izigame.me

I'm bound to play this game more than the alternative older, DayZ. This much is a given, but only because the latter already is consumed by the thing I bring up.
This game, is on the path to becoming another soulless tactical jerkoff fest. It's already clear in the servers where you have.... PVPMAX|10XLOOT|10XCARS|0.5XPUPPET|NOMECHS in the titles. What a disaster. Same with DayZ, this was a bit more on the survival side in the beginning, but it seeps through. The thing that worries me most with this is that the developers seem to not necessarily prioritize survival elements or further gameplay loops (yet..?)
I can appreciate that game devs takes time, and yes, I bought an EARLY ACCESS GAME that is bound to be "EARLY ACCESS" for MANY more years after this until when (if) they deem it's complete enough to let the community take over entirely.
I think that there's some good things this game does, but many bad. There's many bugs, oversights, and bad decisions that have persisted since I began playing, and can imagine that has gone on far longer than that, even.

So what makes this a bad game?

1: Possibly the worst server browser I've ever seen
Seriously this thing won't automatically refresh itself when you go into it. It also refuses to show me my favourited servers OR the ones I've played in the past. It's just slow in general.
2. Seemingly, a second of high-ish ping is enough to get you disconnected.
Within an hour, on a 60 ping server, my internet will spike very briefly and the game will kick me out for this. Is it worse than I think? I don't know. But this is the only game where I get disconnected so often
3. Official Servers have got to be the...
LAGGIEST and most CRASH PRONE servers i've played of any game. I /would/ play Official only if it didn't mean that i'd be reconnecting constantly or dealing with rubberbanding occasionally.
This is such a downside because as you can guess from previous comments made, I'm not a fan of this game's community necessarily. Most of it anyways. Most servers are either jacked up loot x10, have half of the map set to be a hugbox, and filled with admins that are the most stuck up douches possible. The amount of times an admin flew over to me and told me to join the discord and link my account or I'd get banned is a non zero number. Which isn't exactly something I'd like out of a.... survival PVP game which is supposed to be semi-free spirited on paper.
4: A slightly ""niche"" bug. If you have an item in your hotbar and you lose it, it'll still be there as a ghost as expected. But you can't just remove the ghost image. If you accidentally click the throw button, it'll crash your ass straight to desktop. At least that's what it does any time I do it. Always has. I don't know how that wasn't fixed.
In my eyes. The things that makes many games bad is lack of prioritization. (Wow no shit right)
Of course, It's not my game and maybe they want something different out of it now. But as stated before by myself and many people in the past this game has shifted from survival to looter shooter.
I think the core of this is things like... the events. Where you drop into a PVP arena in military gear, sprint around and shoot each other brainlessly. This is just begging to get your community groomed into being filled with FPSheads
In general updates seemingly are more geared towards... Not necessarily improving the bigger picture, but just packing stuff in at random that isn't necessarily fully fleshed out.
Dirt bikes are cool. Yet you can't do anything REALLY interesting on them. You can drive with good turning and acceleration. Where the fuck is the hopping, wheelies, or stoppies, man? It has no SOUL. Dirt bikes were an entire update's selling feature and yet they lack 90% of the fun with dirtbikes This is just one example but it's a reoccurring theme that isn't very hard to spot if you look around.

What DOES make this game good is things like:

1. The elaborate nutrition system! It's very cool to look at and gives you little goals to set. I haven't really played enough on one server to see the fruits of my labour, but it's really cool and i've seen evidence of it being a thing to strive for, even if some goals are apparently unobtainable.
2. There's enough crafting options to be at least somewhat interesting. You can go decently far even just surviving in the wilderness alone. It's not really easy because 90% of the crafting options rely on using scrap items you find around civilization areas. But it's better off than a lot of the games. Not that they shouldn't add more. They totally should.
3. The general setup of the game is quite fantastic. In fact, I'm biased here. But this entire game would be better if it was more on the primitive survival side than the modern/futuristic looter type. I feel like there's potential lost by not going all into survival when you have systems as elaborate as SCUM does, down to the micronutrients. Again, that's my taste versus theirs. But in general the core mechanics are really nice.

Any cardinal sins in this game?

Glad you asked.
Why the fuck did you update only the female models and then monetize the hair choices.
Okay. let me rephrase. Why did you completely ignore half of your community in favour of appealing to chronic masturbators?
It's not secret there's a lot of people on the internet that love to play a cute eyecandy girl. And so you made a whole update to make all the women look good, and gave them more settings to tweak around at. They look good! Good job to the person (people? think it's just one that was doing this) in charge of modeling.
So really, I say all that but I know exactly why. And it's to get money. Money rules the world. It's why this game is still fourty dollars in early access with two supporter packs and... now female hair options.
Clothing in general was made with much love for the female models. Armour looks good on them. Good job. Men, however, will put on armour and look like a square that gained 100lbs. Wow... cool.
I think it's an insult to a greater part of your community that doesn't just want to look at an ass jiggle that the male models still look the way they do.

TLDR

Monetization of cosmetics continues
Trying to become a fortnite cameo game for some reason (see: the two fifteen dollar cameo skins)
Overly tactical tryhard community in the making
Updates bring new features seemingly with littlle thought (other than the radiation update. Pretty cool and a good step), otherwise they're very shallow.
Bugs older than a lot of popular games
Horrible server browser
Men look like ugly ogres and females are tiktok queens with actual good looking clothing