ARMA 2 DayZ Mod

DayZ is a multiplayer open world survival third-person shooter modification designed by Dean Hall for the 2009 tactical shooter video game ARMA 2 and its 2010 expansion pack, ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead. The mod places the player in the fictional post-Soviet state of Chernarus, where a mysterious plague has infected most of the population, turning people into violent zombies. As a survivor with limited resources, the player must scavenge the world for supplies such as food, water, weapons and medicine, while killing or avoiding both zombies and other players, and sometimes non-player characters, in an effort to survive the zombie apocalypse.

DayZ has been praised for its innovative design elements. The mod reached one million players in its first four months on August 6, 2012, with hundreds of thousands of people purchasing ARMA 2 just to play it. In response to its popularity, Bohemia Interactive made a standalone game. The mod remains in continued development by its community.

Gameplay

DayZ attempts to portray a realistic scenario within the gameplay, with the environment having different effects on the player. A character may receive bone fractures from damage to their legs, go into shock from bullet wounds or zombie bites, receive infections from zombies or diseased players, or faint due to low blood pressure. Thirst and hunger must be kept under control by finding sustenance in either cities or the wilderness, with body temperature playing a key part in the character's survival.[1] The game focuses on surviving and the human elements of a zombie apocalypse by forcing the player to acknowledge basic human needs like thirst, hunger and shelter. These mechanics require the player to focus on immediate goals before they can consider long-term strategies.

DayZ is praised for its level of emergent gameplay. BuzzFeed author Russell Brandom suggested that the mod has spawned the first photojournalist in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, creating articles that are not only about a game world but journalism told from within it. Brandom claimed that DayZ is a unique example of the massively multiplayer online game genre in giving players the freedom to harm or murder each other, whilst adding no restrictions on how or why they may do it, quoting a player who described it as "the story of people". The mod has been compared by Kotaku to The Walking Dead and its focus on interactions between the characters when faced with desperate situations. The players in DayZ are forced to deal with dilemmas in similar ways as portrayed in both the comics and TV series for The Walking Dead.

It has been proposed that DayZ provides some insight into people's motivations and behaviors when reacting to real crisis events, mirroring controlled experiments of a similar nature. However, some critics of this theory argue that participants do not react as they would in a real world situation in which their life is truly threatened.[5] Despite the game being biased towards self-interested, hostile competition, many players enter the game with their own perceptions and priorities. These varied approaches and experiences within the game suggest that even in a system that should theoretically promote rational behaviour, people act in unexpected ways. It has been proposed that this dispels the idea that chaos is an objective and defining feature of the system, rather it is what players make of it.

During the alpha, designer Dean Hall became part of Bohemia Interactive, and the mod, retitled to Arma II: DayZ Mod, was officially released on February 21, 2013.