Forget permadeath. There is a more intense way to play DayZ, and it somehow makes the survival game way more hardcore.
I speak of perma-permadeath, a concept that Rock, Paper Shotgun writer Christopher Livingston recently documented. Here’s how it works. If you die, that’s it. You don’t just lose your character, though. You never get to play the game again. Ever.
Livingston added some rules, in order to keep this playthrough interesting:
I came up with a couple ground rules to make sure I don’t just squat safely in the woods eating berries for the day and then declare myself a winner. The servers I play on need to be at least half-full so there are other players around. I’ll also make myself visit two big cities, one in the north and one in the south, forcing me to cover a good bit of ground and enter areas in which zombies and players are likely. Once I’ve visited those two cities, which will take at least a few hours, I can call it quits and start playing normally again.
When you couple this with the fact that DayZ can be a source of income for Livingston — he’s a game writer and all — the stakes are pretty high, eh?
I don’t want to spoil what happens in his playthrough, but you can read the account here. Suffice it to say, it’s a pretty nerve-wracking way to play DayZ, and I’m curious if anyone else will follow in his footsteps. It doesn’t even have to be in DayZ either — perma-permadeath is a thing you can do in pretty much any game.
It’s not my bag — I like to keep playing my games, thank you — but, I’m curious. Would you try something like this out? Or is it too much?
Comments
9 responses to “The Most Hardcore Way To Play DayZ”
Seems like a publicity stunt, but that’s my uninformed guess.
Why not just play it normally and set your own goals?
Imagine doing this with a game like Battlefield.
This (perma-permadeath) is also not a new idea. Shit, I talked about it to my brother back when we played Mario and Sonic.
It’s a bit different in this case… in Mario or Sonic, if you die it’s because you messed up. In DayZ, someone can pop you even if you are the best player in the world… that makes it much more nerve wracking.
I think this would be hilarious in Alien: Isolation. You’d get 5 minutes of gametime before you had to give the game away, but what an intense 5 minutes it’d be!
Pretty Cool
Sounds retarded.
Bit dumb, and if they really do enjoy the game I doubt they would stick to it. I picture a few weeks/months later, “hey remember when we died and we said we weren’t going to play this anymore? Haha what were we thinking”
Wouldn’t it be more hardcore if when he died in the game the person who killed him came around to his house and force fed him bleach after stealing all of his cans of beans. Obviously the logical conclusion of being this hardcore.
I remember when Chris Livingston was good. He made arguably the best Half-Life 2 comic ever: Concerned. Not to imply he isn’t still good, but that shit was golden. Go read it if you life Half-Life and funny.