DayZ standalone alpha first impressions: surviving in the bleak black (VIDEO)

It’s pitch black, and I’m lying prone in the middle of a forest. I have no idea where I am, but I can hear a zombie growling somewhere nearby. I want to get away, but I’m not sure which way to run, and I don’t dare stand up or use my only piece of equipment — a flashlight — for fear that it could clue the zombie in on my location. So I lie quietly under the stars, heart pounding, waiting for the zombie to wander away. Welcome to DayZ.

Don’t feel like reading? Check out this video, or stay tuned later today for our Let’s Play video with daylight footage:

What is DayZ?

DayZ is a game that’s difficult to categorize. I guess it might be most accurately described as a zombie-themed first-person/third person shooter/survival MMO. Basically, DayZ plops you into the shoes of a character in an Eastern European country well after a zombie apocalypse has devastated the world. Resources are scarce, and you start with nothing except a flashlight. To survive as long as you can, you’ll need to find food and water supplies, acquire weapons and ammo, and probably track down medical supplies and other tools to help you through encounters with zombies and — much more dangerous — other players.

Long-time DayZ fans know that this game started as a mod for Arma 2 (which is still playable) that was inspired by the developer’s experiences in Singapore and Brunei. But is it time to upgrade to the standalone? Does the new game — which is still in early alpha and was just launched on Steam early access yesterday — offer more than the mod, or enough to attract new players?

Alpha means alpha

Let’s start with the negatives. The standalone is not an alpha in name only; there are some serious bugs and issues with this game. You will experience weird problems, low framerates, and probably disconnections and crashes. At the moment, the game’s servers are set to mirror the time of day in the Czech Republic only, which means that for many players outside Europe, the servers will be dark during prime playing hours (time in DayZ mirrors time in real life, so “night” in the game lasts about 12 hours). And as you can see from some of these screenshots, the game doesn’t look great in the dark (and exploring in the dark is less fun for sure). This issue will likely be fixed pretty quickly, but for now, it means that Asia-based players with full-time jobs are going to have trouble finding servers with daylight, which is a drag.

The game’s current default controls are kind of a disaster. Thankfully, it includes tons of options for customization — you can change everything from the quality of the cloud rendering to the FOV and re-map every single action in the game to new buttons if you like. But be prepared to spend quite a bit of time (maybe 20 minutes) tinkering before you find settings that will work for you. Be prepared to spend a little time learning the UI, too. There’s no tutorial yet and parts of it aren’t particularly intuitive.

Veterans of the mod will recall that survival in the wild depends on maintaining stats like health, thirst, and hunger. The mod had a little UI element that indicated how bad your need to drink something (for example) was at any given moment, but the standalone seems to have done away with this in favor of a vaguer system of messages that appear in the bottom left corner of the screen and say things like “I’m feeling thirsty.” The removal of almost all HUD/UI elements from the screen does make the game more immersive, but “I’m feeling thirsty” is pretty vague, and it’s tough to know if that means “a bit parched” or “seriously about to die of thirst”. And for a game that’s all about realism, you can die of thirst or hunger way too quickly — within just a few hours — in the standalone right now.

In my own games, I also found that the zombies seem to be few and far between right now in DayZ. I think I came across four zombies, total, in my two-plus hours of playing so far. This isn’t a huge deal, as the game is really more about surviving in the wild than it is about fighting zombies, but it definitely removed some of the tension from foraging in urban areas.

Of course, it’s an alpha, so all that can and probably will change.