Simulators are not fun to anyone who is not able to immerse themselves in that situation.
A game trying to simulate a real life situation should actually work to immerse the player using ambiance and graphics. A simulator cannot function without graphics because it cannot simulate the real life without simulating the senses you experience. Hence sound and vision.
Instead DayZ leaves it all up to the player to immerse themselves in the player they control which comes easy for some people, but impossible for others. The biggest complaint of DayZ is that you run around a lot and crawl around a lot to get the most basic supplies you need, and most of the time it is just flat out boring for the player. This means most people aren't able to properly immerse themselves and the game has flaws. Yet instead of the developer acknowledging that the simulator fails to simulate the situation for most players, he disregards them as, "Carebears" and, "Casuals" instead of actually fixing his game.
Here's what's wrong with DayZ:
1. stuff is too difficult to find, and half the time I get too bored from crawling around from each empty house to the next just to find nothing that I crouchwalk to increase my speed and end up getting killed.
2. There is little to no incentive for anyone to spare the life of another player considering the bandit skin has been removed. Humanity no longer exists. This would never happen in a real zombie apocalypse because you would be scared stuffless of dying. This is another example in which your mechanical, "It's just a simulator!" excuse fails miserably.
3. Crawling around from house to house is fun if you're afraid of losing your gear that you've worked so hard to collect. But considering you spawn with the same stuff EVERY SINGLE TIME, you're forced to painstakingly crawl at a ridiculously slow speed from house to house before you even find food or a gun. Sometimes this takes up to 2 hours. Simulator or not, your game sucks if people have to spend 2 hours doing boring stuff before anything remotely exciting happens.
4. The ambiance and sound effects of the game suck. Instead of being afraid of dying when the scary music kicks in when I'm near zombies, I'm annoyed because I can't hear where they are and it impairs my ability to play the game. Amnesia: The Dark Descent does ambiance right by amplifying the sounds of the grunts breathing as a constant reminder that they are near to you. The zombies in DayZ USED to do that, but it seems like that's been removed too. What a pro developer.
so yeah, forget you for excusing bad game development because it's, "Just a simulator". Well a simulator actually has to simulate the environment, and when the game has mediocre ambiance and visual effects, the player is not immersed. You think graphics don't matter in a simulator? Here I'll prove they do.
This is a simulator called dungeon cave spelunking 2012:
☺= you/player
X= cave wall
O= cave troll
XOX
X XXX
X ☺X
XXXXX
You move to the left
XOX
X XXX
X☺ X
XXXXX
Dear god, you've just encountered a cave troll! It could kill you! What would your wife and children do? you'll lose all the spoils of your adventures! Isn't that scary?
No it's not because the cave troll is a loving O on your screen.
