DayZ goes into Feature Freeze Leading to 1.0, Leaves out Countless Features - Sensationalist Headlines

In August, we've gone through a feature freeze - an important internal milestone where we've evaluated the overall state of the game and marked any item from our Feature & Content Goals that did not reach a certain level of implementation as post 1.0 development. While we are ultimately the masters of our own development time, there is one universal truth in game development: you can always try to squeeze more stuff into a release, so eventually, a line needs to be drawn and goals need to be established in order to achieve results. Making decisions like this is painful for every developer - nobody likes to see "their" feature being cut, or postponed to some future update - but having a balanced and polished core of basic gameplay is more important than having dozens of flavor, supporting and exotic features. Everyone who was ever involved in the full development cycle of any game knows that at the finish line, there's always less stuff than was originally planned. You can read more in their (very lengthy) status report here: https://dayz.com/blog/status-report-23-october-2018 The tl;dr of this whole thing is that DayZ is now leaving it's alpha and entering it's beta stage, freezing all development on adding new features and focusing on bugs leading up to release. So that's not all that bad right? Bit funny it took the game this long, but otherwise not really news worthy, right? Well, for anyone not following DayZ's development cycle, the current iteration of DayZ, while boasting a lot of mechanical improvements, is bare bones compared to any other point in DayZ's history. Even launch arguably had more content than the current iteration of DayZ. Here are some handy dot points of the features that once existed in DayZ but are missing on release, and therefor will probably never ever be reintroduced. No diseases No ragdolls No advanced injuries (broken bones) No grenades No ambient animals No fishing No throwing mechanic No horticulture system Gimped physics system 20+ clothing items missing 39 weapons missing 10 vehicles missing That's just what DayZ already had in it prior to this most recent year of experimental builds. Below are the features that have been promised for a 1.0 release, some since day 1 of development, that will be missing and have never shown up in any form during DayZ's development: Helicopters/Planes Boats Barricading Climbing/Vaulting system Drowning (has seriously never been in the game over five years) Zombie hordes Contaminated/’End-Game’ Zones Body Decay Non-lethal player interaction Several misc. features promised from day one such as corpse manipulation, advanced crafting systems, item customization, etc, etc (the list honestly goes on) This probably seems more like an angry fanboys rant than a news story, but honestly I'm kind of blown away seeing the state DayZ is in right now compared to where it was just a year ago. Don't think I'm padding out these lists either, there are actually countless of other tiny features missing. What I've listed above represents mechanics that were considered 'vital' to the DayZ gameplay loop in one way or another, mainly giving the game an actual end-game. If you want to see some 'controversy', take a look at the subreddit, where most of this information is actually gleamed: https://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/ Fans are pissed, the game is still a mess, and after five years shambling like an early-access zombie, it's finally going to meet a lukewarm climax. I've honestly never seen an early access title that was as much of a disaster as this, unless they were an outright scam. To summarize once more, DayZ will be launching with objectively less features than it had mere months ago, and will be lacking features that were originally implemented on release.

Does this mean on release day i can finally get a refund?

Oh boy. I knew DayZ is dying but I at least thought it reached it's beta phase a long time ago. I used to play the mod version and even some features from it are missing.

I still don't get the point of the standalone when the modded versions for ArmA are so much better. I guess there was the promise of being better but looks where this went.

Barricading lol

I don't want to hammer this point on too much, but basically any iteration of the DayZ mod has more content than the current Standalone build. This fact has actually been true for the vast majority of Standalone's development, even if you ignore the continued development of numerous 'third party' DayZ mods. Standalone has had some ups and downs, but, at least content-wise, the release they're aiming for will basically be a skimmed-down version of the original mod with some improvements to visuals, controls and UI. So basically, what the first release of standalone should have been five years ago.

I'm more surprised that this still has a community/fanbase after all these years.

Hey, if we can still have people thinking/hoping Valve is gonna make HL3, I cab totally believe DayZ still having a fanbase.

I just feel that with the market for survival games being this oversaturated, they would've moved on by now. There's no story, characters or anything charming to hold on to with DayZ.

The entre open alpha/beta whatever was a mistake, too many resources went into trying to keep the game playable, and because they money was roling in there wasn't any actual pressure to release a (good) game.

It's amazing to think the Arma 2 mod from years ago is still far superior to this independent one, how do you fuck up this badly. A semi competent team of 5 people would've been able to include half this features in a fraction of the time...

I wish refunds were a thing when i bought it, I regretted buying it the moment I started playing it

I forgot about this game. Does anyone even actually still play it? I remember it was tons of fun back when it was just an ARMA mod and then shit went downhill when it became standalone. Did they ever add the pooping feature?

I played it a lot around when it first released but stopped after a few months, i know the development has been going really, really slowly...but i didn't expect the game would also end up with less than it had back then. Those aren't small features either, they sound like huge portions of content that just aren't going to be there at all. It's turned out even worse than i thought and i didn't have too much hope in the first place.

DayZ is in a better place functionally than it has been at any point in it's history, it's just extremely feature bare. The Dev team has always been the main problem, the way they've handled development is awful, they seem to have zero clue about how long content takes to produce and failing to deliver on promises with the timeframe they've given themselves. They said they'd have 1.0 out before the end of the year which was a huge mistake, but they're so afraid of breaking yet another promise they're releasing 1.0 anyway with about 5% of the features. You'd expect a 1.0 release to be more or less feature complete, people coming back expecting a complete game are going to be sorely fucked off, even folk I watch who still support DayZ and are very careful about slagging the game off are pulling their hair out wondering what the shit the devs are playing at.

hell you should be able to get one now considering you're in Australia. i got one earlier this year thanks to the stuff with the ACCC, bought Nier: Automata with the credit https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/110524/8ef0ef14-6bfb-47c3-bbeb-2ef235f566ae/image.png

they wasted time and money implementing/redesigning the same things 2 or 3 times in some cases, they should have had a plan and stuck with it

So what you're saying is, Helk actually fucking did it and made a "better DayZ" with Rust? Well shit... Honestly, I kind of feel like DayZ's worst enemy was its own hype and legacy, which only became more and more of a burden as the genre of survival games started to fade out of the public eye. People losing interest in the genre meant having less incentive to actually work on the game for BIS especially since they were mostly focusing on ARMA 3 at the time. DayZ feature freezing for 1.0 now is more or less just BIS saying they're tired of making this game and see no reason to continue outside of just fixing outstanding bugs. It's weird to see how the genre of survival games progressed though. It was a very slow progression with drama along the way for pretty much every game, but it seems like the only ones that stood out as enjoyable in the end were Rust (again, who'd have thought) and Subnautica (which isn't even multiplayer). Every other game either died on the way, or are still currently a massive mess of a game in every way (ARK being a notable example).

I was always defending them back when it was first apparent that early access would take longer than anticipated, because I don't mind waiting. Game development takes a long time, it just does. Especially when you're a small team. But after this revelation, I'll be asking for a refund. I have no hope left for the game. Coincidentally, I booted the game up the other day and while movement and performance had improved, the infected were still as broken as ever. And they don't even mention it in the blog post, except for ditching "infected ragdolls" for 1.0. At least I had a fun time with the mod back in the day.

I remember trying to get a refund a year or two ago, bought it on early access release in 2012 or whenever that was and played 21 total hours of it which has made the refund invalid last I tried, I hope this changes shit and allows refunds again because that money was not worth it back then, as a poor sod student I could use that money right about now aswell

glad I didn't buy into this mess of a game, so glad can't say that I understand how the engine works, but would drowning really be that difficult to implement?

I managed to get this game refunded earlier this year with almost 100 hours and then I bought it again a few months later cause some friends told me it was getting good updates, I wish I could get a second refund cause it fucking sucks

Man swimming is just one of the features of DayZ that has been in a perpetual state of wank. You've just never been able to dive, fuck that shit right off. Swimming's viability has ranged wildly from consequence-free to absolute death sentence depending on whether or not they decided to include environmental damage in that patch (it's been a long time since that's been the case.) You'd either slowly wade into the water, suddenly jerking into a swimming animation after about ten solid seconds of walking, and swim off to one of the two islands worth swimming to and suffer absolutely no consequences, or, your foot would splash through a puddle, making your pants and shoes wet, starting the slow countdown to death as you desperately try to loot the few extremely obscure items you need to dry or repair your clothing. Then it comes to drowning. Look guys, I gotta admit. I wasn't completely accurate when I said you could never drown in this game. There was one point in DayZ's history, fairly early on, where going prone in a body of water would slowly drain your characters health. Of course, this acted like actual, permanent damage. It could be circumvented by perpetually bandaging yourself in the water, iirc. So they removed it, and never bothered with it again. Seeing as how the only way to get your characters head under water is to prone in a few very specific places, it's obvious they want to ignore that feature since they apparently don't know how to implement it or something. Also, little bonus tidbit of this whole "water" talk I'm going through. At several points the history of DayZ, the vehicles could act as submarines. As in, you'd drive your bus or hatchback or truck into the water, and you'd drive along the ocean floor. You couldn't drown, and it wouldn't get your clothes wet. So it was an actually viable and preferable tactic to reach the islands off-shore. Without boats, it was pretty much the only way. That silly little bug got fixed aaggeess ago, of course. But is somehow once again present in the most recent build with vehicles.

I remember driving a motorcycle underwater in Operation: Flashpoint, for a milsim that game was disgusting when it came to actual gameplay

Everyone saw this coming

The Stomping Land comes to mind, I've been tried maybe once a year to get it refunded. Might try a DayZ refund to see what happens.

Well God damn. I'm not surprised the game is going into 1.0 and still shit, but for it to be THIS shit? I'm shocked and appalled. Going to ask for a refund now.

I want a refund. I bought this in 2013 and held hope this would be good one day, I loved the mod. That they removing features and calling it 1.0 should be considered a fucking scam.

Hey guys remember how the paid standalone was somehow worse than the mod?

Honestly it's bohemia pulling it the second the stuff like Dayz became popular is when they started to become lazy in my opinion, just take a look at ARMA 3 it honestly in my opinion feels like a Game that lacks content / is unfinished you have the Playermodels to some kind of Spaghetti move if hit (is most probably fixed now after years of released) most of the stuff looks basically the same and probably has the Hulls or Turrets on Tanks reused multiple times, and the rest is being Released as DLC just forget that you will cause inbalanced issues but hey all that counts is the Money! I've been playing since Arma 1 and everything that came after Arma 2/OA was honestly just a shitshow Early acess games that never finish and if they finish you will have like 6-7 Guns and the rest will be released in the "future" with DLC's Who knows maybe they had not enough of variations to pick because of the "futuristic" times. But it's just sad what has become of the Franchise. and in the older Installments there was way more content you just need to look at the Civillians alone, And it's just not the content in terms of Guns/Playermodels even gamemodes like Warfare with 2 Player commanders with AI soldiers / Convoys and Player Soldiers does not even exist anymore in Arma 3