Anyway, I was sitting around recently in a funk as I wanted to play something but not sure what. I sat down and ‘hid’ loads of games and expansions (70+) in my Library I would never play or had already played and then looked at what was left. I looked at Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA4 and other games I would like to play eventually but they were 100GB+ and I didn’t want to go through an in-game tutorial. I despise arbitrary in-game forced tutorials, perhaps most infamously in my case Assassin’s Creed 2 and Just Cause 2. So that narrowed it down to ‘games with no plot’ and DayZ jumped out at me.
It took a bit to install but after a determined wait I booted it up and managed to sneak around the coast and avoid the zombies. Not too long into it I bumped into like 4 zombies and 2 people! One of them died in the skirmish but the other gave me food/medicine and walked with me for a bit but then after another skirmish my leg was fractured and they punched me to death!
So that was a rush. I was thoroughly amused that I kept at it. I resolved to spend as little time on the coast as possible and rush inland and what began were not one but two epic sagas as the game went from Walking Dead crossed with Battle Royale to Into the Wild (2007) wherein the protagonist dies alone, cold and starving in a bus in the former Russian territory of Alaska.
The game is so Russian - granted it’s made by a Czech studio and the map is a combination of Eastern European themes but I was wondering why it reminded me so much of Finland running around the map. The trees, the housing, the colour gradients - it all reminded me of my times in Finland. Which is right next to Russia so it would make sense that the foliage is similar and indeed I was in Russia for 3 days in 2012 so there’s that too. There is a distinct feel to it, the countryside, the road signs, the buildings and ruined cars. It’s not a lazy stereotype - it is an excellent replica of Eastern Europe, Russia specifically. Also, canned food is god, which is true in real life, Russia and in this game. On the conclusion of our 3 day trip to St. Petersburg and Pushkin in May 2012, our group of 5 were presented with a can of condensed milk each (I am not joking) - the 4 girls from Germany, Canada and Croatia were NOT ecstatic, they would have rather gone home with nothing, while I was delighted!
But yeah - run inland, to avoid the murderers prowling the coastline, both survivor and infected. Blindly thrash through the forests and hills until you hit a ‘vein’ or breadcrumb trail. That’s what I think of when I stumble upon a series of farmhouses and outright settlements where I can find some gear. I still have my starting clothes (always a t-shirt and hiking pants) so we gotta get warmer. Nice insulated jacket, any pants, hopefully a bag. I’ll take anything, even a kids school bag, but a proper one is best. Sling a couple of things over my shoulder, maybe a damaged and empty rifle or shotgun and a melee weapon, anything from a crowbar to a sledgehammer or axe. Make sure to hotkey some of that shit. You can play for hours (and I had) without encountering any survivors and if you play your cards right the infected ain’t much of a factor either.
I was primarily playing on the EU/DE(Germany I presume) servers with good ping and late at night/early in the morning so the ‘population’ of the server was usually ranked medium to high. No idea what that means but I seldom encountered anyone, outside of the first two people I met. But you remember almost all of them:
The first two people, one died and one beat me to death after treating me.
Shipping containers - spotted a guy using Q or E to peek around the corner at me and he proceeded to kill me with a blunt instrument. I may have initiated the fight by trying to stab him (got one stab in) but he just approached me at right angles and killed me. I’ve noticed players/survivors tend to charge at right angles and it seems somewhat effective - we’re afraid to get bashed by their weapons/fists but want to get our own shot in.
Suicide guy - I was playing again super late, had just respawned and it was late in the night and near the shipping containers I spot a guy climbing a crane or viewing platform thing. He is climbing the whole time and I am moving around trying to find stuff nearby and suddenly he just hops the rail to his death. I was able to sprint and be within a few feet of him when he died instantly. Surreal.
‘Negan’ - a baseball bat wielding psycho who prowled the docks where I was spawning. Killed me one time and dodged him a second time completely. Spent a long time worrying about him.
Stab guy - I was just starting out again when I came across some hardened looking dude but he was probably not that much further ahead of me in terms of loot. He made his herky jerky way up to me and managed to stab me like 3-4 times. I just crouched and waited, hoping he was satisfied but he awkwardly circles back and stabs me to death. I hadn’t made any aggressive motions but learned my lesson!
Draw girl - I was in a farm near the starting coastline hills and I spotted a girl mooching in and out of the houses I had just raided. I hid in the back garden of one and she managed to spot me observing her. We squared off, me with my knife and her with her fists but after failing to make contact and with the infected getting in the way I waved her off. I used the wave command and backed away but she started to come closer again so I just backed off and she got the message. She continued up the trail where I hadn't been yet while I went back the way I came, which is disastrous as I had already looted that area. Starvation would ensue.
Double KO - two dudes got in a fistfight near the starting area and had knocked each other out. I had observed this and was somewhat geared up but ran up and beat both of them to death while they were unconscious! Got one fresh fruit off them and plenty of bandages which lasted ages.
Repeater failed - I was near death, like, so low on health the slightest breeze would have killed me and I saw some survivalist snooping around a farmstead so I decided to take my repeater rifle I found and stake him out. He spots me and rushes towards me and of course my guy is near death so can barely move so I manage to fire off a round - completely missing him - plus I didn’t realise you had to manually operate the bolt action or lever or whatever and he closes the distance and one shots me with his fist or blunt instrument.
Crowbar guy - I has just respawned and some guy was nipping around in the shipping containers so I said ‘fuck it’ and charged him and must have stunlocked him with punches as I managed to kill him. However I had been knocked out, so when I finally came to all I could see was his dead body next to me. Free crowbar!
Motorbike helmet guy - was running up the coast road and passed this guy carrying firewood? He was the first person I had encountered who was using voice chat. He just kept saying ‘hello’ over and over. I was so taken aback I just stared and kept running. Nice guy!
German girl? - I was minding my own business running around a military base in the rain when I spotted this girl behind a truck near me. She starts saying ‘hello’ as well and I say ‘hello’ back. I immediately ran away into the forested hills, though she wasn’t overtly hostile. I was trying to gather firewood at the time and had a decent haul of ammo and guns on me. I dithered for a bit then decided I should have staked my claim better and ran back with my ‘Kolt 1911’ and 3 bullets to take her out! Could not find her afterwards. Again I was so shocked by a friendly I didn’t just tap my hotkey and attempt to gun her down when I met her.
Shipping container insanity - I had spawned and gathered a small number of things and I started to stalk some guy. We exchanged hits with crowbars and whatnot and backed away from each other and I decided to whip out my smoke grenade. I hadn’t used one before so it literally just trails smoke everywhere, like a real one - I don’t know what I expected. I could hear someone taking potshots at us as well! I hid in a shipping container and dropped the grenade outside. I closed it and started to patch myself up and someone else came in and beat me to death with a sledgehammer! I managed to sprint back here after spawning and collect some of the loot from both myself and the first guy. This is also where I discovered you can make your own belts from rope, after not having a real one for ages. Nifty game.
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I’m happy if I can find some sort of sharp metal implement and ideally a gun with a handful of bullets. Not that I’ve had any success shooting players but have shot numerous infected with silenced weapons in the head and loud guns too. Really not advised unless you want the whole neighbourhood after you. I’ve also fired the occasional shot in the air just to spice things up. There is nothing more ominous than hearing a shot in the distance. I am more afraid of other players than zombies, by far. I’ve had little success hitting players with sticks (unless they’re unconscious) nor shooting them but fists are always a solid option. The game seems to have some sort of stunlocking going on so if you get a punch in you can win most fights. Despite this, there is nothing more satisfying than acquiring a selection of firearms and sharp objects which you become increasingly less likely to use unless in an emergency. I keep meaning to go for a hike, gather a good load of guns and ammo and then make my way back to the spawning coast. Wreak some havoc.
So anyway what else is there to talk about? I like that weapons are kind of hard to find but food is really hard to find, especially when starving. As I mentioned above you stumble across a trail of goodies and can play a good hour or two and just collect shit. The game for me really becomes living from can of food to can of food. Canned goods don’t give you any issues as far as I can tell but eating raw food is almost always death or more accurately, sickness. Which is kind of annoying - I was absolutely starving one time and managed to chase down and murder a ewe with a knife, chopped it to pieces and ate some of the raw meat and entrails and a minute later I had a sickness. Fair enough, accurate but goddamn. Also, despite all my sprinting I find water less annoying to keep sated (I think it is partially restored via eating). I got the achievement for cooking a steak on a stick over a fire (a human steak by the way) and ate it but still got sick. It may be because I found the body of a guy in a shed in the middle of nowhere - flies were around him - and proceeded to chop him to pieces. I made the fire a short distance away but then got scared that everyone would see the fire in the night. There is an achievement for starting a fire with a road flare, a matchbox and a hand drill so I will need to get all those items. Turns out I had them all at one or two points but didn’t know how to do it. There is also one for gutting a deer - I did bump into a deer once and had a gun but no sharp implements. I will go deer hunting at some point again soon. That’s another thing - animal noises can be heard at all hours in the forest and are terrifying in a way. Apparently there are wolves as well? I have yet to encounter them, or bears.
There are cars scattered around and you can repair them to the point of being driveable but have not bothered going in that direction. There is no achievement for it (but there probably should be) but might try it at some point for the craic.
There is also a way to build stuff, like fences and doors and whatnot. Apparently you can craft all kinds of things but I certainly don’t have the time or desire. Also it’s such a crapsack world and the servers restart every few hours or whenever so what’s the point. I did come across someones’ locked fence door or something in an apartment building but lacked the means to do anything with it.
The Zombies - ‘infected’ are mainly a nuisance, a barrier, whatever. Sometimes they can be avoided completely, as is the case with large industrial yards and such. I’ve had bad luck on one or two occasions, coming across military barricades and blockades with tougher soldier zombies. I was usually desperate for some sort of resource when I would encounter these roads and tried to navigate them - almost always a mistake. At least after being beaten up by the infected you tend to pass out and they back off, but they are never too far away. After a quick bit of patching up and gathering your dropped weapon/items you can wrangle an escape. But you might still be dying somehow. If you are unlucky enough to die, you might be lucky and run back and get your stuff from your corpse, as shown below.
Human players - ‘survivors’ - have a distinct movement pattern. It reminds me of another game I can’t think of right now, perhaps many games, where players just have a different movement animation than the infected. Nightfire! I’m thinking of Nightfire where players glide along. Survivors tend to sprint everywhere in lines and zig zags while the infected just stand and stumble around and then charge when they see you. I stop and assess whenever I see infected milling around but players? I have seen almost every single human player before they have seen me (so far) because they stand out instantly. It’s terrifying and the initial thought to hide and let them pass tends to subside for me and the urge to challenge and try to kill rises. Note this has mostly not worked out for me, I am currently 3 wins, 5 losses and 1 draw in what I would term fights started by me or another player. There is an achievement for imprisoning 10 players with manacles, I haven’t found any manacles yet nor have had the opportunity. Maybe when I saw that double KO. There is one for killing 15 players with melee weapons and that remains the 2 I got from the double KO, murdering them both with a crowbar I think. There is also one for shooting a player at 300 metres but IDK.
Wet and cold are my main enemies at the moment. If it starts raining it lasts a considerable amount of time, now it’s like I’d rather switch servers or just log off completely. Rain makes your clothes damp, soaked or drenched gradually and will inevitably give your character a chill and sickness. Which is just annoying and debilitating. Cold is a bit more manageable but it can be annoying if you get unlucky and fail to find good, warm clothes and get sick that way. These alone are annoying but combine with starvation and blood loss and it’s almost always a game over. Blood loss was my old enemy, you can lose too much from scrapping with zombies (or players!) or just self-inflicted injuries and accidents. A black and white vision is your reward and if you’re really low on blood and health, passing out frequently. Food, drink and ‘rest’ can restore you to a somewhat passable condition and now that I know that I can get past the point of passing out frequently. It was so annoying I would just feed myself to the zombies. There are fun extra things like multivitamins, antibacterial handwash and herbal/alcoholic tinctures that can prevent bad health and even chlorine pills to treat bad water.
Update: managed to get the firestarter achievement (with road flare etc) before dying because I took my shoes off and cut my foot on something and my health deteriorated. My gal wore bandage wraps as shoes for a bit but her health was severely affected by all this, it was incredible to see. She died not long after in a store versus the infected who were all over here - she was my first character to have a scoped rifle, I was hoping to get the deer hunting achievement with her but oh well. She was a cool character, I started in a coastal village and hit upon a trail of goodies instantly. I pretty much had free reign to put together my gear and then start messing around with fireplace setups. I was only missing the road flare and hand drill parts of the achievement so set up two fires and made that happen. It was also good because I had spent the previous hour running around in the rain so I was dry quickly (I think) but I made the mistake of putting my shoes >in< the fire not just being in its presence and hey presto no shoes. Cut my foot like a second later walking into the nearby house on the floor and her health vanished. Limped to the next set of buildings but the infected were super riled up and I was getting careless with the Sporter rifle shots. Death.
I got the deer hunting achievement after chasing a pack of three deer back and forth over a set of hills maybe 3 times. I definitely shot one of them once at one point but had no magazine so was one bullet at a time. I stumbled across someones’ stash and got a magazine and a ton of ammo so was able to parlay that into a successful deer hunt. Gutted the thing and got the achievement. I continued playing for a bit but was quite sick and I died while AFK - I’m not sure if it was a wound infection or did some player stumble across me in the medical facility I was in and murdered me, I’ll never know. Maybe it was the owner of the stash! That was my first genuine stash I got and it was tremendous but there was only so much I could take with me, in the end I was quite conservative and even had to go back like twice to fiddle with what I really wanted - magazine, ammo, bandages and food, of which there was very little. They had a pumpkin patch planted as well near their tent and two submachine guns but again not a whole lot of space on me.
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One time I was collected by 3 European dudes and followed them along the coast for a while. They adopted me and like 4 other people so we had like 8 running around for a while. I got so bored after a while as they had a 'no guns' policy which was fine but I hid a knife on my person and started stabbing one of the other guys when it was time for dinner LMAO. I committed suicide in front of them all. It was cool and I was very respectful and thankful for all they did - the main guy kept handing out food and water - but like, it just became a weird exhibition as they were incredible at shooting while all we could do was cower in their presence. Not that they were intimidating or hostile to us but after sprinting between like 5 different settlements and watching them one shot zombies I was bored to tears and needed to eat. Also there were aspects of it that seemed staged, I can’t put my finger on it, but they offered me someone tied up to kill at one point early on who begged for his life somewhat unconvincingly in an Eastern European accent. Weird.
So all that’s left for me is to kill 10 more people with melee weapons out of 15, tie up 10 people and treat 20 with bandages. I have no idea how to achieve the latter two but will play a few more rounds to see if I can wrack up melee kills. But my interest has probably peaked for the moment. Honestly, while it’s great to trek across the country and acquire loads of equipment and be on a good ‘run’ so to speak, it's inevitable that I will die from sickness, carelessness re: zombies or someone way better than me will gun me down. While it’s exhilarating in its own way, another playstyle I can start to do now is: spawn, acquire a few bits and then traipse around town hunting other fresh spawns. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose but there is less feeling of having spent hours on a character only for them to die silently in the woods. And don’t get me wrong I love those long playthroughs but often the investment in time and energy yields few rewards, other than the journey itself. Nasty, brutish and short fresh spawn hunting can be just as fun and if I tire of that or am particularly successful I can always migrate inland and do a long playthrough, loot in hand.
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All in all this was a fantastic segue from the usual fare, I will play a few more games like this in future hopefully. It reminded me a lot of Fallout 4 Survival Mode, which I absolutely feasted on the last 3 years. I rarely play multiplayer games but am pleased to say the player base is still very active overall and while most lean on the side of banditry and kill-on-sight there are a few bright lights. A glance at the online community on Reddit and so on it’s mostly people showing off and git-guddery abounds, you can’t have it all but plenty of good advice online as well.
Update: Aaaaaaaand I got 15 melee kills! Apparently the rarest achievement. I now might try to beat up people and restrain them (10 times) to get that achievement as it is possible to KO people and then have the chance to tie them up. The shooting someone at 300 metres and killing them and patching up 20 people with bandages may take way longer to get anywhere near.
