One month later: The past, present, and future of H1Z1

Exactly one month ago today, Daybreak Game Company (formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment) launched Early Access to their post-apocalyptic, survival MMO, H1Z1. As an early access title, it launched with the warning that it was not a feature-complete game; there was still plenty of work left to do on it. But now, a month later, we’re starting to see that overall vision beginning to take shape.

As players in Early Access are already aware, Daybreak Game Company continues to push live new updates on a regular basis. These updates are small, but frequent, usually fixing bugs, tweaking and balancing game features, and things of that nature. Since launch, H1Z1 has struggled with things like properly balancing loot, but the most prevalent problem at this point seems to be hackers. In fact, earlier this month one of the updates included a complete server wipe to sort of restore the world to how it should be without all the hackers duping weapons. It’s something that lead designer Adam Clegg says was actually welcomed by the H1Z1 community.

“This is the first game I’ve worked on or been a part of where players are actually excited about completely serving wiping,” he told me in a one-on-one interview/playthrough. “We had a lot of dupe bugs in the past and it was ruining players’ experience because they would get killed and the perception was ‘Oh, it’s because he had a bunch of duped ammo,’ even if it wasn’t true, or you would kill the guy and then loot a thousand bullets and be like ‘Oh, this isn’t really survival.’ So that was probably not fun for most of the players that were pretty hardcore about survival. They really wanted a server wipe.”

“We also had a lot of player base persistence that was really wonky,” he explained. “Like, players were just able to place a base in the middle of the road and it would look really bad.”

“But the overall reception of the server wipe has been great so far,” Clegg said. “We told players in advance and that entire threat was nothing but ‘Thank God! I’m so glad!’”

Clegg described the server wipe as a “second launch” for H1Z1, having fixed most of the bugs and other glaring issues, like zombie AI which resulted in a feeling of an empty world. It’s adjustments and tweaks that he said are “part of” the Early Access experience.

Of course, H1Z1 is still in Early Access and there’s still much work to be done. Asking about Daybreak’s future plans, Clegg said all of the cosmetic things, like character creation and different wearables are all things being worked on.

“All of that is definitely being worked on, coming down the pipeline. We have concept art coming in right now that’s going to be made into wearables and it’ll go into the game hopefully pretty soon. We know that having one character model right now, looking unique and having different wearables is very important,” he said, adding that the female character model is being “worked on right now,” with plans to have different races as well. “And as we get through this alpha period, maybe into beta, we’ll have a ton more wearables so players will really start to look unique.”

Another issue brought up was map size. Clegg said there were some initial discussions on the H1Z1 forums regarding the map being too small compared to games like DayZ, but said players would return a few days later defending the size. “They would come back saying, ‘It took me a few days, maybe a week or two, to learn the map, but now that I know the map I’m not as mad as I would be when I die because I know that when I spawn I can figure out where I am and get to my friends a little more easily.’ So they’re actually enjoying the smaller map which kind of makes me wonder how we’re going to expand the map in the future.” Clegg acknowledged that there are “definitely” people who want the larger map, but defended that the majority of players are enjoying the smaller map.

Looking ahead, Clegg said Daybreak plans to publish a more in-depth road map of what’s being worked on soon, but did give me a heads up as to what they are thinking about so far.

“As far as getting new things into the game, there’s things like more crafting recipes that we want to do, more quest items that we want to do. We want to have more things on the map — eventually want to expand the map out. But one of the big things we’re trying to get is showing the guns on the person. So when you run up to somebody and they say they don’t have anything, you can tell because they won’t have anything on their back or on their waste or over their shoulder. That’ll change the game big time because then you’ll be able to run up to somebody who doesn’t have anything in their hand, but you see they have a shotgun on their back.”

For now, though, the main focus is on stabilizing server lag and getting rid of all the possible hackers. “There’s like a constant war going on with hacking and we’ve been banning hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more hackers. We’re just getting more and more info as the development cycle goes on,” he said.

Back in January, after one week of Early Access, I wrote that if Daybreak Game Company continues to listen to feedback and build upon the base game, there’s no reason why H1Z1 can’t be the game we’re all hoping to be. It’s amazing how much progress has been made in just a month. Many of my initial complaints have been address: zombies are more frequent thanks to an improved AI, the loot system is much improved, and the hackers are starting to disappear. If all of this has been addressed in just one month, I look forward to seeing what Daybreak can accomplish in another.