DayZ’s Frostline DLC makes the brutal survival game even more inhospitable

I spawn for the first time in DayZ’s Frostline DLC shivering in a field. It’s too cold for me to be outside in cropped hiking pants and a t-shirt and yet here I am. If I don't warm up soon, I’ll die. I look out across the frigid wasteland and spot a couple of huts jutting out against the sky. 

There’s no time for a cautious approach. My thirst and hunger bars are draining but the biggest threat here is the bitter cold, not the zombies scattered across the Sakhal coastline. I find a warm hat and a pair of gloves which makes me slightly less likely to freeze to death, but then I have another issue: I’m famished, thirsty and, based on the constant sniffling of my character, sick. 

Things start strong. I find a can of drink, some food and a pistol, but then quickly realise the food and drink are both frozen and I’ll need a way to thaw them out before I can use them. The pistol doesn’t have a magazine, so I have to load bullets one at a time into the chamber. 

Not that it matters. The sniffles have become a persistent cough and my health meter is crashing. My thirst and hunger bars are flashing red, empty, and I’ve slowed to a crawl. The can of off-brand Fanta in my inventory is still frozen. I’m dying, and I’m not sure I’ve managed to achieve anything of worth.

40 minutes after I spawn, scuffling around an abandoned warehouse, I die. Tapping the respawn button I wake up shivering in a field. It’s too cold for me to be outside in cropped hiking pants and a t-shirt and yet here I am.

My time spent with Frostline is a pretty miserable bundle of death and failure, but that’s DayZ all over. One of the first survival games on the market, it’s also one of the most brutal. Back in 2012 I had a DayZ era along with just about everyone playing PC games. It felt fresh and exciting to wake up on the beach and see how long you could survive for, which often wasn’t very long. Over time, the survival genre ballooned, with a host of games that allowed you to not just survive, but thrive. DayZ, however, has remained unpleasant.

To coldly go

For Frostline, it seems like the devs at Bohemia Interactive have decided to crank DayZ's difficulty up to eleven. Stand outside and you’ll freeze to death. Fight the zombies with your starting kitchen knife and you’ll break your knife or bleed to death. 

It’s worth noting here that there are two different versions of DayZ. The more popular version of the game involves modded servers that add more weapons, phases out the zombies and turns the game into something more akin to Rust. For those players, Frostline is a new map, some winter-themed cosmetics and some extra mechanical complexity for modders to work with. It’ll add some spice and it’s probably worth buying if you’re already enjoying the game. 

For those who want to play the vanilla version of Bohemia’s survive-’em-up, Frostline twists the dials to make things more challenging. I think it might be a step too far: I died to the elements on six out of the eight times I played. As for the other two, once I was killed by a trio of zombies because I didn’t have time to skirt around them (I was dying of the cold), and the other time a player wearing some really warm looking clothes and clutching an AK47 held me at gunpoint, asked if I had anything worth stealing on me, and then told me "too bad" before shooting me in the face.

After each horrible death I swaddled myself up in clothes that made me look like I was going to a rave in an igloo rather than a life or death battle, and then started again, trying to gather bark for fires or a weapon to hunt with. There’s definitely an interesting idea here in that the warmest clothes are often not armoured, so you can choose between a combat helmet or a warm hat. 

Unfortunately, cold is far and away the biggest threat, so there’s no reason to do anything but wrap up as warmly as possible in the initial phase. Only later, when you start to build a base for yourself, does changing clothes make sense. I just can’t ever see a world where I survive that long in this miserable place. 

The harsh winter messes with a lot of DayZ’s core ideas. DayZ is a survival game that rewards careful reconnaissance and planning, and while the base game also makes you think about insulation and food, it rarely feels truly unfair (as long as you play with a wiki open). Try to open a wiki here, though, and you’re wasting valuable warmth while you’re tabbed out. The best option is just to keep moving and hope you don't freeze.

Before that now-hated You Are Dead screen, most of my time was spent snuffling around for loot in empty rooms devoid of anything useful as a series of meters slowly emptied. While things are better away from the coast, there often simply wasn’t enough food and warm clothing to be found to allow me to venture inland. When I resolved that, finding a weapon for hunting or even fresh water to drink became an issue. Frostline’s inhospitable wasteland always seems to throw up a giant problem to solve, but there very rarely feels like an effective way to solve it.

My final death saw me eating snow from the ground in the mountains, desperately sprinting through undergrowth to make it to the next compound, a possible source of loot. I had a rifle and a couple of rounds and even passable armour and clothing, but sadly the two cans of frozen food in my pockets hadn’t thawed yet and I hadn’t found somewhere to build a fire. I died alone and woke up, again, in a frozen field. 

I think I’d rather play something else.