didnt play much but its good ig

One day you're running through a forest because there's a team with an armored SUV and an M134 mounted on it driving around being ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and you come upon our base shaped like a ♥♥♥♥ (it was intentional) with an SH-3 SeaKing on the top helipad. You watch it for 30 minutes and see a guy pull up in an armored Humvee.

And you want it.

So you come back in your MH-6 and start lighting up his base, but you don't see me 1200 meters away with a KSVK 12. Then you have a choice: you can rage quit the server OR spawn back in, rearm at your base, and spend the next three hours stalking our base hoping one of us ♥♥♥♥♥ up as badly as you just did. But you're lucky, you can at least figure out where you went wrong. Most of the time all you see is the road and then a black screen.

This isn't Arma 2, and the only thing that matters about that game is that it was modded into DayZ Epoch. The milsim aspect is vestigial; nobody cares what your squad did. You can brag about it alongside Robert O'Neill at Ballyhoos. The mod, on the other hand...

In case you didn't know - and you probably didn't - DayZ Epoch was the pinnacle of the survival genre. Uncompromising, ruthless, and completely agnostic about your time and comfort. It was a game that demanded excellence in all things at all times. One mistake and it's back to the beach for you. It's Joseph Conrad for those who like to hold a mouse instead of a book.

It's also invaluable as a yardstick: basebuilding, squad tactics, observation, logistics, player psychology, ranging and shooting - Epoch demanded perfection in all of those. Which is why any recommendation someone makes without having played Epoch is, at best, uninformed, and at worst, just wrong.

Are you recommending:
Overwatch? Wrong
Siege? Wrong
Tarkov? Wrong
CSGO? Wrong
Hentaitentacle69UWU? .....probably....wro---I'm listening

The point is that you can't know the boundaries of "bad", "good", and "great" unless you've sampled them all, and recommending a game that has, at best, a quectogram of what Epoch had means you lack the metric to judge it as accurately as someone who has played Epoch.

This game typifies player skill. There is no ceiling and the floor is uncompromising. If you practice enough and develop an expertise in the game, that expertise is rewarded by the game not nerfing you. A friend of mine was unstoppable in the Black Hawk; he could put that thing down anywhere. Another excelled at CQC, he set up an ambush on a team coming back from a trader city and they rage quit.

Contrast that with Overwatch circa 2016 when Jeff Kaplan immediately nerfed Widowmaker a week after release because a small subset of players got too good with her and he had to "balance" the game…unless it's junkrat, genji, or hanzo, then Kaplan was all too happy to watch Genji and Hanzo Eiffel Tower his wife while Junkrat used grenades as anal beads on him.

So you move to Fortnite, but get 6/7 emoted after being downed by bunny-hopping cheese by a guy in the Godzilla skin. You're tired. You're tired of all the games taking shards of what Epoch was and integrating them in the most base manner. All you want is two rocks and a chicken so you can get to Chernarus, loot the firehouse, sell it all at Stary for an SVD and then Castle someone from 750m with the stadia scope. The bunny-hopper? He can't even get past the splash screen.

The closest you can get to this game today is Rainbow Six Siege. But where Epoch was interested in making you use the map to your advantage, RB6 siege is only interested in pixel peeking. Which means those kids camping Siege videos looking for the next hottest angle in Favela wouldn't notice the grand rotation of the map and would get one-shot from a cliff the game barely renders.

Epoch was a social aim trainer, the kind that rewarded observation and accurate prediction of a player's behavior, it's the kind of skill that transfers easily into crafting the perfect slur in an RB6 lobby...which is why modern game studios can't handle the kind of game Epoch was and why none of them have made anything close to it since.

Modernity demands conformal flattening of the skill gradient and reviews are now based more on journalists overweighting the art side of the "art versus fun" scale (see Mixtape). If the only thing they're capable of doing is handing out 10s like that weird neighbor hands out candy at Halloween, then there's no way they're going to be discerning enough to clock that a mod is better than whatever title they've been swagged into giving a positive review.

Epoch was a Population III star, and if you know what you're doing, you can see its influence in every game that came after. Even though most modern players never knew it existed and never could, because today's studios refuse to reproduce the conditions that allowed it, they should want to have played it...if for no other reason than writing better Steam reviews.

greatest game ive ever played. love how u get to fight isis people who threaten the civs and forces at Shapur. i love eating lead from firearms because my Osprey Mk2 can protect me.