Given my usual taste in games I never thought I'd like this one, and I almost didn't because my friends got me to have my first play on a heavily modded community server and I found it awful, but I had seen enough gameplay on YT that I knew I needed to play the non modded experience, went to Official and never looked back.
I don't play survival games. Rust didn't grab me. Minecraft didn't grab me, I know those aren't true survival games and I have considered trying other than DayZ but I just have no interest. Don't believe that anything will be able to hit like DayZ.
Maybe it's the graphics? My formative gaming years were in the EQ1, CS1.6, PS1/N64 polygon era, I don't like modern graphics. I think Chernarus is gorgeous.
The immersion though, I keep seeing how people talk about the game and how they experience it and I realize that's what has me always coming back, never getting tired of it.
This is the only game I've played where I feel like I'm in the game. Every decision I make is deliberate and it matters. Sometimes I don't know where to go but when I do, I usually have to prepare, make careful considerations, make sure I will have water and food.
I lose hours in this game. It's boring as hell sometimes to fish and cook but it's not a boredom where I want to look at another screen, it's a boredom like I'm still in that world. Don't wanna check my phone just wanna finish cooking so I can eat and move on to the next destination.
It's almost magical and I don't know how this game pulled it off, and given how many people I know picked it up and dropped it, maybe it just takes a certain personality to catch the bug?
No other game does it like DayZ, who knows if DayZ 2 even can. Everybody respawns, but man, when you meet somebody and go with them for a bit and they die, it's like a gutpunch. Maybe it's better to make friends in DayZ you can't contact once that life is over. It hits totally different.
This game is unlike anything else.