In the early 2010s, DayZ barely functioned—and it was amazing. This open world zombie survival game, which꧂ started life as an Arma mod and was for a while one of the most played games on PC, was missing a key component: zoไmbies. They were there, but they were comically broken. Think Cyberpunk 2077 was buggy? It had nothing on this mess. The undead would clip through scenery, mysteriously vanish, appear out of nowhere, and run straight through you.
Sometimes they'd kill you in one hit, other times they'd swing their arms wildly in the air and you wouldn't suffer so much as a scratch. This sounds like a disaster, but it had the unintended side effect of bringing DayZ's social dynamic to the forefront. This is what really made the game interesting, and the result is the most thrilling multiplayer game I've ever played. Nothing has come close in the years since, including DayZ itself, which has since fixed its zombies.
DayZ was an incredibly powerful story generator. Similar to EVE Online, everything that happened on a server was dictated by the players. There were no scripted events or set-pieces: just truly player-driven moments of chaos, violence, and occasional friendship. Your only goal was to survive, but that was easier said than done in this hellish sandbox full of cruel, gun-toting bandits: a nickname for people whose only goal was making other survivors' lives a misery.
Sadistic players would loot military bases, tool up with guns, then go down to the beach where new players spawned and mow them down for the sheer sport of it. Rival groups of players would battle over territory. Some people would claim to be friendly, then shoot you in the back when you were distracted and steal all the food you'd just spent an hour gathering from your backpack. The bleak post-Soviet wilderness of Chernarus was a cruel and unforgiving place.
As a real post-apocalypse would, DayZ highlighted the very worst of human behaviour. The more I played it, the more monstrous I became. I developed serious trust issues, to the point where I'd sometimes panic and kill legitimately friendly, helpful players, just in case they betrayed me. But only because it happened to me so often, like the time a seemingly funny, good-natured guy handcuffed me and force-feed me a rotten banana. I later died of food poisoning.
But I never wanted to become a bandit. I played with a small group of friends, and we never purposefully set out to hassle anyone. Well, except that one🐭 time. Having been killed one too many times by ill-intentioned players, we decided to give in to the dark side ourselves. We saw a player milling around a crashed cargo ship, seemingly searching for loo🍷t, and decided to ambush him. This was not in our characters at all, but I remember getting a sick buzz out of it.
Big mistake. This was no lone player, but one member of a large team of seriously well-equipped survivors. Body armour, military fatigues, ballistic masks: you name it, they had it. They made short work of us, and our bandit career was over before it even got started. I'm glad, though. If we succeeded we might have turned fully evil and spent our nights causing mayhem. DayZ was more fun when we were skirting the edge of danger, seeing how far we could push things.
These kinds of spontaneous survivor interactions wouldn't have been half as fun if there were a lot of dangerous, formidable zombies around. Occasionally they would suddenly decide to work properly and make your existence miserable, but for the most part Chernarus was ruled by the players. It was a hell of a multiplayer experience, and I don't think I'll ever experience anything like it again. I tried to go back and play it again recently, but it's just not the same.