I've now sunk 260 hours + into this game in 3 months and for all its faults, for me, there is no other game quite like it. Yes I've ‘rubberbanded’ off small ledges and died to hyperthermia when my status was bugged, yes I have had regular game/server crashes galore and experienced continued desync during any sort of PvP and of course bouncing vehicles after hitting players, but in spite of these issues something keeps me coming back.
For me, the biggest part of the draw is the absolute unknown as to what sort of encounter(s) I will have with each character and that they can come at any moment. I could have one evening where I literally run through typically ‘hot’ PvP zone and don’t see a soul, others I can just spawn in to the coast and suddenly find myself in the middle of a 6+ player battle and end up very geared in 10 minutes!
Two classic examples of the experience that no other game I have played would have given me:
1) I was playing on a first person server and came to this small town where this guy holds me up with a silenced pistol, communicates to me to say to put my hands up, after me pressing what later turned out to be the wave button (F1 rather than F2 – I was in a first person server so couldn’t see my character), I was shot and killed. Very salty I respawned on the coast and decided to take my frustration out on the first person I met… the first person I met was actually friendly, we chatted, ended up heading in the same direction and have since added each other on Steam and have met up almost daily for the past month and get on really well. We have also started to create DayZ content for YouTube.
2) Spawned in as a fresh spawn and suddenly met two people who tried to hold me up, until one was convinced I was a certain popular UK DayZ streamer and, thinking I was TRMZ making a video (which coincidently I was making a video), he proceeded to suck up to me and in spite my continued denials I was the presumed individual, it only served to reinforce his view. Anyway, the friend I mentioned above, and I were able to convince them to give their guns to us and when one got bored and tried to punch us we lit them up. Utterly hilarious.
The draw for me is the constant risk that at any moment a player or players might come along and hold up or kill my character, thereby losing the loot I'd taken 2 minutes or 2 days to gather. For some it would be hugely frustrating (initially it was for me) but what it does is forces a kind of interaction with people and I have made genuine IRL friends through the game from completely random encounters.
Development of this has been slow but when you think, this game was based on the same engine as Arma but from the start it was planned to move to a completely new engine, which has meant developing two games side by side (in effect). With 0.61 came the enfusion sound engine which has changed things enormously, as well as changes to lighting effects but now the 0.62 is nearing experimental the devs have fully migrated the game over to the new engine, which means development will be far far far quicker than before.
Perhaps they would have been better to have created the engine before releasing the game to Alpha but remember, the whole resin d'etre of this game is to not only develop a new sandbox engine but to allow modding, which as we all know, does wonders for selling copies of the game!
If anyone is interested in the game, perhaps grabbing a cheap copy in the next Steam sale would be a good idea but for me, having spent hours in Arma III in various guises, I haven't played it since buying DayZ.