Article by Finn:

One of my friends recently introduced me to a little modification for Arma II Combined Operations called DayZ. Now I’m sure many of you will have heard of this mod and a good few will have played it, but like us didn’t have a clue what you were doing, at least at first.

DayZ is set in a fictitious location, however it is based on Russia or a similar ex-soviet country by the looks of the place. The map is some 25 square km in size with a huge number of small towns and villages to investigate, loot and get killed in, which is surprisingly easy. Along with the small villages there are three big city’s where most of the action takes place, there are also three airfields and even a couple of castles to be found. However why do you need to loot these places? And why would I be getting killed doing it? Well the ‘Z’ in ‘DayZ’ should have given you an idea if you know nothing else about it; Zombies. These good old fashioned cannibalistic dead humans make everything from going down to shops to get a can of beans, to trying to get that broken down car of yours working again a real pain. These dead proletariat tend to hang out in the towns, which is where almost all of the loot can be found. So if you want a new gun or your a bit low on sardines your going to have to sneak, shoot or run your way past the unemployed drunkards (which is what they look like when they aren’t trying to eat you).

But the dead are normally the least of your worries, those gun shots you heard off in the distance are far more worrying. You see this isn’t a single player mod, the servers are populated with other players, and just like you they are looking for that illusive can of sardines as well, but unlike zombies they can have guns and they often use them to kill you. Why do this? Well you see after you have spent half an hour searching a town for those sardines and found a new gun, maybe got yourself a nice new outfit, you become a far fatter target than the town. Why not just kill this guy and take his stuff? Easier than navigating all those zombies to find some empty tin cans and another pile of flairs.

Right now the way DayZ works is you spawn a character, that character is then saved every time you leave a server. Then when you log into another server you play with that same character you spawned last time. You also bring all your stuff and you will be in the location that you logged out of the last server. So it can be a good idea to leave your character somewhere safe so when your loading up you don’t get attacked by everyone and their grandmother. Servers sport a day and night system as well, so if your playing in a British server and its night time in Britain then it will be night time in that server. This of course can be a bad thing as you can discover from the video of our night time antics. It also means that if you want to play in day light you might have to play on a US server and make do with the lag issues.

VIDEO: