Before i begin my take and personal sentiment on this desolated game, I just want to say i love this game for what it could be and not for what it is and i have plenty of hours so you can ensure my statements are credible and not just a rage review like some I have read. So......First off i would like to say this game is a train wreck of missed milestones, hacking, optimization issues, slow development, hostile players and fan community that doubled down on the cult of personality that surrounds the creator. Steer clear of this one, the unfulfilled possibilities and painfully slow development will just cause frustration that is shouted down and defended by the default catch cry of "Its an alpha!" as universal excuse for the game breaking issues that have been around since launch. It might of started out as a real thing but now they just feed it minimal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ just so they dont have to refund you your money. Players invested an absurd amount of money into this game in Early Access and that faith was repaid with incredibly leisured progress and the founder Dean Hall abandoning it before it was even remotely what was promised. It is poorly optimized and has had devastating memory leaks that you require you to have a monster of a system to even start the game. Some admins even resorted to hacking on their own servers to catch glitchers and hackers because the battle eye system is a joke. And it seems every time a patch comes out certain glitches or bugs always seem to come back from previous patches in one form or another.. Whether it be sliding (6.2) or swimming glitching(6.0). (swim glitching is where you would be doing the animation of swimming but rather you would be on solid ground making it hard to see or hit you, while sliding was to go prone and due the surrender animation and constantly be on the ground. and where both exploits you would could operate the same as always giving an advantage over other players ruining the experience for new and veteran players.) Zombies went from glitchy to purely unrealistic. They now run at Olympic Runner speeds and hit you before they can finish their animations. The new loot economy that they are pushing towards mixed with persistence will absolutely break the game as it has done a few times in past patches. Now you walk the entire map for hours and find minimal gear. Which leaves no insentive to leave the coast turing it in to a sticks and stones game. The plan was to make items limited so that the only way to receive items is to kill people that are already geared. The best part is that in some insane logic this was going to reduce PvP and KoS according to the devs. If not that then it would be the complete opposite in which you would leave the coast on one of the HUNDREDS of servers that were low pop be cause the full ones would always crash constantly and then spend hours runnning town to town finding plenty of random gear not because the loot system is working, but that no one has been there since the server restart or some times even since the start of the patch. And eventualy you would become so sick of not finding anyone that you would decide to run back to the coast where players with axes,shovles, and cans of beans would be slaughtering each other for "fun". And you would bring you guns into the mix and people would become beta as ♥♥♥♥; because you are killing fresh spawns and they would state that you are the reason this game sucks. Where you know the guy with the police hat and long wooden stick would not think twice of poking you in head if you lowered your gun. .......And yet i play the next day....
The vision is vast and ambitious and if ever completed, it could be great. Unfortunately, I expect by the time this one is finished, the whole zombie/survival fad will be past and DayZ will be one of those dusty old titles sitting in your Steam library list that every so often you look at and think, "I should install that again one day", but not today.