Day Z: a realistic open-world zombie mod for Arma 2 with PvP and persistent death

[Vegeta897]

You're not screwed when you have zombies chasing you, no matter their numbers. That is, as long as you have enough ammo. If you run backwards and then shift to walking to take a shot or two, then keep running, repeat, you can handle them.

And you'll recognize buildings in no time.

Also only lamers **** with their gamma/brightness. Some nights are moonless, some are fairly visible. It's part of the game.

 

[morgs]

I love playing at night, moonless or otherwise, so what Veg said.

 

[Ennui]

I sort of go back and forth on the gamma thing... I do like playing better without it, much more immersive, but I also feel like a sitting duck for players who are tweaking their settings and can see 100x better than me. The first night I played was moonless and I just crawled around in the inky blackness for quite a while.

Another thing that bugs me is that there are no melee weapons. It's a zombie apocalypse ffs. I should be able to brain zombies with clubs and hatchets and shit. Especially seeing as how I come across that model of the woodpile with a huge wood axe on it all the time. It would be really nice to have a more quiet and less wasteful option to dispatch lone zombies.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

I'm speaking towards the campaign(s) which I want to play through. They're quite good so far but sometimes I feel like I'm shooting through molasses. There's a bloody brilliant game somewhere behind all that sluggish performance, I'll keep tweaking and send you guys my settings.

I want to do more campaign before DayZ and mods.

 

[Viperidae]

For some reason I can't get ArmA 2 playable on my rig satisfyingly. Do I just have to get used to poor performance? I use:

C2Q 6600 @ 2.4ghz, 8GB DDR2 (generic), AMD 5800HD, Asus P5N w/latest Bios update

Is the game just supposed to run at ~30fps on year and a half old rigs? Didn't this come out when the Core series was Intel's flagship and the 5xxx was hot shit?

My January post is still relevant:

No PC in the world can run Arma 2 at 1920 at max detail (let alone 8x MSAA) without hiccups as it is.

Your CPU and GPU aren't powerful enough for high detail. None are. Maybe a quad SLI could handle it all... maybe.

We already have several in-game examples of this not being sufficient in some scenarios. I'd much rather it be immediately apparent who my allies are than have to shout over everyone else in Mumble just so I know which generic hatted person is friendly and which, in all probability, is going to shoot my face off. It goes beyond just not being able to tell one person apart from another as well - I very nearly got shot after I PKed someone and one of you found me suddenly changed to the bandit skin (your character changes to a hooded model if your humanity sinks below a certain level - that's the current penalty for player killing).

Coordination... communication that a friendly is in a particular spot, isn't the only thing that would prevent a friendly from shooting another friendly up close. They would recognize who their friendly was.

And when you're mostly playing with everybody in a bush somewhere, even somebody completely different in the general area also in a bush would be mistaken to be that friendly.

You know nothing, Jon Snow(s). Try playing TVTs with 50 people to a side where both factions have woodland camo at 700m engagement distances, where all you might see is an arm sticking through a bush before getting shot. Where the only people you can talk to have to be within 50m for them to even hear you. Trust me, being in Mumble and being able to tell friendlies where you are at all times is a godsend compared to PVP with ACRE and Expert mode. Hell, if you're a regular soldier on UO and you lose your squad and the mission is on Expert, you can't even find him because you have no map and no radio, and there's no GUI chevron to show you where your SL is.

Navigation, communication, and tactics are key. It's still Arma we're playing.

 

[Vegeta897]

I sort of go back and forth on the gamma thing... I do like playing better without it, much more immersive, but I also feel like a sitting duck for players who are tweaking their settings and can see 100x better than me.

It really isn't 100x better. On moonless nights, no amount of adjustment can turn pure black into more values. The best you will get is clearer distinction of silhouettes (against the sky), and certain parts of textures, but a properly calibrated monitor and playing with your lights off is good enough. Weigh your options here: play with an ugly washed out, unnatural view in a game that's king of immersion, or play with the chance that some other players can see maybe a slight bit better.

Another thing that bugs me is that there are no melee weapons. It's a zombie apocalypse ffs. I should be able to brain zombies with clubs and hatchets and shit. Especially seeing as how I come across that model of the woodpile with a huge wood axe on it all the time. It would be really nice to have a more quiet and less wasteful option to dispatch lone zombies.

I too wish there were a better way to combat zombies more silently, but trust me, you don't want melee weapons/attacks on the arma engine.

 

[Raziaar]

You know nothing, Jon Snow(s). Try playing TVTs with 50 people to a side where both factions have woodland camo at 700m engagement distances, where all you might see is an arm sticking through a bush before getting shot. Where the only people you can talk to have to be within 50m for them to even hear you. Trust me, being in Mumble and being able to tell friendlies where you are at all times is a godsend compared to PVP with ACRE and Expert mode. Hell, if you're a regular soldier on UO and you lose your squad and the mission is on Expert, you can't even find him because you have no map and no radio, and there's no GUI chevron to show you where your SL is.

Navigation, communication, and tactics are key. It's still Arma we're playing.

Proper identification is CRITICAL in the military. You don't just shoot someone if you see an arm sticking out of somewhere. But in the US military, they actually have good identification methods to distinguish friend from foe... most notably the stark contrast in uniforms, but also other means as well.

Sorry, but the military doesn't(and survivors in dayz shouldn't) rely strictly on a "I know who this person is because it was communicated to me and that's the only reason I don't shoot them and am not shot by them" method of operation.

I was near that dude who shot me for a good five minutes. He looked exactly like Sliver, he was in the same spot as Sliver. If the game had some proper way of identifying friend from foe, I would have been able to see that something was amiss(in real life too), and killed him instead of being killed by him. He was likely a loner with anybody but him being a target, and so had the supreme advantage over me.

 

[Unfocused]

The server crashed and I called it a night, but I am currently in the west side of Mogilevka about to make the final short trek over to Zub to check it out.

I'm supposed to be somewhere NW of Mogilevka atm, I'll check that castle out tomorrow then

I play on US servers, since I only have time for that in the evening and that would mean playing at night all the time, if I were to join EU servers. As for performance - I've got an i5 2500k at stock speed (3.3Ghz), a GTX570 and 8GB RAM - I put the settings on "very high" (the preset, so it's probably not maxed out) and 10km view distance and the game runs well (fps don't drop below 35 from what I checked). So I don't know, maybe the game engine is just picky and I'm lucky with my configuration to run it well .

Today I died with my first character - I haven't played yesterday and as it turned out I was starving when I logged in today. I walked for like 15-20 minutes, losing blood because of starvation, and couldn't find any buildings. Finally I encountered some small village and since I had a good amount of ammo, I decided to shoot the zombies to clear it out. However, even though there was like 50 meters between us, a few managed to run up to me zigzagging and hurt me, causing me to bleed out as I was running away.

I started my second character and this time checked the map to know where I am (spawned at Cap Golova). Having heard that it's not a good idea to go to the big towns at first, I travelled north, to Pusta and then to Mogilevka.

At Mogilevka somehow I found myself trying to sneak by two zombies, both around 40 meters away from me and closing in (unaware of my presence at first). Unluckily for me, someone asked over chat if the person approaching Mogilevka with a Winchester (me) is friendly. As I was trying to remind myself which was the chat key (yeah, noob), the zombies came closer and noticed me. I started running away and noticed the guy writing in chat "I guess not". With the zombies on my back, unable to type, I just desperately yelled into the microphone "I'm friendly" (into the side-channel I assume) and fortunately, he responded to that with an "OK". After running for like 5 minutes, I managed to dispose of the zombies, when I ran up a rather steep hill, which slowed them down more than it did me, enabling me to turn around and shoot them.

Returned to town, and as I approached the church, I saw someone crawling there. Turned out it was the guy which had asked me if I was friendly before. Right after that we got attacked by zombies and somehow I got scratched once and when I started running away, the second hit knocked me to the ground. Luckily for me, the dude I just met helped me up and after I bandaged myself up even gave me blood (I think; I was restored to full health). I'm having my suspicions that perhaps he accidentally shot me and that is why I went down, but it doesn't matter since he turned out to me a decent guy. We travelled for a bit (he said, we were going NW which was most likely the case) and then he had to log out and coincidentally my game partially crashed (I froze in the game, but everything else was responsive - chat and menu), so I also called it a night.

 

[Vegeta897]

Proper identification is CRITICAL in the military.

We're not saying the game couldn't use a better identification system, but lack of communication of where friendly units are in in fact a primary factor in real life friendly fire incidents.

In high-risk situations, leaders need to ensure units are properly informed of the location of friendly units and to issue clear, unambiguous orders, but they must also react correctly to responses from soldiers who are capable of using their own judgement. Miscommunication can be deadly.

The reason misidentification is the major cause of friendly fire is because any organized military force does know where friendly units are supposed to be and where they aren't.

As for performance - I've got an i5 2500k at stock speed (3.3Ghz), a GTX570 and 8GB RAM - I put the settings on "very high" (the preset, so it's probably not maxed out) and 10km view distance and the game runs well (fps don't drop below 35 from what I checked). So I don't know, maybe the game engine is just picky and I'm lucky with my configuration to run it well .

That preset is evil. Post processing on high is pretty annoying and is a total performance hog. The game looks better with PP and AA turned down to make room for the other settings turned to max.

And also, you're not actually running 10k view distance if you're playing dayz. Try running those same settings in a regular mission and you'll be seeing plenty of lag

 

[Ennui]

I played all day today and got wise to a lot of things. This game is really something. I love the fact that it forces you to make tough moral decisions that you actually have to think about. The whole PVP aspect is absolutely enthralling because of this. The way the game constructs a personal narrative for you and your character is like nothing else I've ever seen, even something like Minecraft.

Today I played for about eight hours straight without dying. Started out in Three Valleys on the eastern coast, swung down around the point and passed through Kamyshovo on my way to Elektro, scavenging here and there but mostly sticking to the relative safety of the forested hills parallel to the coastline. I watched a fellow survivor die to a zombie horde as I passed unseen through Kamyshovo, having neither the ammo nor inclination to help him.

When I got to the eastern outskirts of Elektro, I opted to stick to the high ridgeline that ran parallel to the northern (inland) side of town so I could check out the area and target my looting, since I knew how dangerous the central parts of the city would be. Around that point I saw another survivor nearby running frantically from a pack of zombies and I took pity on them, having found a bit more ammo for my Winchester. I saved them, gave them a bandage and we wished each other luck before going our separate ways.

The ridge terminated on a high hill overlooking all of the downtown portion of eastern Elektro, with the power plant just behind the ridge on the other side. I found a tent and got some meager supplies from it and was scoping out the town center when I noticed another survivor ahead of me on the ridge. His back was to me as he surveyed Elektro through his sniper rifle sights and he didn't notice me until I was right behind him. I was prepared to shoot him if he seemed hostile but he wasn't; he and I exchanged greetings and were preparing to go into town when another survivor hailed us over chat, asking who was on the hill outside Elektro.

He turned out to be another guy on the roof of the tall hospital building in downtown eastern Elektro. We went to meet him and he gave me some painkillers for which I was sorely grateful since I had been dealing with incessant screen shake ever since being wounded helping the other player survive a bit earlier. We met up with him and looted our merry way through some of the absolutely loaded buildings around there until our inventories were full of food, water and ammo. We ended up meeting up with three more random survivors in Elektro who saw our chat messages and had ourselves a merry band of six players, most total noobs and the others relatively new (like me).

We were moving out together to head north past the power plant and out of the city when all hell broke loose. One of the noobs attracted some undead attention, and one of the others took this as a reason to fire his Lee Enfield rifle while we were still in the city. The dead were swarming all over us in seconds... the most I've seen at once, at least 60 if not 80 or more. We all broke and scattered in random directions. Three players died within the next few minutes, and one was soon stuck on a rooftop with masses of undead below. The other remaining guy (who was the original dude I met on the hilltop) and I both ran north to the open plains albeit in separate directions. I killed the dozen or so undead that had followed me - Winchester all day baby - and bandaged my wounds. Dammit - I was in need of painkillers again.

Once things settled down I went back into the northern edge of town to link up with the remaining survivor who was in the store replenishing some of the ammo and supplies we'd just expended. Like I said, this was the same guy I had met on the hilltop before heading into town - we'd been together in the town for two hours but were the only ones of our group to make it back out again. We stocked up and headed out. I put out a request for painkillers in chat and someone responded that they'd give me some, and we agreed to meet at Topolka Dam north of Elektro. Along the way I cooked up some meat I had gotten earlier in the day after killing a wild boar.

When I got there, I snuck up carefully not wanting to take any chances of being ambushed (with my companion lagging a ways behind me) and was surveying the dam looking for the guy I was trying to meet up with when I heard a noise to my left. I turned and nearly died of shock to see a player in bandit camo crouched in the woods behind me. It was the guy who had agreed to give me painkillers, and fortunately it wasn't a trap and he was true to his word. He gave me painkillers, we traded some small items and he continued on as my companion and I decided to continue trekking north.

We played together for the next few hours and slowly worked our way northwest, visiting the castle Rog and looting our way through Msta and Staroye. Eventually it got dark and we both decided to call it quits for the day, since there was no moon, but resolved to play more together later.

I'm near Guglovo now and I plan to head up to Stary next. If I survive long enough to get to the western side of Stary then I'll swing north and check out the Devil's Castle area before creeping my way over to have a look at the airfields.

I have a lot of neat stuff - binocs, matches, hunting knife, map, watch, Alice pack, well over a hundred shots for my Winchester and plenty of food, water and meds. I will be very sad whenever my death comes this time which will most likely be soon because I can already tell that the inland areas are a very different animal than the coast. I plan on being totally sneaky and incognito from here on out since I know that bandits and organized groups are more common in the northern areas.

So much fun.

 

[Viperidae]

In other news,

 

[Vegeta897]

Just had a crazy encounter with 3+ survivors at the Stary Sobor military camp. It ended in my death, but Lev avenged me and held the camp until I got back, so I have all my stuff back as well as the spoils.

I have the whole thing recorded, will edit and put it up tomorrow hopefully. It was so intense.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Arma 2 Combined Ops (game + expansion, actually I'm not sure if the expansion is needed for Day Z but prudent to get it anyway) is half off on Amazon digital. Need a US address (any will do~).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003UV8RRE...tiveASIN=B003UV8RRE&adid=1MNSGHW2SN665DKGJ3DE

 

[Vegeta897]

Arma 2 original acts as the "expansion" to OA. The game you are running is OA with Arma 2's content (chernarus, models, weapons, sounds, etc)

But do be sure you install Arma 2 first and then install OA into that same folder.

 

[Ennui]

I've made it to Stary Sobor and I'm pretty nervous about lone wolfing it into the city in the daytime. Being up north is frightening... everything is so solitary feeling, but I know it's only because players this far inland are more experienced and stay out of sight. I've just been waiting to get sniped out of a bush somewhere.

 

[Vegeta897]

Actually, near the hotspots of the NW airfield and Stary military camp, you'll often see players. That's where almost all of our battles have taken place.

 

[Raziaar]

Just had a crazy encounter with 3+ survivors at the Stary Sobor military camp. It ended in my death, but Lev avenged me and held the camp until I got back, so I have all my stuff back as well as the spoils.

I have the whole thing recorded, will edit and put it up tomorrow hopefully. It was so intense.

Oh my great gosh, that does sound crazy.

 

[Ennui]

Actually, near the hotspots of the NW airfield and Stary military camp, you'll often see players. That's where almost all of our battles have taken place.

Yeah, I traveled through Stary and am on the northern edge of the airfield right now. Saw two other survivors looting in the airfield but stayed clear of them. A bandit tried to lure me into a trap in Stary but I didn't fall for it.

edit: Actually made contact with the friendlies on airfield and they were nice enough. Then one of them alerted a zombie and they ran off with half the undead army of Chernarus after them.

Can we play together this weekend sometime?

 

[Vegeta897]

Sure, if you're on at night/late night. You should have the beta installed by the way.

Anyway, here's that vid

 

[Bad^Hat]

Tense.

I followed someone in a jeep to the NE airfield earlier, he parked outside the control tower so I tried to sneak up and steal it. Right as I was about to swipe it he poked his head out and spotted me, we traded a few shots and both attracted some zombies (rifles are LOUD), I dispatched mine and noticed he'd just retreated up the stairs to wait for me to come in view again (the jeep was directly outside the door). I used this opportunity to sneak around the other side of the tower, climb the ladder to the top and come at him from above. It worked, and I got him clean in the head, but he must have had a buddy because I dropped dead a few moments later.

The last thing I noticed in chat before I aborted was (what I presume to be) the guy I shot saying "asshole." My work here is done.

Edit: So I found a helicopter wreck earlier and was just checking to see if they could be repaired and found this. OMG we SO need to get one up and running (but howwww).

 

[Ennui]

Speaking of helicopters, I rode one last night in what has easily been my most epic sequence of events in the game. If you ignored my other two wall of post texts, read this one - I promise it's worth it.

I ended up getting killed by bandits while sneaking around the NW airfield (at least I assume it was bandits. I think I got sniped in the head because I was just creeping along one moment and the next I was dead as hell) and lost all my sweet gear and found myself on the coast again. I spawned east of Chernogorsk and found ample loot on the beach around me - at least four dead survivors, all with full starting kit. I loaded up on Makarov ammo, took what little extra food I could carry and grabbed some extra painkillers as I have found them to be very scarce in general.

It was already the evening, with only a couple of hours of light left, so I decided to head into Cherno to try and find some real gear before nightfall, hoping to find an ALICE pack and a Winchester and some other essentials. I started talking to another player who was asking if anyone else was friendly in Cherno and wanted to meet up and we decided to connect in the city. I painstakingly snuck into downtown Cherno and met him in the big plaza under the clock tower with the statues in it. He wore bandit gear but swore he was friendly, and another survivor in Cherno assured me he was watching through his sniper scope and would avenge me if the friendly bandit tried anything.

It was starting to get dark and we noticed that the zombie population had gone from relatively scarce in the city to just swarming all over the place - the spawn timers are weird in this game - and suddenly we were stuck in downtown with literally hundreds of zombies around us. We decided trying to sneak out of town was too dangerous and instead elected to climb to the roof of the hospital in eastern Cherno and wait it out a little bit. Another survivor linked up with us up there, having seen our flares on the roof.

We looked out over the sea of zombies beneath us for a while. More than I have ever seen in one place... there were literally well over a hundred within viewing range of our tall vantage point on the hospital roof. We were loaded with medical supplies - a box on the roof had 10 bandages, 4 painkillers, 5 blood bags and various other medical goodies - but didn't have enough ammo to safely attempt an escape.

Before long the inevitable happened. One of the guys I was with (their names were MK and Goodnews) made a little too much noise walking back and forth along the roof and attracted a few of the nearby zombies who began to clump near the bottom of the ladder. This problem was compounded when I accidentally fired a shot from my Makarov while trying to drop a flare, and I was sure our death knell came when MK fired his CZ 550 at a zombie for no apparent reason and drew every zombie within a kilometer to our building.

It was full on dark by this point and we had been sitting on the roof for about an hour. There were easily 50-100 zombies around the base of the building, just a massive swarm of them. I figured we were dead for sure since there was no way we could get down and avoid getting injured, and even if we managed to break out and run away we'd have too many of them after us to kill with our limited ammo.

Then I heard salvation in the form of a distant thrumming that could only have been a helicopter in the air. A few moments after that I spotted the chopper flying in the sky over Cherno before turning west and heading away. Having seen a way out of our dismal situation, all three of us on the roof got excited as hell and started begging in chat for them to pick us up and save us from our horrible fate. The pilot responded and was skeptical at first, fearing that we would try to steal his chopper, but we convinced him we were well-intentioned and when it became clear he was seeking blood packs for his severely injured comrade we sealed the deal - we had five blood packs with us on the roof. He agreed to try and pick us up but warned that at the first sign of aggression he would leave us there to die.

About five minutes later, he neared Cherno again and we popped flares all over the roof of the hospital. With a bit of painstaking hovering he managed to land on the hospital roof (I suppose he is a pilot in Arma because he certainly knew what he was doing) and picked us up. MK fell off the roof while this was happening, and ironically he had been carrying all the blood packs. He was torn to pieces by the zombie horde and rage quit almost immediately.

We took off in the air and I told the pilot how to get to the hospital in Elektro so we could keep trying to find blood for his friend, and we successfully did so and took it to him. We spent the next 15 minutes flying all over the map, with people in the dark nighttime forests and towns below cheering us on and begging for rides to places. Eventually I had to leave so I logged out after we landed to find more fuel and now I'm alone somewhere near Lopatino in the NW. It was truly epic though, the exhilaration of being in that chopper was simply awesome. Props to the guy who was cool enough to not only get a chopper in the air but also be willing to pick my sorry ass up and save me

 

[Unfocused]

Anyway, here's that vid

Do you kill non-bandit people because you don't want to take any chances or because human life means so little to you? :3

I was a bit surprised watching this video, it seemed like playing on a lower difficulty setting compared to my experiences. The zombie count is <300, whereas when I played it was >900 (on the US Hardcore server [1 or 2]), which makes things harder. Also you were hit a few times and barely lost any blood, while most of the time when I get hit I start bleeding. Can the servers have different settings, apart from normal and hardcore (you're playing hardcore here anyway)?

You also have some nice gear and judging my the zombie kill count, you haven't played for long with his character (that or you're good at sneaking and don't kill a lot; but then again there's also that lower zombie count) - can you recommend some good spots to loot?

BTW I listened to you advice and disabled post-processing. I decided to play a bit without it to decide if I value clarity and sharpness more than the... gloomy mood that comes with post-processing. Soon after my blood level dropped to the point ~4k were you get those spasms every few seconds and I played like that for probably and hour or so when I decided to turn post-processing back on. Turns out, while with PP off the spasms are a mild annoyance, they make the game barely playable when PP is on, cause with every spasm the screen not only shakes but also gets blurry. They ought to tone it down IMHO.

Anyway, I died with my second character, because I chose my gear badly. I went to Stary Sobor and looted the army tents where I switched my stock Makarov for a silenced Beretta and my Winchester for an M16A2 (chose this over an M4, AK47, MP5 and some compact AK version). However half an hour later, as I was trying to figure out how to make my way into town, I found a sniper rifle with 15-20 rounds for it. Thinking that I'll probably soon find a better pistol fro CQB (the Beretta was silent but didn't deal enough dmg IMHO and aiming for the head is not always easy with a twitchy-laggy zombie coming at you in zig-zags) and that it would be sweet to snipe some bandits if I encounter them, I grabbed the sniper rifle. Not long after that however I ran out of ammo for my pistol and before I had the chance to find another weapon, I was forced to defend myself with only a sniper rifle.

And that didn't go too well.

 

[Vegeta897]

Awesome story Ennui. That's the kind of unscripted cinematic stuff that makes everything worth it in Arma.

Unfocused, there is no difficulty settings that change how much damage zombies do or how resistant you are, or the spawn rates.

The spawn rates depend on how many people are near buildings/towns. The server I was in at the time probably wasn't full up, and it was I believe one of the UO servers which run the beta, and most of the players in it at the time were probably experienced enough to not spend all their time fighting zombies in the starting towns or elsewhere. Zombie spawn rates can also depend on how long the server has been up.

In one of my longest lives a while ago, I had racked up something like 600 zombie kills before I died. All winchester.

The only spots I usually loot when I have my main stuff is the NW airport, camp at Stary, and military towers.

I died yesterday while killing/looting in the NW airfield, so I'll be back to square one again. I really had it coming. I nearly died so many times from zombies during that life. I did have Viper recover my GPS though.

 

[Sloth]

Arma 2 original acts as the "expansion" to OA. The game you are running is OA with Arma 2's content (chernarus, models, weapons, sounds, etc)

But do be sure you install Arma 2 first and then install OA into that same folder.

Will it work with the Steam version, I already had ARMA 2, so will buying OA through Steam work?

 

[Vegeta897]

Like I've said a bajillion times before, the non-steam version of Arma is the most easiest to work with.

Buying OA on Steam (or anywhere else) would be more expensive than just buying Combined Ops from that deal on Amazon right now.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003UV8RRE...tiveASIN=B003UV8RRE&adid=1MNSGHW2SN665DKGJ3DE

Get it.

Edit: It appears Amazon has OA by itself for only 10 bucks, so you could purchase that and install it to your Arma 2 Steam directory. I still think spending the extra 5 dollars to have your content much easier to manage and not controlled/dependent on steam is much better.

 

[Sloth]

Looking into it, turns out Amazon downloads are only available to US customers.

I'll check the Bohemia website and see what their download policy is. Failing all that I guess Steam would be the final option.

 

[Vegeta897]

Look at Badhat's post more closely. You can use any US address.

And the BI Studios store is fully international. But you can get it on Amazon with no problem.

 

[Sloth]

Look at Badhat's post more closely. You can use any US address.

And the BI Studios store is fully international. But you can get it on Amazon with no problem.

I ended up going with BI, downloading now. I was just skim-reading the thread, must have missed BadHat's post.

Thanks for the help anyway.

 

[Ennui]

Had another epic night. Walked all the way from Lopatino (way up by the NW Airfield) down past Stary and south to Elektro. Once I was on the eastern outskirts of Elektro I saw a few bandits legging it through the town below with zombies after them and I dispatched both of them with my Enfield (the most godforsaken weapon in the game IMO). Shortly thereafter I was mobbed and eaten by zombies while looting their bodies. So it goes.

I respawned at Three Valleys and legged it back to Elektro within 30 minutes, managing to salvage all of my loot (including just about every important gear item - hunting knife, matches, watch, compass, map etc). Around that time I hooked up with some folks in a private Ventrilo server and spent the rest of the night playing with them. Group play is truly where this game shines.

Long story short, the five of us in Ventrilo were scattered all over the map on the server, so we started to try to congregate towards Stary Sobor. While running through the fields south of Stary and cooking the meat of several animals I had killed, I went afk for 10 minutes proned in a clump of trees in the middle of the large fields that span the entire southern approach to Stary.

When I returned, I saw a vehicle on the horizon. A UEZ jeep. The first time I had seen a repairable vehicle... I ran towards it and checked it out, exclaiming about my discovery to the guys in Ventrilo. It had a bunch of equipment in the trunk - spare car parts and ammo for the most part, and several empty jerry cans - and once I found that it was running and had a half tank of gas I put it in gear and took off south towards Vyshnoye, where I linked up with two of the guys in vent and we refilled the tank.

We spent the next four or five hours having a ****ing blast just tearing around the map, picking up comrades and getting loot. We found a helicopter spawn next to the gas station in western Vybor and that was our "base" where we returned to fill our jerry cans every so often. We were on our way back to Vybor with rotor assemblys and engine parts to fix the broken helicopter there when the server finally crashed and we lost our jeep and parts. We were basically 20 minutes away from getting the damn helicopter in the air.

Now I am about dead in an industrial building on the eastern coast with a broken leg and no morphine and just about 600 blood left... shit is not looking good for me. Still, having a jeep was so much fun, even if the vehicles are super buggy (z's and loot don't spawn until you get out of the vehicle, and there are all kinds of issues if you drag a passed out teammate into cars). This game is really incredible and I can safely affirm that I am experienced and grizzled enough to be useful to you guys in a real group. We had a number of run-ins with unfriendly players and managed to come out on top in all of them although we did lose a man or two in the process.

My favorite gun is by far the Winchester - plentiful ammo, high fire rate and its very effective despite not being nearly as loud as the CZ 550 or Enfield. I usually roll with a Makarov sidearm purely due to how available its ammo is. Besides that I find having the ability to hunt very useful since you can replenish health without using a blood pack. Driving around in a jeep and crossing the map in 15 minutes rather than 2 hours was really nice as well.

 

[Vegeta897]

Pretty exciting and lucky night for me. See video!

I spawned with a fresh life near Balota airfield and quickly gained a good set of gear with a winchester as my primary. I was headed toward Viper at the NW airport when I heard this low hum. At first I thought it was outside IRL but it got more distinct and I noticed it was directional in the game. I headed toward it and found that someone was driving a car in the middle of a field, with like 20 zombies chasing him. Well, check out the vid.

I'm still alive and well with the car hidden somewhere. I had some fun with Viper on the airfield but he got mobbed by zombies on accident, and I never could get those stanags, so I ended up taking his DMR back to the car and reclaimed my winchester from the car.

All in all, pretty fun. And now I have a car.

 

[Ren.182]

Finally got round to downloading this and it's not bad! Played for around 2 or so hours until I just died.

Took a while for me to get used to the controls again, so my first experience was a bit clunky... I spawned next to a gas station near a beach, it was mid-day and pissing it down with rain, helped with the mood I think!

Not much happened really, searched the gas station and a zombie spawned in the room I was in so that sucked, meant I had to shoot him and alert all the other ones around. Killed 4 and was bleeding. Patched up and headed up a hill where I could see a radio tower. Got to the top, managed to sneak up to the radio tower and I climbed it. Sadly there were no supplies around and the view wasn't that great since there were so many trees about.

On the climb down some zombies spotted me and started climbing up, easy enough to get rid of, shot in the head each. Head to a building I saw on top of the radio tower, a guy was there and he was friendly so we joined up, head to a town and got mobbed. Split up and I had about 10 runners and 5 crawlers after me, I ran down a hill and they all died cause they were running so fast the jumped and died from the fall. Bit lame, but they had some food on them. I head to another town alone (had a railway line and a road going through it, also had a dock and some small islands just off the coast)

Scouted the town from the top of a hill, saw a road heading up the hill with a few houses lining it and no zombies there. Ran down and found a room with tons of bullets etc, but a zombie spawned and I had no bullets (none on the floor were for my gun ) and I was cornered since there was only one exit. Died. :'(

To be honest, pretty boring story haha, but I can see how playing with friends is the way forward. Just wish the aiming was smoother/more responsive and the zombies running not as jerky. Makes them pretty hard to kill. Also the spawning zombies is very annoying, especially when I've scouted for a good while and decided its clear, just to have a zombie spawn where I was looking 2 seconds ago.

 

[Bad^Hat]

That's great except why didn't you stop to loot the guy.

 

[Viperidae]

I had some fun with Viper on the airfield but he got mobbed by zombies on accident, and I never could get those stanags, so I ended up taking his DMR back to the car and reclaimed my winchester from the car.

Probably the most bullshit death I've ever had in Arma. I've died to falling, to doors, to getting thrown out of vehicles, to richochets of bullets that weren't even directed at me, to AI seeing through 25 trees and a wall, to awful squadmates that gave away my position. But this takes the cake.

I'm running away from a mob of zombies with 12000 blood, and I switch to pistol so I don't waste DMR ammo. ONE--UNO--UNE zombie hits me and breaks my legs. They swarm me and I manage to fire off one mag before they knock me unconscious (!?!?!) 2 seconds later. I actually managed to swallow painkillers and morphine between running out of ammo and getting knocked unconscious. I die 15s later as they all eat me. So let's recap: I get an extremely random dice roll for breaking my legs that is supposedly even more rare your higher blood is... on the FIRST HIT. I then get knocked unconscious from a tiny bit of blood loss (??), DESPITE taking painkillers (??????????), and then eaten to death in a flash. I went from a 20 hour long veteran bandit life with full HP where I survived more than 5 hostile encounters with humans to death in less than 30 seconds because of RNG.

 

[Gargantou]

Been playing this 10 hours in a row now, just a lovely mod.

Just committed my first two murders, first time the other guy shot first so I popped him in self defense, looted the shit out of him and then hid his body so the prick couldn't recover the loot I had left.

Second time, I had barricaded myself inside the church in Elektro to hide from a bandit with an CZ sniping the shit out of the general store when I looted it.

When I have finally gotten inside the church, closed the door and am patching myself up some guy opens door and rushes in with a winchester aiming at me! I naturally panic, and pump him full of like 7 bullets from the Makarov, then I realizes it wasn't the guy who had been sniping at me (at least I don't think so, since he didn't have an CZ) so I just told the guy over side channel that I am sorry and that he could come there and reclaim his body.

So happy this mod has Swedish servers that give me nice pings.

Edit: Just to be clear, not 10 hours on one character. My current character I've only had for like 5 hours, he's had quite a journey too, went inland, got bored, headed outland, had to refill my canteen, lost backpack and almost all my items because I misjudged the depth. Made it to Elektro but was all out of ammo, a guy with bandit skin approaches me but tells me not to fire, I choose to trust him and he escorts me to the general store before he disconnects.

 

[Ennui]

Died, killed a few bandits and took their gear. Also got my hands on another UAZ jeep and spent the night getting it fully fueled and have four full cans in the truck. It's hidden in a forest in the northeast right now.

 

[Unfocused]

Also the spawning zombies is very annoying, especially when I've scouted for a good while and decided its clear, just to have a zombie spawn where I was looking 2 seconds ago.

This! They should make it so that zombies couldn't spawn in something like a 250m radius of a player (even more would be better). I'd like to be able to temporarily clear a town of zombies and then explore it in peace.

But what's more important, I'd like to avoid situations like the one you described. Two days ago I was walking to a barn, making sure there are no zombies around. As I was 10 meters away from it, I noticed a zombie relatively close to me, in a spot which was empty 5 seconds ago. I then turned around to face the direction I came from, that was clear a few seconds ago, and there were like 10 zombies a few meters away from me, making it impossible to get out of there unnoticed.

It's just like zombies out of nowhere in The Walking Dead!

 

[Ren.182]

Had a better game this morning. Started using a map on my second monitor just to get used to things. I's so much easier when you actually have some bearings.

Started down south east corner near Kamenka, got shot pretty much straight away by another survivor/bandit. He came up to me and I was talking to him but he didn't reply, I was asking if he wanted to team up, looked around for a second and he shot me in the back. I'm just going to shoot people who don't reply now.

Respawned there and decided to skip Kamenka this time, there were a lot of shots going off in the town and I saw a couple of people moan about being killed in there. Headed North to Pavlovo and there were quite a lot of zombies. Still I circled the town and entered near the church. Sadly I couldn't enter it (it's really hard to see what you can and can't enter ) but I found a large backpack in a random archway to a building and saw an open door down the end of a street. I snuck into it and found a can of soda, 2 full revolver mags (12 bullets) a compass and some bandages. Great success!

From there I head East to Bor, all I found here was some binoculars which I'm sure will come in handy when moving in on towns and planning routes etc.

Only a single crawling zombie saw me through all of this, but I just ignored him and went on my way. Headed East out of Bor and logged off for now.

So yeah again, not much happened but I'm doing ok as a lone survivor. Any other EU players fancy meeting up?

 

[Acepilotf14]

Aha, actually started a new life and managed to skulk into cherno and find a bunch of stuff some guys must have died protecting. Found about 4 rifles, a whole bunch of food and water, maps, compasses, etc- so I might just hang out here on this roof for a while and see if I can find anyone to shoot that walks by. I wanna get the bandit skin.

 

[Vegeta897]

The bandit skin is being removed in the next update. Rather, you will no longer change skin based on your humanity level.

Skins will now be findable like loot, and you can 'wear' ones you find.

Also, do you know how to change backpacks? I'm betting the loot you found must have included a bigger pack than the default.

 

[Acepilotf14]

Oooh.

And yes, I found out how to change backpacks. Worked the same as normal inventory stuff for me. I just dropped my old backpack and scrolled from 'rearm from x pack' to 'pick up x pack'.