Forget permadeath. There is a more intense way to play DayZ, and it somehow makes the survival game way more hardcore.
I speak of perma-permadeath, a concept that Rock, Paper Shotgun writer Christopher Livingston recently documented. Here's how it works. If you die, that's it. You don't just lose your character, though. You never get to play the game again. Ever.
Livingston added some rules, in order to keep this playthrough interesting:
I came up with a couple ground rules to make sure I don't just squat safely in the woods eating berries for the day and then declare myself a winner. The servers I play on need to be at least half-full so there are other players around. I'll also make myself visit two big cities, one in the north and one in the south, forcing me to cover a good bit of ground and enter areas in which zombies and players are likely. Once I've visited those two cities, which will take at least a few hours, I can call it quits and start playing normally again.
When you couple this with the fact that DayZ can be a source of income for Livingston—he's a game writer and all—the stakes are pretty high, eh?
I don't want to spoil what happens in his playthrough, but you can read the account here. Suffice it to say, it's a pretty nerve-wracking way to play DayZ, and I'm curious if anyone else will follow in his footsteps. It doesn't even have to be in DayZ either—perma-permadeath is a thing you can do in pretty much any game.
It's not my bag—I like to keep playing my games, thank you—but, I'm curious. Would you try something like this out? Or is it too much?