"H1Z1 will also distinguish itself by the behavior and quantity of its titular undead.
“We’re leveraging our world in a new way,” he says. “We’ve shown a little bit of the hoards, and we can support more zombies than a player could kill in his entire life… Zombies are attracted to not just sight, but they can smell you. As you move around the world and change what you’re doing, you’re going to change where the zombies are. We also have livestock, as you can see, and the animals aren’t just for food—though they are for that. We had an instance down at the booth where you saw a deer come busting out of the wood, and when they’re running like that they’re spooked. Behind the deer come twenty zombies, and they’re chasing the deer.”
Player built:
Like Planetside 2 before it, H1Z1 will be a free-to-play game with microtransactions, but Whisenhunt insists that nothing you can buy with real money will have an affect on gameplay. Evan got a chance to spend some time with the game a couple of weeks ago, and you can read his impressions here. As always, catch up on all of our E3 coverage by visiting this page."
"In the absence of orders, find something and kill it." -Field Marshall Obs
As far as balance for PvP and shit goes...Jimmy Jizzincunt is on staff for this game.
He is the guy who played a huge part in big changes to CS:GO via the videos below. You don't have to watch them or w/e (although it's kind of nice to get some insight on what the devs may be focused on in a game you look forward to), they're just historical because whether people agreed with it or not it made topical discussions happen in really visible arenas. Enough for Valve to catch wind and listen, and change CS:GO drastically for the better. The most important thing to note is, this dude is on the H1Z1 dev team, and he knows what kind of details to focus on and what's important for an FPS to "feel right". Even if that doesn't necessarily mean the specific topics below are applicable to H1Z1. It may give you a small idea of their vision and what's in store for PvP.
Anything you can do in those games they can slipseat into H1Z1
Flying vehicles (planetside 2), skills/ability systems (EQ:Next), crafting (EQ:Next + Landmark), gun mechanics (PS2), making forts (EQ:Landmark), intuitive clan management (PS2, EQ:Next): they don't have to reinvent the wheel. Almost everything they could want to put into the game already exists. It's just a matter of tweaking it, modding it for it to fit with the game. And discovering what it is they want to put in, which they're heavily invested in the survivor game niche/community to get ideas.
For instance in an interview w/ Lirik, Whisenhunt explains how he wants shooting to behave on release, will be a lot closer to CS:GO than Planetside 2; a lot of recoil that has a pattern you can match when mastered, with low recovery time (tapping/bursting won't move a xhair if you're not moving your mouse).
It's going to be crazy to see what a final product from an AAA company making a free full loot survival game might look like. Especially since their item mall will consist of cosmetic and at best PvE boosters (timed buffs to reduce damage wolves do, etc). One of the more relieving thoughts about "yet another survival game" is that it's not going to be community servers. It's an MMO so SOE will be providing the servers. And their goal is 1,000 players per server at release (in which the map will be much bigger than it is now), and grow the player capacities as they add to the map-size, like they did with PS2. The big red flag; POTENTIAL!
Moxie]You know I look at this and I just think how badly DayZ squandered their chance well they had the only game on the market and now they are in trouble.
They've sold over 2 million copies of Dayz Standalone. I doubt they are in trouble. They just haven't progressed as fast as everyone wanted. Based on their latest update it sounds like DayZ won't be finished anytime soon either. They've increased the scope dramatically and are rewriting the majority of the engine.
We've already seen that the sandbox genre is exploding. So it doesn't matter who is first to market. It matters who finishes it correctly. The Dev videos of H1N1 show it is in a state like Rust right now. Core idea complete, but not polished or nearly finished.
I feel like we are going to get 4-5 incomplete unfinished games before we get 1 finished game
Yeah, I'm not trying to get over-hyped for h1z1. There's just nothing really jumping out at me game-wise any time soon.
The biggest things that drove me to looking into h1z1 a bit was;
Jimmy Whisenhunt
I could be mistaken, but first AAA company to take a stab at the survival genre (SOE)?
MMO - no "community dedicated servers" and all the problems that can come from that. All servers will be provided by SOE using the same anti-cheats that PS2 and EQ:Next/Landmark use (which apparently have been very successful)
Another interesting thing about H1Z1 is how short the dev cycle has been for where they're at right now. Yeah, the game obviously looks like it's way behind in a lot of aspects (polish etc.) compared to DayZ/Rust..but it has only been in production since late February, early March of this year.
How many players can one server host? As with Landmark and PlanetSide 2, H1Z1 uses the ForgeLight engine so we have the potential to support thousands of players simultaneously in game. With H1Z1, however, we want to find the balance between it feeling like a zombie apocalypse and having others to play with. As development continues we will adjust the number of players allowed on each server.
Quote:
How will player servers work? When will they be implemented? H1Z1 will be one of the first games ever to feature a Player Ruleset Server system, allowing players to the ability to vote on and create custom rule sets and attributes that suits their play style best. We are still working out details, but players can participate in the discussion thread on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/h1z1/comments/26w2ly/server_rulesets/
