H1Z1 and the tricky weapon balancing game

A lot goes into the design of a weapon in H1Z1. In a recent blog post, Sony Online Entertainment Senior Game Designer Jimmy Whisenhunt talked a bit bout the weapons we've seen so far, explaining the process of creating, tuning, and finalizing them for the game.

Once a weapon is modeled, rigged, and animated it moves on to a process that Whisenhunt says is "commonly overlooked" in first-person shooter game developer — how a weapon reacts to in-game actions. "Design and Animation have to be in lock-step for a successful feel in combat, we need to have the same vision to ensure a solid experience for the player," Whisenhunt explained.

"The initial values we use for the ballistic simulation is almost 1:1 to real life but almost never stays there," he detailed. "We’ve mentioned in the past that we want to avoid tuning and creating things simply because they ‘that’s the way it is in real life,’ which means I get to take to take a realistic ballistic and weapon recoil feel and make it feel satisfying and fun. Typically the gravity of projectiles in real life doesn’t fit the intended play experience we seek out. After all, the weapon feel and functionality has to fit our world design as well as Zombie and Player combat."

Whisenhunt went on to say that the recoil and shooting mechanics that he envisioned for H1Z1 are proving successful so far, but admitted that there still needs to be some "tuning and support from engineering." It's in early access, he said, that players will see the systems "change through additions, rather than removing functionality. Guns in our game will recoil in different ways but do not return to their resting position. This means that if you aim at a point and fire, you must readjust between each shot to fire again."

For those of you interested in the full process of weapon design in H1Z1, check out the full blog post.