f13.net

watch  http://1337loungelive.com/GTL/  tomorrow [today, 9th April] between 5-6pm PST if you are interested in the new game we haven't announced. there is gameplay footage

The problem I'd see with a strict zombie apocalypse MMO is there's only one foozle to whack. I don't see that.

Some kind of overall biological apocalypse more like Resident Evil would be a better fit, particularly if you pushed it into a post-holocaust civilization angle like Defiance rather than the classic small group wandering aimlessly and being picked off.

So the consensus is, we don't know what it is but we know we hate it.  Roger.

Watch the grain, Bzalthek, watch the grain. You wouldn't want to go against it. :psyduck:

Seriously tho, you don't have to see the game to know that zombie-thing is wearing thing.

"That's the point," Smedley said. "When you see a zombie coming up to you with nothing out but a highway flare. But here is something your gonna be able to do that you can't do in these other games: Light things on fire. We are in the middle of putting that in so you are gonna be able to burn down trees, burn down stuff, and that's gonna be a lot of fun. The idea is that these players [are] building these forts and all of the sudden these other guys coming in lighting it on fire and waiting till they come out of the fortress ... is awesome."

A day and night cycle will also affect H1Z1, whose name brings to mind the real-life H1N1 swine flu virus.

"Oh God yeah," Smedley said when asked about day and night, "but in this game it matters a lot more than in others because it gets really dark at night and you need to have a torch and you will be ganked by other players, zombies. So we [have] vehicles in here. We can actually have aircraft if we want. Our goal is to build out this entire massive massive world that is this apocalypse of the United States."

Zinecraft? MineDay?

Hi there,

I wanted to tell you about an exciting new free-to-play game we’ve had under wraps here at SOE for some time. It’s called H1Z1. It’s a massively multiplayer game in which players fight for survival in a world where death is the only sure thing. The H1Z1 virus devastated mankind and left nothing but death and destruction in its wake and a world nearly empty of human life where the remnants of humanity are in a fight against extinction against those infected with the virus.

It’s been 15 years since H1Z1 was first encountered and what’s left of the world before is overrun with the Infected. Humanity has been reduced to hiding in the shadows, searching desperately for food and water and anything that can help to survive even for another day. But the Infected aren’t the only dangers in the world. Everyday life in the Apocalypse means dealing with all kinds of wild animals and the brutality of other survivors, as well as finding your next meal and a safe place to sleep. It also means scavenging or crafting anything that can help you live just one more day. In H1Z1 every minute of every day is borrowed time and fearing for your life… unless you are the Danger (talking to you Walter), but life can and will go on… even in circumstances as dire as this. Humanity has not given in to the Infected. There are still pockets of humanity and the fight goes on!

Our vision for this game is very simple but ambitious. We are starting with what I would call “Middle America” – an “anywhere and everywhere” town. The world is massive as you’ve come to expect from our games. Over time we will grow the world until we have our own version of the U.S. after the death and destruction brought on during the H1Z1 epidemic. It will be our own version of America. We’ll have urban cities and desolate wide open places. All connected seamlessly. Our focus is building a sandbox style of gameplay where players can build shelters out of resources in the world. They can even work together to make amazing fortresses complete with weaponry to help defend against both the Infected and other players. Players also have access to a very deep crafting system that can let players make a huge variety of awesome stuff, including weapons (I made a 1911 the other day) and things like Molotov cocktails, explosives.. and other fun surprises.

I will also go right to the heart of the question a lot of players will have – “There are a lot of survival / Zombie games… how is this one going to be any different?”. First off, it’s a persistent MMO that can hold thousands of players on servers we host (yes there will be multiple servers with very different rule sets). Why is that a good thing? It means a thriving economy (oh yes… there’s trading). It also means you have potential allies in the all-out war on the Infected... and many an enemy as well. It uses our proprietary next-gen Forgelight engine and that means we’ve had a lot of really cool technology to work with to make the game we wanted to make. It’s also designed from the ground up for our players to become part of the design process. The Roadmap system that we built for PlanetSide 2 will be used extensively to clearly communicate what features we’re working on and what you can expect and when. You’re also going to be getting awesome access to our developers. We’ll be opening it up for Player Studio creations too so expect player-created items to make their way into the game.

The main thing that differentiates H1Z1 from the other great games in the genre is the emphasis we are putting on player ownership and building. We want you to be able to form roving gangs that are headquartered out of an abandoned warehouse that you’ve taken over... or a house you’ve built from scratch after having cut trees down and secured the resources to make it. We are giving players the tools to make their own towns, camps and defenses, and they can decide how to set up their base (which is in the world btw... not instanced). We’re building in all the social features you’ve come to expect from an SOE game (grouping, proximity voice chat, voice chat for your gang, and many other cool social features).

To use a simple reference I’m sure everyone interested in this game will get... we want our players to make Woodbury from The Walking Dead if they want to. Or take over a prison. Or fix an old car so you and your friends (yeah we have multiplayer vehicles) can run zombies and players over mercilessly, and revel in the sheer delight of hearing a zombie scream as you light it on fire, or craft a gun to take down your friends and enemies alike. Our goal here is to provide emergent gameplay that will allow our players to make the world their own the way they want to. One of the best things about H1Z1 being an MMO is the fact that with a lot of people playing, we’re able to see all different kinds of gameplay. If you prefer a quiet life as a farmer raising crops... we’re going to make sure your zombie apocalypse fantasy is complete. If you’re like me and you want nothing more than to kill everything that moves, by all means see how that goes. It’s going to be a blast!

Check out H1Z1.com and the subreddit ( http://reddit.com/r/h1z1 ). We’ll be adding more information in the coming weeks to the website. We’ll also be very openly answering questions in the subreddit.
Next week you can see us do a livestream of the game as we have a playtest. Stay tuned!

Based on tweets from a few months ago, I'm not 100% sure it's zombies.  My initial impression was that it's a survival game, based in a world that experienced an extreme loss of people. 

Smed took flak for calling this a game that SWG players would like, making everyone think it was a SW game.  Heh. 

The run over players in the car makes me think this is full PVP which won't work.

Since it's F2P, I'll likely try this out but really... SOE wants to make DayZ? Really? Talk about trend humping. First, EQMinecraft now Dayside.

Honestly I don't. I'm at most a bit annoyed that everyone keeps slapping "survival" when I don't really consider their core design survival.
It is mildly annoying that people seem to think DayZ is popular because it has zombies and "lots" of players, so naturally... to make the game better, add more zombies and players?

I certainly do not hold that view. DayZ is a survival game because it has permadeath. If you don't have permadeath, then it is not a survival game. If you are making a game that may consider permadeath, then it's obviously not one of your design pillars.
Permadeath and the ruthless nature of the game are the key component of DayZ. People have done mass zombies before. People have done mass players before. DayZ is about the emotion that comes with a sense of loss, a molding of risk and reward over a very detailed map in a scenario that pushes the boundaries of survival. It doesn't rely on gimmicks to do this, and while things like advanced crafting are very awesome - they are not the core of the DayZ experience.
I also get tired of people with "there can be only one" attitudes. People said the same thing about Rust, about any other game that has survival attached to it. Always asking me how I feel about it.

How do I feel? Well, 1.8 million people are interested enough to buy into the early access. So I feel pretty awesome. I also feel the weight of responsibility to those people. If DayZ sold not a single other copy, then by every measure it will have been a massive success commercially and critically. It's driven major companies in the industry to look inside themselves and see if they can replicate the components (The Division & H1Z1 both stated DayZ as inspiration).
I put my heart and soul into the mod when it was only 10 or 20 people playing it. Just the same as I do today, as I have done for the last few years. I do my work for me, as I always have. Although I do have that sense of responsibility - that keeps me focused when I'm down a bit. But above everything else, I make DayZ for myself.

tl;dr
1. How can I feel anything other than absolutely amazed that something I did has such impact on the industry?
2. A survival game, to me, has key design pillars focused on survival (most notably permadeath). Without those it is not a survival game


(cont.)


What I find is a bit strange is that I don't see the concept as being very similar to DayZ, it appears to me to be more focused around what Rust was trying to do in it's early days - although they have decided to steer away from zombies anyway.
There are people - both within the industry and consumers - who like to create drama around "which game is going to kill which game". That kind of thinking is stupid, it's counter productive, and it's an entirely worthless exercise. I stressed out a lot about WarZ, I got worried about Rust initially, ZombiU, State of Decay, etc... etc... But at the end of the day many of those titles ended up having positive effects on the industry and in many ways the development of DayZ too.

(...)

The issue of competition and "market exposure" I dealt with previously in my discussions around rust, warz, and others. I really don't feel like rehashing those discussions.
I don't care if DayZ sells another single copy. I don't care if someone else is making a game. The last time competition affected me, was with WarZ, and it caused me to make bad calls with the game development. Since then, and since Everest, I have focused on making DayZ the game I wanted it to be.

Just squint a bit, pretend the zombies are mutants, and you have MMO Fallout!  Problem solved!

I must be looking at this completely the wrong way, but "post-apocalyptic zombie survival horror in rural US" seems light years away from "aspirational interstellar adventure on a variety of planets."

Day Z standalone, maybe. And that's mostly because they haven't been implemented properly. And even when they are, they'll still fuck up you day because they're too goddamn fast for normal zombies. I want the inexorable waves, and so far the only game to provide that has been Project Zomboid.

Project Zomboid?  Allrighty, I guess we're done here.

Is this a game where you build/collect/craft stuff with permadeath? How do you develop a character?

Based on the video alone though and not the propaganda, so far not a single thing makes it look or feel better than Day Z or even War Z.

I sense faith in your words. We'll see how this goes.

I've probably said it somewhere already, but a blatant copying of the better ideas out there already from the likes of Rust, State of Decay, DayZ or whatever, with the might of some AAA graphics engine...that would be sweet.  Of course, this will be covered with the veneer of a cash shop somewhere, fucking it all up.

Some of our outcomes. Please note I'll do a comprehensive posting after we're done with this. We have another meeting Thursday to discuss.

• We will be selling wearables. We felt like this will be a good, fair revenue generator. However - we recognize how important finding wearables in the world is so you'll be able to find and craft a lot of stuff. We agree that's something important. We've also come up with a pretty awesome idea to let players who kill other players loot stuff. So if a player has a black ski mask and gets killed by another player, that player can wear the ski mask for a few deaths (we have durability in the game. Station Cash wearables won't degrade at all but when you loot something.. it will degrade. Please note the original player always keeps their SC purchased wearables. This gives the great feeling of whacking some unsuspecting fool who decided to bring a knife to a gun fight.
• We will NOT be selling Guns, Ammo, Food, Water... i.e. That's kind of the whole game and it would suck in our opinion if we did that.
• Nor will we sell boosts that will impact #2.
• Emote Pack - of course we'll have the basics for free. But we felt like this is another good and fair revenue generator.
• Character slots - feels reasonable.
• Crates - You can find crates sometimes in game. They're filled with random cool stuff from the store. We're considering letting you see what's in them before you buy a key (ala Dota 2.). This idea isn't fully locked yet.

That Monetization thread has turned out to be a terrific source of ideas and it also is helping us steer clear of the stuff you just don't want to see.

More to come late this week.

Smed

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 you are a zombie apocalypse survivor and having others to play with. As development continues we will adjust the number of players allowed on each server.

Will you have female characters in the game?

Yes, we are working on creating female characters and intend to have them implemented in the game in the near future.

How are you different than DayZ?

One of the main reasons we wanted to make a zombie survival game is because we are all fans of the survival genre. DayZ did a great job and we hope fans of the genre will enjoy our take on the zombie apocalypse as well. Our goal is to make H1Z1 fun, accessible, hard core, and super deep, and we can’t wait for players to get their hands on it.

Early Acess is 20$. Not sure about the price when it'll launch, but that's far away anyway.

Piss, I didn't realize you had to pay for the Early Access thing.  For a Free-to-Play game even.

I've probably said it before, but if they can make a prettier DayZ with a more efficient engine (all ARMA based stuff runs horribly)

More efficient engine for sure, but prettier? No way. DayZ, even with its older ArmA 2.5 engine, is ridiculously good looking. It's already obvious from videos and screenshots that H1Z1 went for performance over quality.

8)    We have made the decision to allow paid for airdrops into the game with things like guns and other things being randomly selected as part of the airdrop. We’re making them highly contested and building a whole set of rules around this, but you should be aware that our goal is to make this a way to keep things interesting on the servers but still be contested. If these offend your sensibilities just know that they are going to be there. We have gone out of our way to make sure the airdrops are contested in-game and that you can’t simply expect to easily walk about to the airdrop and grab it. Even if you paid for it.

14)   Crates – one of our primary monetization methods is crates. You are given crates over time simply for playing. The keys will cost 250 Station Cash ($2.50) and can be purchased in bundles for less per key. Inside the crate are skins that can make your character or equipment even cooler. However you have to actually find items in-game to reskin. So if you get a military backpack camo pattern.. you still have to find a military backpack in game (which has the same # of slots btw). The crates have one item each in them and there is a random rarity, so you might get a common item or you might get a rare item (obviously less chance for the rare). Crates are not necessary for gameplay. You never have to buy one if you don’t want to.

15)   Event Tickets / Event Servers – We have many different types of servers that you can play on. One type (Event Servers) requires an Event Ticket which can be purchased for roughly 100SC ($1). At the start we have Player Unknown’s Battle Royale servers that you can play on. This is an awesome Last Man Standing kind of game that we think you’ll really enjoy. You don’t need to buy the tickets.. you will earn them simply by playing H1Z1. If you like it and want to play that more, you can buy them. If you get good at it, we give you additional tickets for being near the top of the leaderboard after the end of a match.

We want them to be server events... so we make sure the whole server knows they're coming and I've personally been killed many times after I paid for them myself.

Watching the login and soe account servers melt was fun. Really old skool fun of a failed mmo launch.

There's not even a bit of a game yet. Seems more of a semi failed tech demo. At least you can't fall off the world when you get to the edge. No matter how hard you try.

Fuck that bullshit.

You can call it beta, early access, etc, whatever you want. But once you start accepting money, you've launched.

Developers, especially experienced fucking MMOG developers, need to learn the lesson - if the goddamn customer is paying for it, FUCK YOU IT'S LAUNCHED. You can call it Early Access and Alpha all you fucking want, but if you take money, YOUR GAME IS LAUNCHED.

Hi folks,
If you feel like the airdrops are an issue for you, you may immediately request a refund to bwilcox@soe.sony.com - this offer applies till Monday and it applies only to people that have purchased the game as of 10:30am Pacific today 1/16/2015 -
Please note that this is going through us, not Steam. Which means it's a little more work so please be patient with the actual refund (it may take a day or two).
Smed

The dev team loves airdrops, and in testing, every time we used one, they were highly contested where the person who actually called in the airdrop had to earn it through a gladiator style brawl. They usually weren't the one that ended up with the airdrop but no matter what, the person who called it in was satisfied with the event that they got to make happen. That event is the magic we are trying to capture with everyone. The last thing we want is it to be a boring item that someone can sneak around and quietly get to find gear without it being contested. In our opinion that is basically cheating and nobody should be able to do that.

Whether you agree with us or not, that is how we want airdrops to work. We are going to be tuning them throughout early access until we can get them to work that way, here are the first pass initial changes.

1) Make the plane move slowly (53% of current) This increases the ability for other players to react to the plane coming in.
2) Make the drop fall more slowly (80% of current) This increases the ability for other players to react to the plane coming in.
3) Less accurate maximum drop radius (was 250m now 700m, so with these settings it would drop up to 700m from the calling player)
4) New minimum distance of 250m for airdrops to appear from a player. This is a little less than ½ the player density of 700m distance with 120 players on a server. Therefore more players are likely to be near the airdrop when deployed.
5) Increase the minimum number of required players to 120 (a little higher after more discussion about player density being important to keeping airdrops contested)


H1Z1 Airdrop Events and drop percentages:

One thing I don't quite get about the bitching about air drops is sure there may be a gun. But anybody in the area has about as much of a chance at it as you do and can kill you to take your stuff if you happen to get it.

I dunno, I'm not poor. I don't mind paying $20 for a game I might want to check out before it "releases". I don't have enough time to get worked up like Haem about these things.

I didn't buy into this game, and really have no interest. But I know a lot of people that get $20 worth of fun out of some broken games. Who gives a fuck?

The game world is 64 miles wide and to airdrop there need to be only 50 people on the server apparently, so it certainly seems like you could time a drop during a low pop time and have very little realistic chance of it going to someone else.

Twenty minutes later I decided to log back into landmark to work on a new drawbridge to my castle and couldn't log in. This was weird. I try to log into Planetside 2, also cannot log in. Try to log into SOE website. Account has been suspended.

For my tastes, there's still too many games about fighting or surviving the AI. Reason I love DayZ beyond all the other clones so far is exactly because the real monsters are the humans, and that's what you are really trying to survive from. But I agree that if they could come up in DayZ with some ways for you to reach some tangible milestones in your quest for survival, it would be much better. A layer of long and short term goals on top of the everyday slog for canned beans and ammo, while dodging ganking campers' bullets.

When they'll find ways to add more long term goals in these games without adding stupid player levels or boss fights, it'll benefit both DayZ and H1Z1.

I am really curious about Battle Royale. I have a doubt though: how does it deal with some idiot hiding forever to troll, especially if he/she has no chances of winning? And even considering that, how long does it last on average?

Makes sense. I was thinking of something like that. Isn't it the same in the the real Battle Royale and Hunger Games after all?

Similar. The real Battle Royale had a gridded map with certain areas becoming uninhabitable as the game went on; anyone who stayed, died. It wasn't a strict progression from the outside creeping in, though.

Right, I forgot to mention I am part of that million too. But I am into zombies (a lot) and open PvP and full loot games. It's just, last time I checked, no one wants these kind of games, only wolves. Right?

But yeah, snark aside, considering how much of an unfleshed clone H1Z1 is at the moment, I am really surprised of 1 million sales in less than two months.

For some reason, when the match is around 10 dudes left and the gas is close, my framerate drops from 80 to 25 (it feels worse though thanks to the above-mentioned jerkiness), frametimes go up to a 100ms and GPU usage starts bouncing between the floor and the ceiling. I can't figure out what's causing the bottleneck.

we’re excited to announce that the survival game will now be called H1Z1: Just Survive, with a renewed focus on truly delivering a persistent, open-world zombie survival experience where scavenging, crafting, and base building are the difference between life and death.

We’re also excited to announce that the fast-paced shooter comprised of multiple, fight-to-the-death game modes, including Battle Royale, will be called H1Z1: King of the Kill (KotK).

This is fucking ridiculous!

Stealing a page from the new Bible for Scammy Success in gaming by Chris & Roberts in no time, H1Z1 splits into two games with two separate development teams.

https://www.h1z1.com/news/just-survive-king-of-the-kill-game-split-february-2016?cid=1066645


Also, best acronym ever, H1Z1:KOTK.

What the fuck  :why_so_serious:

One must find a way to re-monetize the already monetized customers.

If I have the original game now, would I have to buy the second one now?  In theory, I mean...no way I would drop any more money on this one.

The split got me to boot this game up for the first time in six months.  Logged in, ran around for 10 minutes in a survival server, found most of the place totally looted and then got help up at gun point.  :oh_i_see:

Oh well.