H1Z1 – 28 DayZ Later: Exclusive Hands-On
I’m not shy about stating my opinion on DayZ clones. If you read some of my other reviews, like 7 Days to Die for example, it is pretty clear that I think the whole genre is buzzword bullshit that exists solely to drum up Kickstarter money and Twitch/YouTube subscribers. Seeing as how my altar to the dark spirits has yet to yield results, I guess I better just get used to it and hope that a few decent games come out of it before the trend eventually burns out.
Going into the Sony Online Entertainment building on Friday, I did not expect H1Z1 to be one of these elusive good games. I was all excited for my first big boy press conference but had trouble maintaining that erection when people chortled at the name of the game I would be covering. “H1Z1?” my dear mother questioned, eyebrow cocked and head slightly back. “It’s really called H1Z1?” Well, I wouldn’t need any research to figure out what my first question would be. This whole professional journalism thing is easy!
What I did expect was a lot of “open world crafting,” “emergent player experiences,” “dynamic living worlds,” and other claptrap that all boils down to a game that spreads itself too thin to be enjoyed by any other than the criminally insane. Let me tell you what these games always boil down to. You can either A) work hard to balance your survival needs with resources for improving your situation, slowly building an inventory while establishing a base in a crawl towards self-sufficiency, or B) kill someone and eat their beans in the comfort of your newly acquired hovel. This is not how people normally conduct themselves in a society, mostly because it is way easier to work a bit and buy food rather than deal with the harsh reprisal of a society that has outlawed murderlooting. These kinds of games typically skew the effort/reward curve far in the favor of murder, and lo a sociopath simulator it becomes.
What I also expected was that H1Z1 would be DayZ but with crafting. Lots of games are trying to be DayZ with crafting. Hell, even DayZ is becoming DayZ with crafting. These kinds of games heavily lend themselves to being fodder for streamers. I think that these games follow a bit in the footsteps of the “massacore” games of yesteryear like I Wanna Be the Guy, where most sane people throw up their hands after their third death and get back to playing League of Legends and being miserable cowards. It takes a lot of dedication to not only learn how to play the game, but persevere after being reset to square one every death. That and money. Being paid to do it helps a whole lot.
What all this meant was that, walking through the door, my expectations were low. The onus was entirely on Sony to get me to walk out the door with a glowing review. It isn’t fair to say I was dead set on hating the game, just that I came in with a number of preconceptions that made me initially lukewarm to the whole idea of it. When I took my seat in the communal meeting area, I was curious to hear what my perhaps not so jaded peers thought of the game. It was at this point that I realized I was one of three non-streamers in the bunch. Well hell, SOE, can’t say you don’t know your target audience!
So I talked to some of the streamers, who might very well read this, and I have to begrudgingly admit I kind of liked most of them. This didn’t stop me from liberally murdering them in game, but I’m sure they got likes or subscribes out of it so I’m sure they didn’t mind. They also all had a significant amount more experience with the game, as they had played it before at another SOE event. Save for one that I won’t mention out of fear that his fans will send me anthrax, they did a lot to give me a baseline of excitement to build off of going into the game. Shoutout to Cohhcarnage for being incredibly friendly and well-spoken enough to impart a small sliver of his excitedness onto me.
The one thing I heard from everyone other than waves of shameless self-promotion was “DayZ that works.” Aside from the guaranteed channel views, they all seemed pretty stoked on the concept of a game like this being developed by a major production company rather than some dudes in a garage. It’s a pretty understandable sentiment, given DayZ’s notoriously perpetual “work in progress” status. Personally, I’m not sure I’m sold on the promise of “same old crap that at least works.” Still, it was impressive to meet the team and talk to some devs that not only clearly cared about the project, but also knew what they were doing. Touring their workspace was probably my highlight of the trip, as I got to see first-hand how they gather information on bugs and improvements. Unbeknownst to me while playing, the developers were watching the streamers and taking notes. I felt a bit like a guinea pig, but at least a guinea pig whose owner has its best interests at heart.
My time with the game was brief, but in that time I got a pretty good sense for the game. I discovered about 50 of the 130 craftable recipes, and I’m sure that given enough time I would be able to intuitively discover the majority of them. The game takes out a lot of the crafting guesswork with a simple discovery interface. If an item has recipes to discover, it will be selectable. If the item requires other items to craft, it will tell you that there exists another item, highlighting available combinations in your inventory. It counts down how many recipes you have to learn, so with enough blunt force it should be possible to discover everything.
This is aided by a lack of “junk” items and recipes. In a game like this, it is common for there to be several useless or limited use items that clutter your inventory until you look up the guide, only to learn that you have been unnecessarily burdened by forks and bent tin cans the whole time. As someone who likes to scour every corner of a map for all collectibles, it is frustrating to learn that the 20-weight point lawnmower engine’s only use is to build a makeshift decorative fan. In H1Z1 every item has either a use in crafting or in survival. Cans of beans can be eaten, but don’t leave behind useless empty cans to clutter your inventory. Empty bottles can be used to collect water, which has a number of crafting applications. Anything that is not either single use or an implement of destruction is useful in crafting. There are some silly items like packets of sugar and salt that I never found a use for, but the discovery tree always promised that they were worth something, which abated much of my distaste.
Meanwhile, higher level crafting recipes will automatically incorporate lower level ones. If you have all the raw materials to build a shack, then clicking the build button on the shack will build all the prerequisites automatically. It is vastly better than the brain-numbing 7 Days to Die system and might be the first of these games I don’t have to play with a Wiki open on my other monitor.
As I mentioned earlier, these kind of games are basically The Road simulators with more zombies and less existential crisis. I was not immune to this effect. I went into the game with the best of intentions to hunt zombies and learn crafting recipes. It was not 5 minutes in that I found a hatchet, and a moment later an unarmed fellow tester came up to ask for some advice on where to find a water source. After I had taken his empty water bottles, I left his crumpled corpse behind to find an answer to that question.
I found a motorcycle helmet in a garage and a military backpack in a nearby convenience store. I quickly tore down the nearest shrub to make a bow and arrow out of its branches and fell a tree to fashion a spear out of the logs. I lit a fire to hunt for prey and scored some nice venison off of the body of the first person that came to investigate the smoke. I found a car sometime later, and with the car battery and spark plugs I pulled deep out of my backpack, “Lord Munder, the Road Warrior” was born.
I found myself very quickly making decisions based on what would be best to hunt the most dangerous game. I put down piles of supplies and laid in wait for someone to be foolish enough to try to take them. Players would find my car seemingly unattended, only to find a snare trap in wait. At one point I surrounded a well with punji sticks and drove away, satisfied knowing that someone would one day fall victim to them. I wasn’t even doing it for the supplies anymore. I was doing it for the thrill.
At the point where I figured out where the shotgun shells spawned, the game was over. I was lord of the apocalypse. I scoured the land for campfire smoke and the promise of fresh kills. I had enough resources to build a shack, the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a throne of skulls. But as most good things in my life, it was ended with vehicular manslaughter. I was run down while trying to shoot a driver out of his car, so at least I died awesomely.
It was getting late in the day, and I couldn’t be bothered to start over. Though I certainly had fun, this is a game I can’t see myself playing in anything other than bursts. I will play for a while, get murdered, and put it away for a week. Starting over is by design punishing, but it isn’t something I really dig. For me, Dark Souls was the perfect level of punishing. Starting all the way over just feels too much like wasting my time, which ironically is why I became a horror critic.
After I played, I spent some time with senior game dev Adam Clegg and asked him a few questions about the project. I was impressed with how open the development of this game had been, as several builds had been available at events for a while now. This is one of the few games where first-hand gameplay accounts had been a majority of the information available. Talking to him, it was clear that the development goals reflected the expectations of the streamers. When I asked what H1Z1 brought to the table to set it apart from other DayZ clones, he referenced SOE’s expertise in making MMOs and ability to deliver a stable gameplay experience. This comes not only from the experience and work force of the devs, but also from the server infrastructure that a larger company like SOE can field for their game.
While not all SOE games have lived up to my expectations (I’m looking at you, DC Universe Online), I definitely got the sense that they wanted to go big with this game. While it is always the case that developers at least have to act excited for their projects, Adam pointed out that the game was designed in such a manner as to leave it open for further development. The intuitive crafting and discover system was designed so that new items and materials could be added in without messing up previous designs. The map will be static across all servers, but the actual scale of it is still to be determined. He told me that they are still toying with the right size to server population ration but was certain that the current DayZ model of 40 people on a huge map was way too sparse to create good player interaction. What is promising is their ability to deliver, as Adam promised that the current map world of 8×8 kilometers was not even a tenth of what their engine could support.
Servers will have their own settings, with the default option being the “full PvP drop all items on death survival game” that has become standard. Adam promised that the full release would see a slew of server settings, ranging from a variant with no vehicles to an entirely PvE experience. I am curious to see how these alternate settings work out, as I did not get any hands-on time with these other variants. It is odd for an MMO like this to have variable server settings (other than PvP and PvE servers), so it will be interesting to see how this all pans out.
That being said, I did hear a lot of empty promises. I know that these events are supposed to be a lot of excited hype, but seeing the innerworkings and hearing the dropped features was SOE’s Catch-22. I know that in all developments, some features will be left on the cutting room floor, but generally those games are in final release before being open to public scrutiny. This game is still a work in progress, so it is impossible to distinguish what is a future feature and what is a future abandoned concept. I heard from the streamers that there was previously an infection and attack combo mechanic, which made me wonder what else would be cut before the game reached a final state.
Likewise, certain features that the devs had promised didn’t seem to really be fully implemented. They had promised that zombies would be a big part of the game, but I only ran into about a dozen easily dispatched shambling corpses. Wolves proved to be a much bigger issue, but there wasn’t nearly enough wildlife to make hunting viable. Scrap metal could only be obtained by whacking cars with a crowbar, but without a crafting option for a crowbar, players have to find one. They promised that you would be able to get through the game by just sticking to yourself and crafting in the woods, but metal is a key component in most tools. It wasn’t ruining my experience, but I was disappointed to see such obvious contradictions between what was promised and what was presented.
H1Z1 has a long way to go. It is currently a fun if not rough-edged toy box, but will need plenty more development before it will be engrossing. As it is so hard to tell with these kinds of productions where the title will go, it is hard for me to recommend it right off the bat. If this is your kind of game, the asking price of $20 is reasonable, and you might get a kick out of the more player-driven experience. I definitely won’t warn people away from the game, but stay tuned as it develops to see if it is going in a direction you will be pleased with.
Oh, and I did ask a few devs about what was up with the name. The best answer I got was, “It was better than the other ones.” Well put, H1Z1 dev team. This is the kind of honesty I look for in a faceless corporate entity.
H1Z1 is an upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online Game developed by Sony Online Entertainment for the PlayStation 4 and the PC. The game is set in the United States during a zombie apocalypse wherein players will have to interact with the resources in the world to survive, build shelters, and craft weapons against zombies.
For more information keep on eye on the H1Z1 website!
Categorized:Horror Gaming News
