In 2009 a modder by the name Dean “Rocket” Hall created a mod for the military tactical shooter ARMA 2. This mod put players in a fictional country called Chernarus that has been struck with a mysterious virus that turned the population into zombies. This mod was called Dayz. Over the next few years, much like a zombie virus, DayZ spread to every gamers’ PCs, becoming one of the most popular PC games that wasn’t World of Warcraft. You even say that the game was “patient zero” for the open world zombie survival genre and the battle royale genre. The mod was so popular that gamers bought ARMA 2 just to play DayZ. In 2012 it was announced that Hall would join the developer of the ARMA series, Bohemia Interactive, to developer a standalone version of DayZ. Five years in early access and three million players later the standalone game would be released on Steam. Now between 2012 and the release of the standalone version of DayZ, it was announced that the game would be seeing a port over to the next generation of consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One respectively. Which brings us to today. With the PS4 and Xbox One starting to near the end of their life cycles, DayZ rises from the grave to infect them. With gamers already looking ahead to the next gen, can DayZ infect console gamers with the same excitement that PC gamer had all those years ago? Or is the game a double tap away from being put down? Let’s find out with DayZ on the PS4.
Stay dead
Late to the party- I’ll be honest, when I first heard that DayZ was going to be ported over to the PS4 in the early years of the system’s life cycle, I was pretty excited. I didn’t have a decent PC at the time, so I couldn’t play DayZ,so being able to play it on the PS4 sounded awesome. Time past and some of the best games, both PS4 exclusive and third party, came out. The global phenom that was Fortnite released. Hell even PUBG, which could be considered its little brother since it an offshoot of the DayZ mod, was released before it. Clones also started to pop up and bigger triple A developers started to add in their own variations of the game to their own existing games. In short, I think DayZ was late to the party. Why would players bother with the game, other than based on its name recognition, when they have plenty of other options.
Graphically challenged- There will always be a difference in graphics when a game developed for PC is ported to consoles. When DayZ first started out as a mod, the graphics weren’t the best. There were glitches, bugs and all sorts of weird things going on in the game, but that’s to be expected since its a mod, and mods usually have to be updated constantly along side the base game. This is why Bohemia Interactive brought on Hall to work on a standalone version of the game. And again since they were starting from scratch there were bugs and glitches. It took five years for DayZ to finally leave early access and another two years to reach consoles. You would think that with all that time that the graphics would be updated, bugs fixed and glitches patched? The game looks like it came out of 2012. The textures take a while to pop in on to the different models. The whole game looks grey and murky, especially when the game shifts to night.
More barren than the actual location- From my understanding DayZ is an open world survival game where you can squad up with other people to survive the zombie apocalypse. squad up and terrorize other players or a bit of both. That’s if you can find anybody. In my time with DayZ for the PS4, I was only able to find four other people which didn’t last due to my connection timing out, and when I got back on to the same server (more on them in a bit) no one what there. I ran around for about an hour or so trying to find anybody, no such luck. So I tried another server. And another. And another. I even tried non-US servers and still empty. I know that the area that the game takes place is is pretty big but I would expect to at least encounter one person or even a group of people.
Screen tearing and frame rate issues- Another set of graphical issues that I’ve experienced is that there is very noticeable screen tearing and frame rate issues. Now the game is locked at 30fps, which is normal for most PC to console ports. Even so the game starts to drop frames for the smallest of actions. This mainly happens when running. As I run the frames start to dip into the low 20’s. While all of this is happening, the screen starts to show noticeable tear as well. I understand that the PS4 doesn’t have as much power as a Fully spec out PC, but it has the same amount of power as a lower end gaming PC so it should have no problems.
When reviewing games, especially games that I have no experience with, I try to keep an open mind. Just because I might not like the game, doesn’t mean that the game itself is bad, it means it’s not for me. However if a game is bad, and not just “I’m not enjoying myself” bad but mechanically bad, I will say so. And the PS4 version of DayZ is pretty bad. A barren world, graphical glitches and being late to the party, I’m wondering why DayZ was released at all. Bohemia Interactive had almost four years after the official PC standalone release of the game to optimize for the consoles. And now that the PS4 and the Xbox One are near then end of their life cycle and the next gen is a year away, I think Bohemia should have waited. If you’re a hardcore fan of DayZ and have been wanting to play with your friends who have console, go for it. For those who are new to DayZ, until things are patched and fixed, there are better choices out there for your post-apocalyptic zombie survival fix.
