Dayz Manifesto
On 12 June 2013, Destiny, upon viewing the E3 footage of the DayZ standalone game, was left deeply disappointed. In response to this disappointment, he took to the Reddit community r/dayz to pen a manifesto.[1] This post garnered significant attention, drawing the game's director Dean Hall into the discussion as well.[2] In retrospect, this event may be considered a pivotal moment in the "Dayz Arc."[3]
Early Days of DayZ
Destiny's journey with DayZ began during the game's early access phase in 2012 when it was a mod for Arma 2, created by Dean Hall. DayZ was a unique survival game that introduced a post-apocalyptic world infested with zombies and offered players the challenge of surviving by scavenging for resources, interacting with other players, and dealing with the ever-present threat of zombies and hostile survivors.
Destiny, like many other gamers, was drawn to the intense and unpredictable nature of DayZ's gameplay. His initial experiences in the game involved surviving in the harsh Chernarus landscape, forming alliances with other players, and facing the constant fear of death at the hands of both zombies and hostile players.
Twitch Streaming and DayZ
Destiny's journey with DayZ became closely tied to his career as a Twitch streamer. He started streaming his DayZ adventures to a growing audience of viewers who were captivated by the game's suspenseful gameplay and Destiny's charismatic commentary. His streaming career quickly gained traction, and his DayZ content helped establish him as a notable figure in the Twitch community.
Destiny's streams often featured intense moments of survival, dramatic encounters with other players, and humorous interactions. He developed a reputation for his sharp wit and strategic thinking, which became key elements of his streaming persona.
The manifesto
Hello! I am a relatively well known streamer in the Starcraft and League of Legends community and I absolutely fell in love with DayZ a year or so ago when I first discovered it and started playing. Like a lot of you, I fell out of interest with it due to the hacking, primarily, and also a bit because of all of the random bugs. Nothing was more frustrating than running 15 minutes to the NW airfield only to be thunderdomed by a hacker or (arguably worse) killed by a door in one of the barracks, heh.
Like a lot of people in the subreddit, I quit playing DayZ (for the most part) and began to anxiously await the release of the stand-alone. It's been quite a long wait, but we were all (for the most part) happy to wait because of two things:
We knew that the team that was working on the game was relatively small, compared to most larger game studios.
We knew that the end product would be something worth waiting for.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about number 2, and why the E3 footage that was leaked worried me a little bit.
There's no easy way to say this without coming off like a bit of a dick, so I'll just get this part out of the way. The E3 footage looked like a reskin of the Arma 2 DayZ. The movement appeared more or less just as sluggish (the door moving the character model, the general handling/response of the character) and, more noticeably, the zombies appeared just as glitchy as ever (running through walls, hitting the character, running behind the player due to pathing to attack, doing damage way before they've even gotten to the character, etc..).
These things are very worrisome because these are the "hard" parts about DayZ stand-alone, and from what it looks like in the E3 preview, absolutely no (apparent) progress was made towards solving these problems.
I think I speak for all of us when I say this: It would have been far more exciting to see a shitty collection of boxes (that represented houses) and stick figures (representing the player and zombies) moving around the screen and interacting with each other in an incredibly smooth way than it was to see a reskinned DayZ with all of the same bugs as before. If everything looked like absolute shit, but the engine (the thing we're all the most excited about!) looked to function well, damn that would be exciting. Because at that point, all we'd be thinking is "Jesus, everything is so smooth. It looks like shit because of the placeholder graphics, but all they have to do now is work on the animations and graphics and everything will be perfect!"
Instead, we saw a nicer looking, reskinned DayZ that honestly wouldn't surprise me if it were just released as a DayZ patch tomorrow. "Graphics updates, guys! And way more buildings you can go into! Plus a crafting and map system!" That's pretty neat, but those aren't the things we were really excited for.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of people who like the new graphics and the map and crafting stuff, I think they're fine ideas. People are mad and upset, though, because they assumed that those new systems were going to be built on a heavily improved stand-alone engine that was free from the terrible buggy glitchiness that existed in DayZ.
Some common responses I've seen so far:
"DUDE STFU IT'S PRE-ALPHA IDIOT" Yeah, it is pre-alpha...but why did so much work go into new buildings, nice graphics, inventory management and a new crafting system before work went into the actual engine itself? In my earlier example, I think we all would have been far more excited to see shitty programmer placeholder graphics in a well functioning, smoothed out engine instead of seeing what, essentially, looked like a reskin of our current DayZ game.
"THERE ARE A TON OF CHANGES U JUST CAN'T SEE THEM YET LIKE THE SERVER-CLIENT ARKITECSHUR!11Q" If the game is already that laggy in single-player mode, there's no way any server-client architecture is going to help. I'm sure they've made some changes on the backend, but none of those changes matter if the end product to us, the player, still contains horribly glitchy zombies and sluggish/Arma II movement.
I'm not saying "OH GOD SA SUX" or "FUCK DAYZ I HATE THIS SUBREDDIT" or trying to shit on Dean or fearmonger or anything...I'm just expressing why I believe so many people are disappointed in the SA video from E3. I was incredibly excited to see some shitty-looking, but very smooth-running DayZ, but so far everything I've seen looks possible to do in the current Arma II engine and all of the same bugs still seem to exist. I hope I'm wrong on all of this and I hope SA launches relatively bug-free.