DayZ

It's an incompetently made game. I defended them for years, they were going through an engine rewrite, gamedev is hard etc, but years after release and continuous development, many major updates, you can't put things down without them occasionally disappearing. If your inventory has slots for the thing you're putting away, even if you're replacing a like for like item (eg: weapon mag,) it will just drop on the ground if they're different orientations in inventory. Even sometimes if they're the same. If you take out a, for example, walkie/GPS (which has its own special inventory slot) with a hotkey, then put it away, the game will ignore that slot and if you have no other space, just drop it on the ground without telling you. Sometimes you'll spawn into the same server you left as an alive character and suddenly be dead for no reason with a new spawn. Walk down a staircase and your character has a seizure. Also - solid objects like walls are often a mere suggestion to the undead. You'll frequently get all the way to military areas, which takes hours, aggro a zombie, and then get kicked because the server can't handle the zombies and loot. But because when you leave your character stays in game for 15s to prevent combat-logging, your character just sits there dying helplessly, even when it's a server frackup, so you die through no fault of your own. which is a common theme It can be a pretty mellow camping simulator, but the game is objectively bad. They removed the mechanics which change your appearance if you're friendly or a bandit because it's "not realistic" but then added a counter for survivors killed, which besides also not being realistic in game psychology means it's the only thing players can track as a form of progression, so of course they'll see that as "what you're supposed to do." Those together destroy any chance of not being killed on sight. The devs do not understand what made the mod back in the day a global phenomenon, because you could arguably look past the fact that the product straight up does not work because it had a great community which had reasons to actually create interesting human stories more interesting than "saw a guy, killed him". It really sucks if one of the best things in your game was the hackers, especially when you get rid of them and realise that substantially, there's nothing really left. You can learn the mechanics, but in any other game that's the start of actually having fun with it, once you figure it out there's nothing more ... There. Also, half of those mechanics are just outright dumb, while the game is supposed to be realistic above all. Open a tin of beans with dirty hands? Of course you'll get sick, because your character decides the best way to eat a mostly liquid food out of a cup-shaped container is to stick your fingers in like a 4-year-old instead of drinking from the tin like a functioning adult. But just-as-dirty gloves are fine. It's something you can learn fast, but it's one of many examples of "realism" actually being fake difficulty that makes no sense to pad out the time you spend in the game before realising its lack of anything real to offer Pros: Can be mellow and beautiful at times if you want a camping / hunting sim with a chance of being murdered at any time. It's also a good exercise in nihilism and learning to accept and embrace loss as an inevitable part of life Cons: Literally everything else. The game is an indefensible, nonfunctioning PoS. It still plays like a pre-alpha, and they actively turned it into a shooter with crazy long rounds instead of the fascinating survival game that made it famous. Which is a real shame, because they began with a winning formula that I adored and systematically fracked up every part of it. 10 years after they started selling the game, it still doesn't have feature parity with the mod that made it, which would be fine as a conscious design decision, which it famously isn't. A ton of people stan it because it lets you experiment with sadism, killing someone actually affecting something they've been working for for hours or days, so they really feel the loss, which is interesting and has its place, but doesn't excuse the product you pay for being outright broken, and it's the only way anyone you're likely to run into actually plays which gets old fast I always eventually come back to this game out of hope, because it had the potential to be more amazing than any other, but I always uninstall it because it's quantifiably bad