Despite being declared dead multiple times during its prolonged stay in early access, DayZ has proved its critics wrong by becoming the definitive zombie survival experience it always claimed to be.
Co-op Multiplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
While much of this can be attributed to DayZ starting life as a mod of Arma II (2009), the lack of character customization in DayZ is startingly, with players only having one or two faces per skin tone/gender to choose from, resulting in entire servers of people looking near identical.
In a game where roleplaying is a huge part of the experience, I feel being able to make a character that better presents you is important. While it’s not enough to detract from the experience, adding a basic character creator with a small selection of sliders would make DayZ feel more diverse and, by extension, immersive.
As to be expected after starting life as an Arma II mod, DayZ standalone has a massive mod community, with 23,373 mods being released onto the Steam workshop as of the 20th of May 2022, ensuring that players who grow tired of the “vanilla experience”, can hop onto a server with game-changing modifications to experience DayZ in a whole new light.
Despite players being thrust into a world filled with bloodthirsty zombies, wild animals and homicidal survivors, new players are far more likely to die of hunger or thirst than actual combat, with the average player dying/respawning up to 10 times before learning routes that contain enough food and water to keep themselves alive.
While many survival games boast of being difficult, and some such as Ark Survival Evolved and Rust are surprisingly difficult, food and water are never that difficult to come by, and even an inexperienced player will find enough wild berries or pumpkins to survive long enough to find more sustainable food sources, something that often not possible in DayZ where food is scarce, and players have been known to kill each other over a single apple.
The default DayZ map Chernarus is a whopping 89.5 square miles, over six times the size of Skyrim’s map (14.5) and three times the size of the entire Red Dead Redemption 2 map, which comes in at 29.5 square miles.
With that size in mind, I no longer feel so bad about frequently getting lost and cowering in a shed until daylight.
DayZ is one of the only games where I felt genuine concern upon encountering another player; while the shadowy figure looting the next-door warehouse could be friendly, they could also kill me for the brisket spread in my backpack, which I had saved for a rainy day.
I have played dozens of PvP games, and yet in no other game am I so careful in my interaction with others, with every ounce of water and crumb of food having the potential to be the difference between life and death, even the most harmless-looking player could set me back by several hours, something that in my mind, and the minds of many others is an entirely unacceptable risk, resulting in many players shooting first and asking questions later to avoid becoming a victim themselves.
Is this a healthy mindset? Probably not, but you can’t take any chances when you have a pocket full of half-rotten apples and a half-empty bottle of water in your backpack.
The DayZ community is unique in that while most players kill on sight, others are more amusingly sadistic, often kidnapping players and interacting with them over an extended period.
Despite most kidnapped victims ending up dead, players who have been kidnapped often speak positively about their ordeal despite losing their hard-earned equipment and, eventually, their lives.
Not ALL DayZ players will either kill or kidnap on sight and many veteran players will offer to help new or poorly equipped players to find food and supplies, despite often becoming the victim of said players once they find a weapon and the temptation of looting a well-geared player, becomes too much for them.
DayZ is a survival video game developed and published by Bohemia Interactive Studio, it was released on 13 December 2018 and retails for $44.99.
DayZ is available on the following platforms: PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
DayZ has traditionally enjoyed a very unusual development cycle, often resulting in long periods of no tangible updates, followed by substantial game-changing updates that drastically improve the game and swell the player base. As of January 2024, this continues to be the developer’s modus operandi, with the prolonged periods of inactivity mitigated by a larger team and more streamlined development processes.
As of January 2024, DayZ receives large updates approximately three times a year and smaller updates roughly every two months, a release cadence that has maintained and grown the DayZ community while ensuring server owners and mod creators have plenty of time to prepare for gameplay-changing updates.
As of August 2024, around 250,000 people play DayZ on a fairly regular basis.
DayZ is fairly active, and there are multiple active servers during peak NA/EU play times catering to various playstyles and/or regions.
DayZ offers no microtransactions.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
DayZ is rated PEGI 18+ and contains:
DayZ continues to age like fine wine, and I recommend it to anyone looking for an open-world survival game more complex than Deadside but not quite as complicated as Scum.
