DayZ Standalone: The Fire Extinguisher Complex
Have you ever had one of those moments where you have someone lined up in your sniper scope and realize that you can either take them out, or simply let them walk on. It was a time like this that I realized why I loved DayZ Mod so much and had put so many hours into a game that was notorious for being buggy. Those moments where you have the chance to take a player’s life and someone could be watching you contemplating the exact same thing.
There were some truly great DayZ Mods out there that made the game into something truly unique and encouraged Bohemia Interactive to take notice of what Dean Hall had accomplished with one of their games. There were even Mods of the Dayz Mod like DayZero and Breaking Point which were some of the best when looking for PvP or player interaction. All of these combined Mods gave Bohemia a collective idea of what DayZ Standalone should be.
The standalone game was meant to be Hall’s vision brought to fruition, however it fails on many fronts. Thus far I think it is safe to say that the SA has brought in a host of players who never touched the Mod and thought a sandbox shooter would be a fantastic idea. Unfortunately this host of new people is what I like to call ‘Coastal Kiddies’. These are people who never explore the massive map and instead stick around the coast hoping to knock someone out with a fire extinguisher.
Now I know I can’t dictate how people should play a sandbox game, however I can say that I know many of these people don’t even realize the fun that they are missing out on. By staying at the coast and just messing about with the crappy melee weapons most players are missing out on the entire purpose of the game. I even came across a streamer who shall remain nameless, who claimed to have played SA since release and when I mentioned Vybor, had no idea where on the map that was.
It is in my opinion the developers are at fault that people are not exploring the map, they have made it far too easy to get completely geared by sitting on the coast. I realized that the game is still in early access, however the player numbers are dropping and the majority of people that have dropped off are the players who are Northern PvPers. I have heard multiple complaints that most people are tired of putting in such an effort to test a game that doesn’t actually fix its problems.
An example of this came with the 0.57 patch, which was supposed to be a huge patch that would bring life into the Standalone again. I was excited to see the amount of content that was being added into the game, including the SVD and Winchester rifles. Unfortunately my exhilaration was short lived when I saw the myriad of bugs that had been supposedly fixed were once again present. The first bug was one I had never hoped to see again and that was being unable to aim down the sights of a gun I had picked up from another player. This bug was in months ago and has made a not so glorious return to the game. The other bug that has somehow managed to worm its way back into the game is zombies not caring that you have closed a door and just walking right on through it. While this was never a huge issue in the past because.zombies were slower and easier to deal with, it is now a huge problem because the zombies have received a significant speed boost.
I do realize that this game is an early access alpha title, however they have deterred the majority of the hardcore fanbase because they refuse to fix or change things that would make the game more of a challenge. This is going to have a huge impact on the development of the game because there are fewer and fewer people to test and experiment with new builds of the game, which is what the early access is all about.
As someone who has put more than 1100 hours into the Standalone and over 2k hours in the mod, I can safely say I am disappointed in the progress made. It’s things like this that don’t get fixed for weeks on end that drive people away from helping to test the game. On top of that, the coastal PVP has made the game no fun at all for those of us that are actually willing to explore the map and head north. In my opinion they need to focus a bit more on getting people to move around the map to find all of the gear they need to survive. The game is supposed to be about player interactions across a vast map, yet all I see are people running through Cherno, beating each other to death with fire extinguishers.
