Apparently, a lot has changed in H1Z1 since I last played it at SOE Live in August. Though I haven't gone hands-on with the game since, senior game designer Jimmy Whisenhunt has detailed big changes made as a result of fan feedback from SOE Live and PAX Prime.
"Over the past month or so we’ve been really focusing our design efforts. We are fortunate to have players in our game at such an early stage and have utilized your direct feedback to make a lot of small, iterative design changes in our pre-alpha build," Whisenhunt said.
"After much discussion and some debate, we decided to make several targeted and deliberate changes to how the player will be dropped into our world. One of the biggest changes we’ve made is to the starting equipment your character spawns into our apocalypse ridden world with. Being a massive sandbox MMO without XP patting you on the back, progression mechanics have to feel solid and early game combat needed to be more challenging."
So how are they doing that?
By removing the starting axe for one. According to Whisenhunt, removing the starting axe has "created an initial focus on world scavenging and ultimately crafting and building." Apparently, this creates an experience that's more reflective of the true survival nature of H1Z1. "Finding tools you need in the world allows you to move into crafting, which made many of us on the team feel a lot better about discoveries," he said.
Speaking of scavenging, there were also changes made to those systems as well. Here they are:
Weapons now only spawn into visible positions. Imagine you’re running through a house being chased by three zombies; you’re panicking and desperate to find anything to help you survive another few minutes. The LAST thing we wanted was for you to have to start searching cabinets and cars to find something to defend yourself with. It takes WAY too much time under pressure and would pull up container UIs etc etc. By spawning Axes/Crowbars/Machetes and the like on top of cabinets, cars, tables and toolboxes you can now quickly recognize helpful tools in the world to help you turn and fight; good job, survivor!
We’ve moved crafting items and general high population items to spawn almost exclusively inside of things. The design logic behind this is similar to spawning weapons on top of things: we don’t want to clutter your vision, which could cause people to get overloaded and miss important weapons to defend themselves with.
There was also a change made to fist attacks as a result of the new starting point for players.
Fists are now much easier to ‘combo’ while attacking and the ‘combo’ hits have a much larger impact on the target. For those of you not familiar with what combos are in our game, let me explain: Once you attack and make impact with a melee weapon you must attack again within a set window to hit the next step in the combo. If you attack at the right time, you will play a different animation that will do more damage/stagger the enemy/disorient a player and so on. This change was made for many reasons, but one major goal with this change was to help a new player understand that this system exists and to help people realize that it’s much easier to survive in our world if you optimize your attack strategies.
Other systems that SOE is looking at but didn't detail include projectile weapon combat and zombie behavior in combat; although, Whisenhunt did say that zombies will now grapple you, which sounds equally parts fun and terrifying.
Unfortunately, no release date was given. And we also don't know when PlanetSide 2 is coming to PS4.
