Sure there’s base building, vehicles, and more still to come, but my PAX demo excluded much of what the game intends to offer during Early Access and beyond. Also See: H1Z1’s Senior Game Designer InterviewĪs for me? I’m a bit afraid the survival tropes of hunting, skinning, and selling will wear thin relatively quickly. That said, both its intrigue and potential are enormous, and with its developers focus on early access as a learning tool rather than a hype machine, it’s hard to imagine the game doing anything but improving from here. From what I saw, the game does have a ways to go before being regularly and consistently compelling. To me, the most encouraging thing I gathered about H1Z1’s development process is the heavy focus on community feedback. It’s bold, but other games are already succeeding with a similar model: just look at Planetside 2’s PC edition. Like Planetside 2 and Landmark, players can get in on a cut of what they sell, and being a free-to-play game, tactfully embedding micropayments will be H1Z1’s main source of income. I was told that early access is an absolutely crucial part of H1Z1’s progression, both in terms of developing and fine-tuning the world and also determining how micropayments are going to work. There’s always going to be that guy who kills without reason or camps your corpse, but in the world of H1Z1, every effort is being made to organically discourage such behavior. Everyone’s trying to survive, and in theory, everyone wants to help each other out. If you’re a traveler you’ll likely find those comfort-zoned players wherever you go, and for a price they’ll assist you. It is a survival game after all, and if you’re able to carve out a successful little life for yourself (let’s say you hunt animals and sell their pelts in a snowy, wooded area just along a former city’s outskirts), what compels you to explore? According to Whisenhunt, some players will and some simply won’t. Perhaps one of H1Z1’s more interesting lines in the sand has to do with exploration vs. Hey, if SOE is cool with such practices, then so am I. “We try not to be afraid to scrap something, even if it took hours and hours to create,” Whisenhunt jokes. Jimmy told me that the mere addition of bears into various environments drastically changed player outlook across much of the game, and that in some cases huge overhauls that the dev team expected to have a similar effect resulted in nothing of the sort. It’s not a building game foremost, but the actions of other players can and will affect the world. The cool thing about H1Z1 is that it actually does offer some of Landmark’s customization and player input. Why use a birch-striped bow when actual guns and ammo are available? I argued immersion, but I knew I’d never actually hold myself to that. Curiosity, exposure to new abilities, appearance of new survival scenarios all of these things will compel to craft or buy new weapons and abilities. However, the odds of this actually happening are slim. I asked if I could simply craft a basic, wooden bow and get along just fine for the rest of the game, and I was told that I could. H1Z1 is first and foremost about freedom, and how the player decides to use that freedom is going to both shape and define their experience. But that’s a discussion for another article. Of course, he’s referring to Landmark, the player-driven builder constructed from the same tools SOE uses to make Everquest Next itself. “I’m not like him where I just like to troll people all day,” he joked. Are you ready to fight for your life, without losing your pride, or are you fading into darkness and letting it all behind you? Play H1Z1 Battle Royale on PC and Mac with BlueStacks and get ready to kill or get killed in intense battles against skilful opponents and hundreds of friends at the same time! What are your plans to survive and become known as one of the most talented gamers of all? Don’t you forget that, right there, on the other side, are dozens of crafted players too, so you better come up with something new, if you want to be the subject of admiration to others.Our tour guide of the day was Senior Game Designer Jimmy Whisenhunt, and for a guy tasked with establishing, balancing, and maintaining a persistent, zombie-ravaged world, he certainly didn’t seem all that stressed out. Battle Royale games: how not to love them? If you are one of those people who share that interest, then well, you probably already know H1Z1, as it is the game who simply started it all.
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