Within a week of being added to Xbox Game Pass, DayZ - from Bohemia Interactive - reported 🌸an influx of “hundreds of thousands” of new players, becoming one of the Most Played games on Xbox, while noting that the game is now “flourishing more than ever.” If you’ve been on the fence as to whether or not you should play the hardcore survival 🃏title, now is definitely the time to do so if you have Game Pass.
Speaking from first-hand experience, DayZ’s dev♕elopment, gameplay, and overall accessibility has been, well… rough, to say the least. Game-breaking bugs and server struggles defined the game’s early days, unless you were deep into everything DayZ-related and knew how to handle the cumbersome workarounds. Ev꧑en then though, if you were able to get in a game, instability rendered the game tough to play for the majority of players.
However, those who stuck with it and waited patiently for a stable version of the game have been rewarded with an in𒁃credibly fun and authentic survival sandbox game. Up to 60 players can play on a single server, each with the goal of surviving, which is far more difficult than it ꧙sounds.
The game takes place in the poꩵst-soviet country of Chernarus; a wasteland in which a virus has turned most of the population into infected monsters. The world of DayZ is unforgiving with its basic life needs that need to be maintained for each player, coup💟led with the threat of zombies, and - often even worse - other players who are fighting over the same resources that you need (toilet paper not included, as that was rem꧋oved from the vanilla version of the game).
Players can❀ work alone or group up with other players, but what makes DayZ’s gameplay even more int🦩ense is the fact that once players die, that’s it. There are no extra lives or respawns, which means that p🍰layers lose everything they’ve worked so hard for and start over from scratch. That dynamic intensifies gameplay and is really what defines the survival aspect of the game.
In my experience during the early days of DayZ, I had🍎 a blast. After making it over the hurdꦅle of actually being able to connect, DayZ provided a massively fun survival sandbox sim that was, really, more hardcore than what was available at the time. I was admittedly pretty terrible at the game, but that didn’t stop me from continuing to play and try to survive just a little bit longer than I had previously. Exploring Cherna༒rus was thrilling, and avoiding other players, even from s🌺uper far away, played ജinto the strategy element of the game. I haven’t jumped into DayZ on ಌGame Pas😼s yet, but you can bet that I will be doing so this weekend.
𒉰"Xbox Game Pass is a great opportunity for us to open the game to a different audience, and🍨 to let a massive number of new players experience DayZ in all its crude harshness and beauty🌌, together with the veterans," stated Bohemia Interactive Publishing Director, Vojtěch Ješátkoꦑ. "Over the years, DayZ has gone through a diff𒅌icult development, but at Bohemia Interactive, we never lost faith in the game - so seeing its record player numbers across all platforms is a very rewarding moment✨ for the whole team. For us, it also confirms that DayZ still remains an unmatched and unfo🌜rgettable survival experience."
DayZ is available on Xbox Game Pass ♒and is free for those users, while the “Livonia” DLC can be purchased for a discounted price.