EARLY ACCESS - DayZ Critique 6/10
Added 2017-06-15 22:14:13 +0000 UTCSo I've finished that draft of part 6/10 in the DayZ video essay. The early access link is here. As always please don't share it. This is just a draft to gather feedback while I work on all the segments and then release them as one. But your thoughts would be appreciated.
What I'm looking for are areas where the points I'm trying to make don't seem convincing so I can adapt the video accordingly. Naturally, I'm not expecting everybody to agree with my conclusions. Only to try and make sure I'm coming across clearly:
Therefore the points I'm trying to make here are:
- Survival sandbox games are all about challenge. And existing in a world that is powerful and threatening to you.
- Internal challenges (food, water, clothes, etc) drive the player to explore and expose themselves to danger.
- External challenges (mobs) reinforce the dangerousness of the world and force you to remain aware of your surrounding/nervous of conflict.
- The removal of these challenges in DayZ and Rust both, contributed to both games moving away from survival sandboxes into becoming large scale deathmatches between well-armed players.
- Edit - Which is going to be difficult to undo, due to the lack of fresh people coming to replace the experienced ones.
Please let me know how close you think I was to hitting those points.
Currently working on part 7/10. More on that soon :)
Comments
This was actually really enlightening and seemed genuinely heartfelt and sounded like it came from someone who really enjoys these types of survival games (which I know you do) and they really hit home because from your voice you almost get this sense of anguish that many attribute to seeing someone grow up and having big hopes and dreams for them but they end up throwing it all away to make a few quick bucks. And I totally agree with how wrong "crowd sourced ideas" for games can be, you take rust as an example of how not to do it but I give you Star Citizen as one example of how it's working quite well, they have a set number of goals that they see their game becoming and yet they still take ideas from their crowd but always with a grain of salt and usually massively changed. Now Star Citizen could still go down the badly "crowd sourced idea" way but there's still time for that, and I hope PUBG doesn't go that rout and they stick to their plan of what they want the game to be. Anyway it was an amazing next part and I'm looking forward to future installments, cheers mate.
Jeff Duvall
2017-06-20 20:03:29 +0000 UTCI agree with many others, this is my favorite so far! I love how much you explain every element in detail, but your comedy still shines through without distracting from what you're getting at. As a solo game developer myself, I really enjoy videos like these. The points you touch on may seem very simple to some, and in fact many of them are, but in that simplicity it is very easy to disregard them. I'd like to say that I agree with most of your points, especially concerning the need for the standalone to develop its core gameplay faster than it is. I don't agree quite with your direct comparison to Rust, but I can respect the way you represented it. You explained the game itself, then the flaws and perfections, and then transferred those into the comparison. As much as Rust's situation is fairly similar to DayZ standalone, I feel as though the DayZ developers already have a path to move down and a design to follow. They have years of research from the mod for where to move their game, and they seem to be sitting on their hands with the early access money. Whereas the Rust developers, as you stated, never had and still don't have, any real direction to move in. The comparison is not a faulty one when you compare gameplay and community, but the problems with DayZ are not within their gameplay or community, but with the developers not advancing these components as are needed. Just my way too long 2 cents, but I figured I might as well give it if it at all helps with the development of more videos like this!
Kenalia
2017-06-19 12:39:33 +0000 UTC
