Screwed

That's really the only term for it.  Their forum is silent about the subject, locking/deleting any posts made about this, but I'll say it here.  With the upcoming DayZ standalone soon to be released, many of us players have been screwed... or perhaps "conned" is the better term.

ARMA2 is a horrible, tedious game to try to wade your way through.  Everything looks and feels like its coated in a thick layer of mud, from the scenery to the "realistic" movements of the characters.  The game plays like a scaled down version of a real war, 1 second of action for 10 minutes of tedium.

The only reason many... and I mean MANY people even touched ARMA2 was for the DayZ mod.  The only reason a lot of people would even be caught dead with ARMA2 installed on their machines, was for the DayZ mod.  The ARMA2 tedium was broken every few seconds when a zombie would try to eat your brains out!

Now they're releasing a DayZ standalone and no, it isn't free.  No, it isn't a mod.  No, it won't be "given" to anyone who purchased ARMA2 already.  The proverbial icing on the cake?  Bohemia Interactive is publishing it.

The same publishers who brought us ARMA2 are repacking the FREE mod and re-charging us for the same f***ing game we've already been playing.  Talk about a scam, this one's worthy of it's own Hollywood title!

I can only imagine their thought process:

"Well, no one really plays our ARMA2 game anymore, and we know we're just beating a dead horse with all of these "same as the last one" expansions, but, hey... look at DayZ!  Must be thousands of people playing that, and most of them bought our game just to play the free mod.

I know, let's re-release it as a separate game that we get to charge all of them for... again."

Face it.  Myself, like a lot of MMO players are into the "survival" and MMO qualities in a game like DayZ.  ARMA2 has almost nothing to offer us, being a "realistic" military shooter.  The game is pretty much dead last in my list of anything I'd ever willingly play.

When DayZ was released, suddenly we're getting everything we wanted in a survival horror, MMO style game, the only caveat is needing ARMA2 to run it.  Now, those of us who dropped $20+ on a game we never really wanted or liked, are going to have to spend more money (they're talking about Minecraft style payments) to play the game we thought we were getting by spending the initial $20.

The real insult to all of this is that the money is going to the exact same place.  It's not like a different company took it over and re-released it as an entirely new game.  Bohemia is still the company behind it, not satisfied with the flood of ARMA2 purchases already made specifically for this mod, they actually have the audacity to re-release it and charge for it again.

Part of this blame is also being directed at Rocket.  Had DayZ been developed and released in the same manner as a game like Minecraft, I'd have no issue throwing my money his way.  Especially since I know it would all go towards the development of the game I actually wanted to play.  Minecraft has successfully done it and so has Mount & Blade.

The underhanded, backstabbing mentality of releasing a mod for a game released by a separate publisher, then going in to cahoots with that publisher to then release your game as a separate product, isn't one I'm inclined to easily forgive or forget.  I know it can be argued that that's not how it was intended and you might even be able to give credit to the ARMA2 engine for making it all possible.  Funny though, how in this day and age, game engines capable of this same thing are just floating around the Internet for anyone to use, nearly free of charge.

Maybe trying to cozy up to Bohemia wasn't his intention either, but just happened to work out that way.  Welcome to Public Relations 101, Rocket.  Perception is everything!  The perception is, that a loyal fan base that purchased a game many of us would never touch, are being conned in to buying another game we already thought we had.  And as I said, this could be forgiven (although, not easily) if the new game was being released by a different company and money was being sent to a different company, but it isn't.  The same company that already received our money is receiving our money, again.

Thanks Rocket.  I now have a worthless copy of ARMA2 installed on my computer that Bohemia can use as a mark on their annual sales report.

PS - Don't let the references to Notch and Minecraft go to your head.  He never mislead the player-base by forcing them to pay twice for the same product.