Very confused. Want to start playing Exile

[TonaldDrump 0]

Hey all.  I have played DayZ for a little while, and have read a little about Arma 2 and 3.  But I'm super confused.  I know Arma 2 and 3 are a plugin or mod of DayZ, but is it still totally open world like DayZ? Are there still zombies and other players in like in DayZ? I get confused because I see videos of radio chatter and can't tell if its some guy who wants to sound legit or if it is the game audio.  I'm just confused.  I want to start playing Exile, but want to know if it is like DayZ.  I like the open world, free roam, zombie game with other players on the server as well.  Is that Arma 3 Exile? I just need help understanding! Thanks guys!

[WURSTKETTE 205]

Exile for Arma 3 is a open world highly customizable framework, vanilla are no AI/Zombies implemented.

But if you search thru A3Launcher/Gametracker/Forum you'll find server with zombies, crafting bla bla bla.

[Pattoh 36]

Exile is more PvP oriented than DayZ, there's no hero's and bandits but there is a system called respect which is similar to the way you play as a bandit on DayZ, in a sense that you kill everything on sight most of the time , but there are mods that bring back a lot of DayZ like zombies, Arma 2 weapons and there is a humanity mod as well. You can also build a base similar to how you would on DayZ Epoch, traders, safe storage, missions (addon), loot, spawn selection. If you are looking for a open world game, you are in the right place.

[TonaldDrump 0]

I hate to compare it to another game but would it be most like H1Z1 without the zombies? So you can build bases, fight others, etc.?

[Pattoh 36]

13 minutes ago, TonaldDrump said:

I hate to compare it to another game but would it be most like H1Z1 without the zombies? So you can build bases, fight others, etc.?

Yeah you build bases, fight over missions or hotspots, loot up, get respect to access better gear, base raid ,get poptabs (currency) to buy anything from the traders, building supplies ,weapons,food,vehicles ect. It persists as well kind of like DayZ Epoch. There are a ton of Zombie servers out there, its almost overwhelming how many servers have it.

Edited December 17, 2017 by Pattoh

[Flosstradamus 950]

8 hours ago, TonaldDrump said:

Hey all.  I have played DayZ for a little while, and have read a little about Arma 2 and 3.  But I'm super confused.  I know Arma 2 and 3 are a plugin or mod of DayZ, but is it still totally open world like DayZ? Are there still zombies and other players in like in DayZ? I get confused because I see videos of radio chatter and can't tell if its some guy who wants to sound legit or if it is the game audio.  I'm just confused.  I want to start playing Exile, but want to know if it is like DayZ.  I like the open world, free roam, zombie game with other players on the server as well.  Is that Arma 3 Exile? I just need help understanding! Thanks guys!

Arma 2 and 3 are not a plugin for DayZ lol. Its the other way around... DayZ modified Arma 2's engine and is a mod. There is Exile servers like DayZ where there is zombies and base building as that's apart of the default Exile Mod.

[souredsoup 13]

10 hours ago, TonaldDrump said:

Hey all.  I have played DayZ for a little while, and have read a little about Arma 2 and 3.  But I'm super confused.  I know Arma 2 and 3 are a plugin or mod of DayZ, but is it still totally open world like DayZ? Are there still zombies and other players in like in DayZ? I get confused because I see videos of radio chatter and can't tell if its some guy who wants to sound legit or if it is the game audio.  I'm just confused.  I want to start playing Exile, but want to know if it is like DayZ.  I like the open world, free roam, zombie game with other players on the server as well.  Is that Arma 3 Exile? I just need help understanding! Thanks guys!

Like @Flosstradamus has said, Arma2 and Arma3 are not the mods. They are the base games in a series of games made by Bohemia Interactive (B.I.), with Arma2 being released in June 2009 and Arma3 released in Sept. 2013. These games are what you might call military simulators, but have become very popular for being very / easily modifiable (i.e. mods). In other words, they have mods added to them, not the other way around.

This is where mods like the original Dayz mod for Arma2 (made by Dean "The Rocket" Hall back in Aug 2012) come from. This mod became so popular and greatly increased sales of Arma2 that B.I. contracted Dean Hall to work with one of their dev teams and they created the game, 'Dayz Standalone' which released on early access on Steam in Dec 2013. So far that has become a bit of a failure and has not even come close to meeting it's development goals and I doubt anyone plays it anymore. The original Dayz mod for Arma2 (and in some ways the standalone version also) basically gave birth to the "Survival" game genre. And not just the variety of mods for Arma2 and 3, but also games like Rust, Ark Survival Evolved, and many others.

Exile is yet another iteration of a "survival" style mod in the spirit of Dayz. Though it was the second of the big mods for Arma3 to become very popular with Epoch coming before it, Exile has quickly become the first choice for server owners and players alike due to it's acceptance with additional modding by the community and for it's basic survival principles. *Unlike that Epoch thing which came out first for Arma3...the devs for that are just too controlling and don't want their creation being "tampered" with by us plebes. 

You can find Exile servers that have zombies on them and sorta feel like Dayz, but in my opinion nothing comes truly close to that original experience. These servers will be using a mod called Ryan Zombies and/or ExileZ to approximate that old Dayz feel. But if you really want to get a closer feel to it, I would suggest getting Arma2 and it's DLCs and finding servers that are still running the old Epoch mod, though these aren't as plentiful as they once were. I don't think there are any servers running the original Dayz, or at least not very many if at all. Arma3 Exile mod is currently "where it's at" or as the kids are saying these days, "it's lit"

As for the radio type chatter you may have heard in some videos, they are most likely using a mod called Task Force Radio which is an in-game voice add-on that makes it sound like you are talking through a radio. It is most popular with the players who like mil-sim (military simulation) Arma3 servers. Which are *not* to be confused with being anywhere related to Exile in play style.

Hope this helps.

Edited December 18, 2017 by souredsoup

[PenderG 0]

@souredsoup LOL wut?

Dayz Standalone = over twice as many daily players as Exile mod. And is only considered as a failure by players, such as yourself who are uninformed and like to spread mis-information as you have done in the post above this. If Dayz is a failure with twice as many daily players.....what does that make Exile by your logic?

A3 Epoch Mod = Source files available on Github - released under APL-SA and also available to download from Steam workshop......whats Exile's license again and where can I download Exile source? Is Exile on the Steam workshop?  Epoch Mod also has way more 'survival' aspects to it than Exile (E.G -multi-point player status effects, antagonists & Hunting & farming as default), especially in the 1.0 release - thus making it closer to the Dayz Mod than Exile by proxy. Epoch only lacks the fast pacing of Exile. Both mods have their ups and downs but neither exile nor epoch was designed in the 'spirit' of Dayz, they simply shared the genre and attempted to cash in on the Dayz craze.

You dont need A2's DLC's they add nothing because the servers cant run them without discrimination. There's a hand full of original 'vanilla' Dayz Mod servers still running, (in fact a big update was released a little while back adding many new features and even more enterable buildings for the default Chernarus) and a few are still populated into double figures, (playable through the steam client) and there are also plenty of Dayz Epoch/Overpoch servers still running now.

I played almost 10k hours of A2: DayzMods - epoch - origins -overwatch - overpoch - day zero - breaking point etc etc and in 3k hours of Arma 3 mods - I have never once felt the same atmosphere as I did or do in the A2 mods.

If you want to play Dayz then as @souredsoup says, check out the arma 2 mods. Because no matter how many people use the DAYZ name in their youtube Exile videos to get cheap views,  there is nothing in Arma 3 that comes close to the A2 mods, although A3: Breaking Point has come the closest for me so far.

To solve your confusion O.P - go play the Dayz Mod or Dayz Epoch/Overpoch if you want to experience Dayz. The A3 mods are totally different and should be approached as such, players trying to compare them all to each other does all the mods a disservice - and IMHO has resulted in the A3 mods being abandoned by many looking for an updated Dayz experience they still havent found as we near 2018. Also stop relying on other peoples experiences, that is a sure fire way to get yourself disappointed when your game play doesnt match what you watch on youtube, much of which is edited or staged.

Good luck on your adventures, wherever you end up!

[souredsoup 13]

@PenderG Well, what I was trying to point out when I said that Dayz Standalone was a bit of a failure was that is has been in early access alpha since Dec 2013. That is a really long time for an alpha and there have been lots of promises the dev team made in their roadmap they announced back in 2015 (I think it was) that have not been implemented even now. And there may still be some people playing it, but nowhere near what it used to be. I would be surprised if the current amount of players was even 25% of the original amount of players at one time shortly after it launched on Steam. And speaking of Steam, the game has low reviews; with only 49% of them being positive in the last 30 days and overall only 63% being positive since it came out, which is *not* a good sign IMHO.

Also, if it is not turning into a failure and is still so popular, where are the big youtubers who used to cover it? Where are the Dayz videos from Frankie, JamJar, Mr. Moon, KD Wolf, MrBlackout, etc? I know at least one of them still streams Dayz on Twitch (TehJamJar), but all of their youtube channels are nearly dead or they only upload videos for other games; no Dayz uploads in the last 2-3 years from any of them. Granted this might have more to do with youtube's ad-pocalypse than alot of anything else (though I doubt it since that didn't really start being a problem until earlier this year), but seems like an indicator to me that Dayz isn't fairing well these days.

Not to mention there are no news items to be found on gaming news sites regarding Dayz lately. Not even any real buzz regarding the game *finally* going into Beta in 2018. BETA!!!...not even actual release yet...just finally getting to beta...after 5 years. That is not what I call a game anyone cares about anymore. It toiled too long in dev hell and I even think the dev team lost their way and began turning Dayz into their own game engine experiment gone wrong after Dean Hall bailed ship 2 years ago. And where did he go off to? He left to start his own game studio and as a matter of fact their first game just launched on Steam early access this week. Lets just say it looks...umm...yeah. Well it looks a lot like Space Engineers if Space Engineers was made by a new game studio with only a handful of years worth of combined experience. But still, Dean Hall would rather work on that than continue with Dayz. That should be indication enough to even you that something is wrong, when even the guy who was the brain-child behind Dayz wants to leave it to rot and tries to move on while still in alpha.

But in the end, you have your opinion and I have mine...If you are still playing Dayz Standalone then I salute you, good sir! While I do miss me some good old Arma2 Epoch, I'll take even a bare-bones vanilla Exile server over Dayz Standalone anyday.

 

Oh, and good to hear that the Epoch guys got their head out of their butts and are allowing players to have access to their base mod code to play with as they wish. That wasn't the case years ago when I last tried setting up an Epoch server. There were a lot of things you simply could not customize about your server if you wanted to back then. That is why I moved on over to Exile. It is so much more friendly and plays well with others. Want your Exile server to be Star Wars themed? Go for it. Want prancing ponies and rainbows? You can have that too! Want to have tanks and jets? You got it!

And as for the Exile mod files...you are correct. They are not available on Steam. But you can download them from here (in the downloads section) and all you need is PBOManager (or something else to open them) to open the .pbo container and there are all the files for exile. That and a little know-how and you too can make Exile your own. Add almost any mod available on Steam or ArmaHolic. Come back here to the forums and find scripts created by others that add all kinds of new features to Exile. The sky seems to be the limit, which is somewhere around 36km high in Arma3...

[Chainsaw Squirrel 139]

Ok .. we go from explaining exile  .. to full on chaos over if dayz standalone is dead or a failure .. do you think the original poster knows or gives a rats ass about all this .. he just was trying to understand the differences from what I can tell .. and if you came in just now . unlike many of us that found arma ( myself included ) thanks to the first DayZ mod of Arma 2 back in 2012 .. what was a mod of arma 2 .. has gone way beyond that game .. be it dayz standalone or any mod of arma 2 or 3 since then .. most people I know are really burnt out on the zombie Idea.. as the zombie in any of these are not near as  scary as they should be .. never really much of a threat ..just a annoying pain in the ass..  
 Tonald .. if you have arma 3 .. get a3launcher at a3launcher.com .. try some of the servers with or without zombies .. also try PVP and PVE .. just go sample it all .. no matter all the arguing about what is better .. alive or dead .. you try them out and make your own choice.