Ok, first of all, please take into account that this is just a hasty review on an alpha of a mod.

I am going to write it after only 18 hours of gameplay and beleive me, that is nowhere near enough. I have decided to write this down because this mod is currently overshadowing the almighty Diablo 3 in the PC gaming space.  It is a huge sensation and a lot of people are asking themselves whether they should invest in ARMA2:CO or not just to play an unfinished mod.

ARMA2: Shooting at tiny, tiny pixels

ARMA 2 is a relatively unknown game, specially if you compare it to other big modern military FPS. It is a hardcore simulation tool, with heavy emphasis on infantry combat. As most east european simulatons do, it is basically a level designing tool where the programmers give you a very deep physics engine, a very well designed map and lots and lots of cool toys to play with. In this case you can use tanks, helicopters and all sorts of infantry to create any and all types of combat situations.

Once you get in the game it becomes the slowest, most open first person shooter you’ll ever play but also the most complete. It uses advanced damage models and ballistics, a very interesting voice comms engine and it can be used to play massive multiplayer battles. You can hop on any vehicle, go anywhere and do anything you want. It is absolutely fascinating.

As most east european games, the menus are really old fashioned but functional and the interface is counterintuitive and complicated. ARMA2 is also hugely resource demanding and quite buggy. But, also as many good east european games, ARMA2 looks fantastic. It is more ambitious than any other FPS, feels incredibly realistic and once you get into it, is a wonderful story making tool. I really like ARMA2.

However, ARMA 2 has a flaw that has kept me from playing it more: the theme is really dry. The more realistic it gets, the more obvious it is that real modern military is really boring subject matter. Even when you play it in ideal conditions, there is nothing interesting happening in this game. Modern real soldiers act more like doctors than like heroes. Also, because it is realistic, the distance of the engagements is such that you’ll basically shoot at single pixels and announce their deaths with no hint of emotion. Cold and calculating with no hint of emotion, ARMA2 is a game in desperate need of epicness.

DayZ, an alpha of a mod for a buggy game

Of course, over the last years, ARMA2 has developed your typical small core of rabid hardcore fans, who mod for it, play it in huge 200 multiplayer battles and generally bother no one while they have fun testing 40 different models of fragmentation grenades.

However, it is out of this slow trickle of mods and this small community that came DayZ. A New Zealand programmer from the company that designed ARMA2 (Bohemia Interactive) used his holidays to program the mod. He did it with a clear goal: player freedom to create stories and take decisions. He told no one about his project and when he thought it was more or less ready for a little bit of stress testing, he asked some friends to hop in on the server to see how it would handle the load. He had a single server for 50 people. That was 2 weeks ago. As of today, there are 74000 unique players, ARMA2: CO has become the number one bestseller on Steam and this guy keeps adding servers trying to catch up with demand. And it is not working, demand has not reached it’s peak yet.

Why?

Simple, DayZ takes the huge accomplishment that is ARMA2 and makes a game out of it. It is a hard, brutally difficult, slow paced realistic game, but it is a game.

The setting is classic, there has been a zombie apocalypse and you are a survivor. You are stranded on the beach somewhere with some basic equipment, but you’ll need to scavenge heavily to survive. You’ll need an steady income of food and water, you’ll probably need new medical supplies and even if you do not want to, you are going to need more bullets.

The area where you’ll survive is called Chernarus and it has everything in it: Cities, villages, forests, castles, hospitals, airfields and lots, lots and more lots of infinitely respawning zombies. Oh and 50 other players, I somehow forgot about that.

In order to get supplies, you need to explore abandoned structures, where you’ll find that random loot keeps respawning. This seems trivial, except that zombies spawn from those same structures. In other words, if you stay in the forest you’ll starve. And if you go in the cities, you’ll die horribly.

If it sounds easy, believe me, it is not. Zombies run, see and hear. They hurt a lot and will mob on you at the sound of your (very few and very precious) bullets. They zigzag and will pursue you relentlessly for hours until they get you somehow. Getting into a town is a nerve wrecking stealth game, where patience is key. It is extremely difficult to avoid those zombies and still keep on getting enough supplies in order to survive. But it gets worse, much, much worse.

There are survivors that have guns with sniper rifles. And even worse, they have friends with more sniper rifles.

Bandits (survivors who have killed other survivors) tend to populate the hills around the biggest coastal cities, where poor survivors enter at their own risk in order to get some food. When they manage to get out with some supplies, they are actively hunted by those bandits who have spent their time getting better weapons and are ready to use them. Sometimes they’ll even act as survivors to lure the trusting loner into a deserted area where they can shoot and kill the survivor without alerting the zombies around them.

If you add all these factors, you understand why as of this writing, average life expectancy in DayZ is 28 minutes. It had gone up to over an hour, but the programmer updated the mod and more than doubled the number of zombies in the game.

Good people is being killed, robbed and betrayed all over Chernarus, all for a can of beans.

Sandbox simulators as storymaking tools

So there you have it, a huge chunk of beautiful terrain, lots of zombies, some ammo and bean cans and nothing else. This game has literally nothing else.

And yet, I would argue that that is plenty and more than enough for a game. It allows you to decide and out of those decisions, create your story.

The first meaningful decision is whether or not you are going to play as a killer. If you do, you’ll become a bandit. Your skin will change to reflect that and your humanity score will go down. Everybody will see you and know that you are a killer so it’ll be difficult to trick other into trusting you, whether or not they themselves are bandits. However, it can be done.

If you do want to become a bandit, then you can simply start hunting players and taking their stuff. You’ll die often but your career path is simple.

If you do not want to become a bandit and will only kill in self defense, the question is simple: How are you going to survive? What will you eat? Will you stay near the coast, where there are more supplies but more bandits and zombies? Or will you go inland to the small villages where it is hard to scrape by but there are less enemies?

This game is about deciding about all the details that can make you succesful and failing catastrophically or succeeding epically. If you want to compare it to anything, you can compare it to Dwarf Fortress, EVE and the upcoming Project Zomboid. Losing is fun because it will end the unique story that you have created. These games are all about consequences and about enjoying the dilemmas you face. DayZ adopts this design philosophy to the extreme.

The triumph of the zombie

DayZ would simply make no sense without the zombies. They are the great equalizer,  their presence means that no one can stay put and build a strong defense. Everybody has to be on the move constantly as there is no way that you can hold a building against the zombies. No matter how good your equipment is, you never can forget the zombies in this game. They will kill even very strong players if they stop being careful. In my case, I have fallen prey to the zombies specially when I was very well armed, because I got reckless and paid for it. I will tell a typical DayZ story that happened to me yesterday.

I joined a server where it was nighttime and decided to cross the whole map in order to get to a famous weapons depot. It would not be easy, there were many dangerous zones in the way and the zombies could jump you at any time if you approached a village carelessly. I narrowly escaped many times the wandering zombies, but I was actually more worried about bandits. This particular weapons depot is famous all over Chernarus, there are many bandits who choose to stay around it and get easy prey. So I approached the zone really carefully and in the middle of the dark. If they found me, they’d probably shoot me on sight.

Sure enough, I saw a team of survivors get out of the depot, just as I was approaching a hole in the fence to enter from the back. They were using good infantry tactics and would have killed me easily, but they passed at less than 15 metres from me and I moved inside undetected. It had taken me around 3 hours of gameplay to get to this point, navigating in the dark and avoiding enemies.

I entered the depot and quickly found my price: a bolt action Remington shotgun with a flashlight attached. It is an awesome weapon for this game and pretty rare. The flashlight is a very welcome bonus as flares and glowsticks are completely useless. In the depot I got loads of good gear, like ammo, a bigger backpack, smoke grenades… I was loaded.

My mission had been a resounding success, I just needed to get back to my meeting point with Tokey and we’d go on looking for a weapon for him. In one hour, I’d be there.

And then it happened. Just as I was crawling in the dark to get from the weapons depot and into the line of trees, out of nowhere a zombie stepped on me. Zombies usually will not see you in the dark if you crawl and don’t make noise. I have had zombies pass at less than a meter from me, no problem.

However, this one stepped on me.

I rose up to run away and ten meters later, it was not one zombie but five, I was bleeding  profusely and it was then when I realised that I had no ammo for my shotgun, I had put it in the backpack instead of in the gun. I tried to change weapons to get my pistol, but that slowed me down and I fell under the hits of five angry zombies, not 50 meters away from the weapons depot.

I died horribly, shouting curses in the night and respawned on the beach, very far away. Probably my body was looted by another survivor.

I loved it.

Reccomend?

I think this is a very difficult game to reccomend, simply because I do not know if you are going to see cool stuff or not. It impossible to predict. For example, I once watched from within the trees as a survivor lit some flares in the ruins of a medieval castle and tried to kill off the zombies within it. The flare projected against the wall of the catle the shadow of the survivor falling under the zombies, it was really atmospheric and cinematic. And it also was unscripted, it happened like that because that guy had decided to go there and I had decided to be there and to not help him.

Those moments are awesome and more powerful than any other game I can think off right now. No one strives to create those stories in a package that is so elegant as DayZ. It is a FPS with very, very complex technology and very deep decision making. But mechanically, it is simple to understand how it works and it has a ton of atmosphere. It is amazingly well designed to et out of the way, to just let you take pure decisions and cope with the consequences.

I think any gamer would enjoy that part of the game, but I think there needs to be a big warning. This game is very, very rough. It is an alpha. It is still going to change a lot and maybe it’ll never be finished or polished. Right now, it is difficult to install, difficult to update, difficult to join a server and even more difficult to find a daylight server. There are 70000 people trying to play a game that should be testing with 50. If we are lucky and Bohemia Interactive are clever, they’ll give this guy resources to prepare a serious DayZ module for the upcoming ARMA3. Then we’ll be cooking with gas.

I realise that I have been frustrated with DayZ’s lack of polish and I feel that some gamers will feel even more frustrated than me. Personally I think that the game is way worth the price of ARMA2:CO, but be prepared to be patient. You can lose your equipment to bugs, be reset in a server crash… many bad things can happen, but that is also part of the fascination and remember that we are talking about a free mod.

All in all, I think DayZ is the best PC game this year and much better than anything I can think of from last year (yes, including Portal 2, Saints Row 3 AND Crusader Kings). I absolutely reccomend it to you. If you are ready to cope, that is. Cope with the bugs, cope with the servers, cope with zombies and most of all, cope with bandits. Be ready to suffer, as this game is about overcoming the huge odds against you. If you do, the moments you live will be yours and only yours. Nobody will discuss with you what did you do with the prisioners in the airport, it’ll be just you there and nobody else will ever be in that same situation, ever.

If you are ready to cope, I will tell you only one more thing. As of rigth now, only 64000 of the 74000 players are alive. The other 10000 are victims to the bandits or to the zombies. It is unfair and I want to do as much as I can to stop it. I am slowly trying to build a YWBL4DA police force that will protect the innocent in the sandy beaches of Chernarus and I am looking for volunteers. It’ll take a load of time and effort, we’ll have to be ready to store extra weapons and ammo, find the right tools for the job, find out how to avoid losing our own men and try to find ways to help survivors.

So what do you say? Can you cope?

Founding fathers

4x strategy (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) has a problem. None of the games seem to be able to tackle a basic design flaw that was already present in the original Civilization, the “snowball effect”.

In a normal 4x game you start in a weak position. Your first objective is to conquer any of your neighbours in order to become bigger and more badass. If the game is good, these are always scary times, you are small and a mistake will cost you dearly. Good strategies, bold moves and some luck is required. Fun!

However, as games are made to be won, you will inevitably expand and after roughly 3-5 hours you’ll have won some territories. You’ll have more money, more armies and basically be more robust. You’ll be for example 5 territories or cities strong and your 4 neighbours are size 3.

And here comes the problem: after 3-5 hours, you have already won the game. You have become too big to be stopped. You’ll be able to cope with those size 3 neighbours, double your size again and then be 10 territories strong with maybe one or two mighty empires of 15 ahead of you. You turn your back to them and easily wipe the other (by now) small size 3-7 guys. By the time you attack a big empire, you are twice as big as them and technology or geography do not matter, you are too big for them.  Since  the moment you overcame those one or two first neighbours and grew to size 3, the rest of the 30-100 hours ahead of you is just wiping out enemies weaker than you.  Your victory is inevitable,  congratulations, you have snowballed the game.

Should you feel proud of your strategy skill? Hardly, these games are all about growth and they include no mechanism to slow it or even reverse it, so you very rarely lose territories, face an alliance of AI neighbours or have to stop an invasion of green slimy hordes of flying worms. The last phases of any Civ-like game have always been brain dead boring, as you still have to push through yet another 100 turns in order to end the game.  You may have fun watching a battle between the AI’s last 2000 soldiers and your 16000, but the depressing thing is that you do not even have to properly move them. They’ll win the battle by default as they are 8 to 1. In fact you are more sympathetic to the enemy’s armies, as they heroically let themselves be decimated in one last stand.

I have played this arc over and over, complained about it and wondered if there was a way to elegantly reinvent 4x gaming. The key word here is “elegantly”. There have been many proposals to solve this, but they all failed. Many use special victory conditions, like Shogun 2 or Colonization, some use scripted events, like Rome:TW and others simply make the game impossibly complex so that you cannot play it well, like Victoria 2.

Enter the King

Here comes CK2, yet another 4x strategy game from Paradox. They are famously regarded as the designers of the most obscure and overly complex games in the current mainstream. Games like Victoria or even worse, Victoria 2, are simply layers and layers of monstrously detailed economic information that simply cannot be coped with and today, any Paradox game is to be approached with caution.

CK2′s marketing caught my attention more than a year ago because they seemed to be fed up with the snowball effect and they promised to have found the much coveted elegant solution. Instead of playing as a country, civilization or leader, you’d play as a dynasty.

It seems trivial but it is not because it allows for the designers to introduce multiple mechanisms that will slow down and even reverse your growth curve. It is fascinating to look at CK2′s design in this way, because it all fits.

In CK2 you start a as nobleman holding one or many titles to his name. You get to choose from any of the many counts, barons, dukes or kings in 1066 Europe. Each of these characters has a set of skills and controls a bigger or smaller piece of land. You will control him/her until he dies, when you will pass to control his/her heir. And so on and so forth until the game ends. There are three ending conditions, you lose when you lose all your titles and thus do not control any more territories, you lose if your last dynasty member dies without a heir and otherwise, the game ends in 1450 when you count your score. Your score is formed by the prestige points accumulated by all the members of your dynasty. So again, simple enough.

Each starting position is completely different. You might start in the middle of Christian Europe and be a small count who is vassal to a duke who in turn is vassal to a king or emperor or you might be surrounded by territories full of infidels or you could be neighbour to the most annoying piece of AI ever created, the Pope of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In any of these situations, your first order of business is to understand what is around you, but most importantly WHO is around you. Who is allied with who, who is father to who, who is going to inherit what, who likes you and who does not.

That is because the whole game is about people. As an example, I will describe the starting position of a single character, the extremely humble Count of Hainaut. This is when things get interesting.

The name is Flanders, Ned Flanders

This guy is 22 years old and unmarried so of course, no children. He controls a single territory in what is now the belgian/french frontier but he belongs to the Holy Roman Empire, the sum of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, half of Italy and much more. He is vassal to a Duke in today’s Dusseldorf that hates your guts because you are dutch and he, as the rest of the empire, are german. To the north of you lives your small brother who controls what is today’s Holland. All this is very nice and dandy, but as it turns out, you have a border to your west with none other than the huge kingdom of France. And in the kingdom of France, controlling what is today’s Dunkirk and Oostende, is the Duchy of Flanders with 5 territories. And the Duke of Flanders happens to be your father.

Hmmm, that means that when your father dies, his titles will pass on to the dynasty, meaning you (yay!). But as he has a Gravelkind succession system, the titles will split between the direct heirs (booo!).

When your father dies, you’ll become a french duke, the french king will hate your guts because you are dutch and not french and Hainaut will pass to be french (but only until you die, your heir will not retain Hainaut and it will go back to the Emperor). As a side note, of the 4 titles your father has, three will go to you and one will go to your ugly, stupid little maggot of a brother, who is sitting on his Holland county grinning because he’s going to take what is rightfully yours without doing anything.

Embrace the dark side, young padawan!

With this starting position, you have many different strategies. The most obvious one is to kill your father, thus speeding up the process of your inheritance. The second obvious one is to kill your brother. This would allow you to inherit the full Duchy of Flanders. However, the same is true for him. If he kills you somehow, he gets it all.

So you need to decide if you are going to actively try to kill your brother or not. If no, then you can protect yourself from any plots by ordering your spymaster to uncover plots in your county, that will make it hard for him to kill you. If you do decide that you want to rid the world of such vermin, you’ll  need  a lot of money and to do it fast before he is able to have a son/daughter. Maybe it’ll be easier to kill his wife instead of him?

You get the idea of how far this kind of reasoning can go, but the elegance of CK2′s design is that it affects your approach to the whole strategy and not only the diplomacy. For example, any kind of long term investment in Hainaut will be lost in around 40 years time when you die, so maybe it is not the thing to get into right now. Also, any advances in the relationships with your german neighbours are completely useless as you are to become french soon. You need to marry if possible with a girl from a good french family that will give you a solid alliance when you become Duke. You also need to start thinking about getting clever courtiers to help you in the council and be good teachers for your future sons. Those sons will be the ones you control when your guy dies, so you need a woman that can give you those kids. So not too young or too old then. Say, a 18 year old daughter of a count, or ideally a Duke, from France.

Magic glue.

This is more or less an example of what you are looking at when you start the game as the Count of Hainaut. And this guy is a random choice, every count/duke/king has his/her own story to develop that can be as interesting or more that the story of the Duchy of Flanders. The starting positions are complex and interesting because everything is interwoven in cool and deep ways.

So once you have taken a look around you and taken the first basic decisions, you can unpause the game, and immediately, your story starts to become unique. All your plans will be altered by marriages, unexpected deaths, the Pope, the Emperor, the King,  Holy war, lots of betrayals and many events that alter your course through this mess that is feudal Europe. You have chances of having gay sons, becoming converted to the Orthodox faith, being called on a Crusade, your mother killing your father only so that you inherit and one month later your wife kills you so that it is your son who inherits immediately…

It sounds chaotic and hilarious, but in fact it is simply brilliant: what you are seeing at work is the answer to the snowball problem. The brilliance of this game is using nobility titles to tie the grand strategy of a classic 4x game to the scale of a single person.

CK2 is a classic design that merges two types of gameplay, much in the tradition of XCOM or Rome:TW. In this case, instead of merging a grand strategy game with a tactical combat game, Paradox has merged the Sims with Civilization. And Nobility titles are the magic glue that tie both together.

Once you have the idea of the titles in your design, it is easy to introduce many different brakes to the growth curve that are fun and coherent. They can be events that happen to your characters (the Sims game), like for example if your guy decides that he can afford to take liberties with the wife of your financial advisor, she gets pregnant, the husband gets angry because even though he’s gay, he’s also proud. So he kills your character, forcing you all of a sudden to go on playing as the brother that you were planning to kill five minutes before. And of course, what seems as a nice relaxing evening with this nice lady ends up delaying your dynasty’s expansion plans for more than 20 years. The system prevented you from growing and instead of getting frustrated, you’ll be telling the story to your friends.

Or these events could be things that happen to your country instead (the Civ game), like your king getting into a war that he cannot win and you seeing that not only your king is getting resources from your territories to fight this lost hopeless war, but that you are going to lose everything. Unless you declare independence, of course. If you time it right, it might actually work in your favour, so what you could do is raise your army so that the king does not have the chance to get your men for his army, thus increasing his chances of losing…

The magic glue works, it all fits nicely.

Complexity version 2.0

Paradox games are complex and so is CK2, but the good news is that it is complex in the right places. For starters, technology, military and finance have been extremely simplified if you compare it to Europa Universalis or Victoria.

The interface is a scary beast at first, but it has a very simple rule that will make it very easy to use effectively: letting the mouse cursor hover over any piece of information will give you much more information. Also, although there are many menus and screens in reality the whole game is played by dealing with people, so you only need to really understand one screen in the game: the screen that describes each character. From there, you’ll do everything important in the game.

CK2 is a complex game with a complex interface and a lot of information to deal with but it is a kind simplified complexity, where you can move through lots and lots of menus in an intuitive way. The only game that I can possibly compare to CK2 is Football Manager and CK2′s interface is way easier and more intuitive than FM.

The other stuff.

Paradox has spent money in CK2 and it shows, but they are still Paradox. They have never been amazing at graphics and CK2 is no different. In comparison, Shogun’s 3D map is much more attractive and beautiful and is also faster than CK2′s. I’d say that for a strategy game, CK2′s maps and graphics are adequate.

The music is nothing to write home about, it is also adequate and there is enough of it that you will not get tired of it too fast. however, this is a game where you’ll spend many, many hours playing, so rest assured you’ll end turning it off.

The biggest complain I have with the game is the multiplayer. Labchimp and me have been unable to setup a game and I can assure you that the process is as obscure as it can be. We have not given up yet, but it has been frustrating and bad.

A minor gripe that I have is the launch process: the game seems to perform a first time install every time I launch it, then goes into a completely useless splash screen with only a single button that you have to press and then finally starts the incredibly long loading time typical of Paradox games.

And the last complaint I have is about the difficulty level, the game plays fairly ok in normal but when you want to increase it the two higher levels are simply AI cheats with military and economic bonuses. It is really a pity, because the standard AI is pretty good in all that involves diplomacy but it is very bad in military matters.

Get to the point!

It has been a long review, I know. And the point is this: CK2 is very, very good. And it is an important game because it moves the genre forward. It is able to brake the growth curve of 4x games in an elegant and enriching way that makes the game better. Previous attempts to do the same were frustrating and painful, specially in Victoria’s case where it was just so complex that you HAD to play badly. In CK2, not growing and thus losing is actually a lot of fun.

If you like 4x strategy, you simply cannot not play this game, it is up there with the best of the best.

Today one of the biggest file sharing site was shut down by the feds today. The founder and several company executives were also charged for violating piracy laws. The accusation that started the criminal case was unsealed a day before globally used sites like Wikipedia, Reddit and Craigslist blacked out to show their support for their opposition against SOPA and Megaupload are accused of costing copyright holders over $500million (£322 million) in lost revenue from pierated films and other content.

The interesting fact about this site was  that it was only a few weeks ago when Megaupload posted their infamous music video featuring celebrities such as Kanye West, Alicia Keys, P.Diddy and even Snoop Dogg, who all endorsed their site! And these are people who are ‘allegedly’ affected by file sharing sites such as Megaupload.

Kardashian in the Music video. Been busy with tape finding lately?

Hours before the site was taken down megaupload posted a statement out saying how “grotesquely overblown.” the accusations were against the company.

The main people who will be affected are those legitimate customers, (hey, not every file sharing site is used for pierating!) those people who have important family photos/videos, work related documents and other important files will be heavily affected as they find out that the site refuses to load for them anymore. As well as court fees if any, this will cost Megaupload a lot of money in lost revenue.

No doubt that supporters of SOPA and the likes will use this to their advantage in future nonsense videos. We’ll be  keeping an eye out for any more development on this matter.

So what do you guys think? Will other file sharing sites start getting shutdown? Will Megaupload make it through the court of justice?