The DayZ mod just turned over 1 million unique players!

In 4 months and its still an alpha not bad!

1M+ and it's a hardcore game with actual penalties for dying and not some weenie gun-and-run-respawn-with-every-weapon game like every other shooter game out there.

I know there's lots of Arma2 vets that turn their nose at DayZ thinking it is about zombies (we who play it know better that the zombies are just a sideshow), hopefully the game devs will see that 1M people are playing a hardcore game like this even despite Arma2's bugs and complicated inventory system, and that has to bode well for Arma3 and the future of other hardcore shooter games not to mention DayZ standalone

woot !

amazing its done those numbers in that time frame, congrats rocket !

I’ve tried DayZ and I can describe it as consisting of hours and hours of utter boredom/loot gathering interrupted by occasional moments of sheer terror worrying that my loot will vanish

If you have lots of time to waste doing nothing more than wandering around, starving to death and/or stockpiling gear ... this is the mod for you!

"Different strokes for different folks."

DayZ isn't combat in a blender like most of the FPS that we see churned out today. I own most of those games for the PC and/or the Xbox360. Sometimes buying a copy of the same game for both systems. While I enjoy those games to a point, I prefer a sandbox game like ArmA2. I don't want to be on rails playing a role in a game/movie and I don't need structured missions to feel like I accomplished something. IMO playing DayZ with a group is the way to go. There are an awesome bunch of guys here at SimHQ that are playing throughout the week. If one of the group gets killed they are back up to speed in a short time, so losing good gear to a death is not a big deal. I will agree that to enjoy this game you have to invest some time in it. It is not a game that most people will enjoy if their gaming time is really limited. Personally, if I had a 1/2 hour a day to game I would be playing something like BF3 or COD where I could get at least one or two quick MP matches in.

Time wasted? I don't know about that. It is all for personal entertainment and a subjective thing. Would my time spent gaming be more productive if I were playing Ghost Recon?

I couldn't say where all the players are coming from. Perhaps they are bored with the same old FPS titles being rehashed with new skins/environments year after year.

I hope Rocket and the dev team celebrate by releasing a solid update (v1.7.2.5).

Sounds like he got the post-apocalypse survival simulation pretty well then

You just didn't mention the parts about the always tense human encounters, whether to help, ignore or try to kill those other humans who are in the same situation, at least that is what attracts me to this mod not the zombies... it reminds me of a MMO S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sim.

Now if only they could eliminate the hacking and exploiting...

Well stated Kludger. Part of the challenge is staying alive and there is a steep penalty if you don't. You get to start over with practically nothing. If you die in the typical FPS, you simply click respawn and you are back in the action. A friend and I played a lot of Doom back in the day. His personal goal was to stay alive as long as possible. Otherwise, the game devolved into spamming the respawn button until a level was completed. Winning by attrition.

I'm considering getting back into it, but so much has changed since I last played it would take some time to re-learn.

I stopped just before 'newspawns' stopped getting a pistol as standard.

It depends whether I can bring myself to reinstall SU - I like ArmA2 et al megas but I hate SU with a passion. Having 20 minutes for a quick session online and firing up the SU DayZ browser only to find there's yet another SU update and by the time it's done there's no time left to play. Frustration.

Do you guys play on normal or veteran servers?

I played all my sessions with the VCB (realism without the bollox) gang from DayZ public release on veteran servers (we practically lived on UK7). Once when I couldn't get on the always full vet servers I went on regular and it was like arcade mode!