Recent reviews by Crispiro

BI are nothing more than the Video Game equivilent of a ponzi scheme. To be quite frank, this is outright fraud. I would avoid at all costs.

Knowing full well the PC version is no where near a finished product and the dropping of an Xbox port tells you nothing more than this is a cash cow.

----Updated Nov 20.----

A few years and few more hours played; am I happy with the outcome relative to the mod? Absolutely not, but given the devs have enabled community created content, the game is better. But no thanks to BI.

ArmA was great because the community was always the centre of the game, the modding community for the franchise are incredible; but the game's core identity remained the same irrespective and the modding was a major part of that identity.

Arma 2 DayZ Mod certainly had an identity (I'm not including Epoch and Overwatch etc etc in this, as they forged their own). The brutality of the mod coupled with the simplicity of the mod were what made DayZ great, the minimal content meant you knew exactly what to expect from the game but what drew people in was the anarchy of the game. There were no rules other than, don't use cheats and this drew people in. The mods spawned were more a result of a more demanding community, people who wanted absolutely more PvP and wanted quick action. I'm not here to say that was the wrong way to play the game, but it was not Dean Hall's original vision; the unpredictability of the game is what created the incredible atmosphere, but it descended into pure KoS - again, not to say this is the wrong way to play. However, this dichotomy in game play is clearly what caused DayZ to fall off track and fail to deliver what it set out to do.

Fast forward and Dean Hall leaves development and we're introduced to a new 'ambitious' creative director Brian Hicks; I had an issue with the introduction of Hicks to the team, there was all of a sudden an increase in ambition and 'future content' (I quote this, as literally 90% of what was promised, was never delivered). There was a reason why there was a sudden surge in promises, from helicopters to RPGs - but there was a fundamental flaw in the optimistic promises - BI had yet to get working bicycles into the game. Server Architecture poor, so vehicles barely worked within the game, but hey. 'Copters, right, lads? Now, my biggest problem has been elements of the community who need their quick fix of action ASAP, they're the ones who wanted all the big guns, the big vehicles and big updates; they needed this game to look and feel like PUBG. The pure PvP'ers of the game were the loudest and certainly were the majority; unfortunately, for those who wanted a more hardcore survival game (with a dose of PvP and horror) were quickly becoming the minority. BI subsequently caved to these demands, rather than fixing poor animations or bugs, we were introduced to new weapons, instead of fixing bicycles, we were given very poorly working cars. BI did nothing to cool expectations, they fuelled the fire.

With every promise, there was an increase in sales and alas, the problem became clear. Cash flow was more important than development. Now, bear with me, I work within Treasury of a corporate, so I know cash flow is really important; however, games previously were never released before beta and early-access is a craze, largely started by DayZ. But allow me to explain, the clear focus was driving sales and not necessarily an end-game. version 1 was only released recently, the game has been in development since 2013; Games do take a long time to develop, but not this long.

It was clear that BI's strategy had failed, the development was side-tracked with ensuring the new content generated more players, not focussing on the players who had already dedicated themselves to the game, participated in development through bug-reporting etc. They, including myself, were effectively shafted. Which was a perfect way of describing the development of DayZ; it was shafted. Alas, leading to this negative review.

You may notice I have not spoke about the gameplay mechanics at all, because I do not need to, there are countless reviews explaining the short-comings of the game, but none of them really appear to properly explain why the game play mechanics sucked for a long time or still suck.

The negative reviews are a result of a development team completely misunderstanding what the game really needed, and pandered to a crowd of people who effectively drove development towards a more PUBG with Zombies video game. There are a lot of loyal players out there, who were largely ignored by BI and the development team, cash is king and ultimately, you've already paid; you're no longer as important as the person who's on the fence about paying for the game. So long as YouTubers were painting the game as the next PUBG (with zombies, and before PUBG..), the development of the game was hindered by poor expectation management and fundamentally, no vision for the end product.

The modding community will save DayZ, as they will be able to provide the resources for the needs of the community. If you want pure PvP, that's fine, there's servers for that. If you want survivalism and hardcore game play, you will find that too. It's a downright shame that it has taken so long to get to this point; and there's only one group of people to blame for that. The developers.

Stale AF. Okay for a quick 5 minute session to kill time but it's boring as hell. Really adding nothing new to the game play experience whatsoever.

War games from their mini event series was the best event and now you can't play it.

Buy in sale, don't buy at full price.

Yeah, it's alright - mod support for community is ace.

it iz gud innit