It's an easy mistake to make, and arguably not a mistake at all. It seems the shooter took the shot because he had the chance. "WHAT THE HELL," one of the party types on the server-wide chat.
There's a lighthouse in the distance, sheer and ominous in the evening haze. Physics being the jerk it is, by the time they've heard the shot and hit the deck, the bullet's already killed one of them. In retrospect, it's lucky that Arma 2's Eastern Europe already looked like an apocalypse hit it. A group of five players are hiking through the thin forest beside a coastal road. It's about panic, who you are, and what you're willing to become. And simply put, it's a stunning zombie game because, like every half-decent zombie flick, it's not about zombies. This is DayZ, one part glacially paced horror game, one part riveting social experiment. More improbably, they might also die saving your life.
Every one of which could kill you for something as petty as your box of matches. The problem is the other 49 players on your server. Neither is the problem the engine's famous inability to handle interiors, making exploring a house a bit like steering a forklift through a hedge maze. The problem isn't the meticulous plausibility of the Arma 2 engine, which is a sluggish theatre of broken legs, iron sights, bullet drop and orienteering. Zombies also come running at the sound of gunfire, but that's not the problem, either.
The problem isn't the zombies, despite them being the horrible breed of running zombies made popular by 28 Days Later. Zombies wander the world's towns and villages, but it's only there that you'll find food, water, bandages, and maybe even assault rifles, night-vision goggles, a map, a compass or a dozen other things.Īs in The Walking Dead, soon the zombies are just a grim backdrop for your personal drama. Using Chernarus, the soldier simulator's 225 km2 of believable Eastern Europe, each 50-player DayZ server simply tasks you with surviving in a vast, zombie-strewn landscape of settlements, valleys, beaches, castles and petrol stations. All the same, you should know about it, because it's probably the best zombie video game ever made. This is an Arma II: Combined Ops modification that's only in alpha at the moment, and with the current crush of users smothering the master server, you probably shouldn't try playing it for at least a month. Two possibilities: Either you're excited about DayZ, or you haven't heard of it.