H1Z1 - New SOE Game

If I was in SOE's shoes I would be taking a hard look at DayZ's sales data that is public and its limitations. Then I would stay true to what DayZ attempted to do, but with the features it will never have which they have nailed in the talking points. For example, player built towns. Stuff like that is what adds more depth to the game and creates incentive not to KOS.

I feel like survivor and DayZ fans should be optimistic for this title. It is the only studio with the possibility to deliver on what we have waited for patiently over the last two years. Either way it will be more playable than DayZ ever was, and as stated by the devs they will have servers with different rule sets. I imagine along the lines of PVE, 3rd person traditional, hardcore 1st person and some other stuff mixed in. I'm going cheerleader on this one. I want them to succeed only because I loved the concept of DayZ, just not the execution.
 
I have to say, I am absolutely disgusted by what seems to be a large faction of the fans over on the H1Z1 subreddit. In the thread created by smedley asking for input on how to monetize the game, I would say at least 60% of the people commenting are asking for straight up Pay 2 Win scenarios. Another 50%, roughly, are also asking for Pay 4 Convenience (which results in the dev griefing their player base, ala mobile). If this is the future of gaming, I'm going to be leaving the scene.
 
I think this is exactly what the zombie open-world survival genre needed all along. DayZ was simply the kickstarter for the genre, but never got past it's technical limitations.

Color me excited. At the very least, it sounds like Smedley is being extremely honest and is very invested in giving people a different experience in AAA form.
 
delita said:
I'm sure all current speculation leads to Zombie MMOFPS on the Planetside 2 engine.

Which in my opinion....could be pretty freakin awesome. Compared to your current zombie FPS games out there like DayZ and Infestation. The sheer number of players the PS2/EQN:L engine supports (up to 2000) would give SOE a huge advantage in making the first "large scale" zombie game.

I, for one, am most definitely interested if this is anything close to what they are going to announce today.
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The PS2 engine is limited to 2 threads. Terrible performance. Planetside 2 large battles bring my machine to an absolute crawl and its CPU limited. My GPU is hardly breaking a sweat. When I see my i7 930 pegged at a solid 25% utlization (8 * .25 = 2 cores) and my frames < 30, it makes me sad.
 
Any monetization should be strictly limited to cosmetic things which have ZERO impact on the actual game.

Character skins, clothing skins, vehicle skins, etc. There's a ton of things you could put up to allow people to have unique looks that people would buy (IE a mad max inspired outfit/vehicle) while just being cosmetic and offering 0 advantages over a free player.

League of Legends is probably the best "f2p" model out there and the kind of model I wish f2p games would follow instead of say, the World of Tanks model.
 
Maplehamwich said:
I have to say, I am absolutely disgusted by what seems to be a large faction of the fans over on the H1Z1 subreddit. In the thread created by smedley asking for input on how to monetize the game, I would say at least 60% of the people commenting are asking for straight up Pay 2 Win scenarios. Another 50%, roughly, are also asking for Pay 4 Convenience (which results in the dev griefing their player base, ala mobile). If this is the future of gaming, I'm going to be leaving the scene.
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The funny thing is when NOT given the opportunity for input, these same people are probably bashing other games for having pay2win cash shop scenarios.

It's the biggest problem with letting the players have input into what goes in the game and what doesn't. Many individuals have NO idea what they really want and honestly don't even deserve the chance to voice their opinions.

Smedley just needs to do take what Infestation and DayZ have done well and add on to that. Keep the game about SURVIVAL. There is no survival aspect in the game if you can just take real world money and buy yourself a bunch of guns to load out characters. "Good" weapons should be rare at best within the survival zombie apocalypse setting. Unsure if this game will have a Global Inventory yet but if it does, once everyone has a bag full of sniper rifles the way people play the game shifts drastically. My vote would be for a very LIMITED global inventory. It's a fine line between GI and no GI. There are good arguments for having it and good arguments for not having it, which is why I would ask for a small limited number of global spaces.
 
jadams said:
The PS2 engine is limited to 2 threads. Terrible performance. Planetside 2 large battles bring my machine to an absolute crawl and its CPU limited. My GPU is hardly breaking a sweat. When I see my i7 930 pegged at a solid 25% utlization (8 * .25 = 2 cores) and my frames < 30, it makes me sad.
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I generally didn't have any problems with the engines performance. Keep in mind though that there won't be anywhere NEAR the amount of stuff going on in H1Z1 compared to PS2.
 
Amaroth said:
I generally didn't have any problems with the engines performance. Keep in mind though that there won't be anywhere NEAR the amount of stuff going on in H1Z1 compared to PS2.
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In terms of texture rendering, I'd like to see an actual zombie HORDE, not just 3-4 zombies at one time.

Zombies that do not pose a threat to players is a problem within these games. It turns the game into a run of the mill PVP FPS with zombies being a minor nuisance rather than a serious obstacle.

Then I always come back to the other problem: Encouraging players to PLAY TOGETHER in these type of games. There are 2 ways (in my opinion) to accomplish this
1) Huge number of players (possible on this engine) - The likelihood of winning a shootout as a lone wolf versus a group of players together on voice chat etc diminishes greatly, it promotes you finding a group of players to roll with to stay alive
2) Making zombies hard as fuck. If they are a REAL obstacle, and they can kill you very easily, you will likely want to play with others to ensure your survival

The current games out there have poor systems implemented for GROUPING. SOE can do this much better than DayZ/Infestation.
 
delita said:
In terms of texture rendering, I'd like to see an actual zombie HORDE, not just 3-4 zombies at one time.

Zombies that do not pose a threat to players is a problem within these games. It turns the game into a run of the mill PVP FPS with zombies being a minor nuisance rather than a serious obstacle.

Then I always come back to the other problem: Encouraging players to PLAY TOGETHER in these type of games. There are 2 ways (in my opinion) to accomplish this
1) Huge number of players (possible on this engine) - The likelihood of winning a shootout as a lone wolf versus a group of players together on voice chat etc diminishes greatly, it promotes you finding a group of players to roll with to stay alive
2) Making zombies hard as fuck. If they are a REAL obstacle, and they can kill you very easily, you will likely want to play with others to ensure your survival

The current games out there have poor systems implemented for GROUPING. SOE can do this much better than DayZ/Infestation.
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This is an area where I felt State of Decay did it sooooooooo much better.

Noise and other things "Attracted" zombies from around you, you already had "hordes" that roamed around together on top of random zombies here and there.

However what made the zombies such a threat wasn't simply the sheer number that might happen upon you, but the fact that your character had stamina, and at low stamina you couldn't attack/defend well, sprint, etc.

You could easily find yourself in a house, accidentally make a noise or something and attract zombies outside to your presence, then you start fighting them off and they keep pouring in to the house through windows/doors (which you could board up if you planned ahead) and then you find yourself winded, try to sprint, fight off a couple more and get lucky to make it to a vehicle or something to get away or don't.

That was something I found sorely missing from many other zombie games, the sense of danger and vulnerability that the stamina system brought and the fact that your character wasn't superman and couldn't just endlessly exert themselves.
 
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Stiler said:
This is an area where I felt State of Decay did it sooooooooo much better.

Noise and other things "Attracted" zombies from around you, you already had "hordes" that roamed around together on top of random zombies here and there.

However what made the zombies such a threat wasn't simply the sheer number that might happen upon you, but the fact that your character had stamina, and at low stamina you could attack, sprint, etc.

You could easily find yourself in a house, accidentally make a noise or something and attract zombies outside to your presence, then you star fighting them off and they keep pouring in to the house through windows/doors (which you could board up if you planned ahead) and then you find yourself winded, try to sprint, fight off a couple more and get lucky to make it to a vehicle or something to get away or don't.

That was something I found sorely missing from many other zombie games, the sense of danger and vulnerability that the stamina system brought and the fact that your character wasn't superman and couldn't just endlessly exert themselves.
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I agree with you. State of Decay did a lot of things right (as a single player game). If they could implement this kind of stuff into a multiplayer game...we have a winner.

Sadly, most of my deaths in State of Decay resulted from fiery sports car crashes :(
 
Also, State of Decay sucked in a lot of other ways (some related to the shitty PC port).
 
this game sounds awesome.
i just hope they deliver what they are promising.
sounds almost too good to be true.
 
MavericK96 said:
Also, State of Decay sucked in a lot of other ways (some related to the shitty PC port).
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Very much related to the port. However, it was extremely odd for me. Put a solid 5 hours in less than 2 days into it, but haven't touched it since. There's a huge drop-off where everything feels monotonous for me after that.
 
I've seen a bunch of people asking questions about the Map size. Forgelight is built to handle arbitrarily sized worlds. Our plan is simple - we're building the core of "anywhere USA". When we first open it up to users the map will be huge, but nowhere near as big as it's going to be in short order. Our Map Editing system allows us to quickly add massive areas. We want to make sure we clearly understand how the players are playing the game before we do that. On Planetside 2 we made a mistake by making multiple continents before we had a strong enough idea of what worked and what didn't. This game is different. We're doing it smarter.

When we open up the Early Access there will be a massive map for players to enjoy. Over time (very quickly) they'll magically just be able to keep going further than they've gone before. It's a very unique way of doing it, but we actually think this is a better way to go.

So not to worry. Zombie Apocalypse isn't going to be any fun if it's like Disneyland on Spring Break and super crowded. We want remote.. haunting... being scared when you see someone. Your first instinct needs to be to hide. If there are 20 players in your view it's not a very convincing Apocalypse :)

So how many players per server? Who knows. As we add more land the number of people we can hold on a server goes way up. So we're excited. We have a ton of zombies for you to fight too. You'll be seeing hordes :) oh yes you will.

Smed
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Just what I was hoping for :)
 
I'm kind of spacing out here, do we know when we can purchase Early Access yet?
 
Pringle said:
Very much related to the port. However, it was extremely odd for me. Put a solid 5 hours in less than 2 days into it, but haven't touched it since. There's a huge drop-off where everything feels monotonous for me after that.
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Yeah, that's actually my main issue with the game. I think the problem is that you are really doing the same tasks over and over and over. Coupled with the "real-time" progression when you are out of the game, you are essentially just spending a bunch of your time gathering resources and running around doing not much of anything. I haven't gotten to the end of the game, but so far the quests and storyline have been pretty meh, and overall the game feels pretty shallow. If it had co-op it might be a little better, but for an SP game it's really not as deep as it first appears.
 
jadams said:
The PS2 engine is limited to 2 threads. Terrible performance. Planetside 2 large battles bring my machine to an absolute crawl and its CPU limited. My GPU is hardly breaking a sweat. When I see my i7 930 pegged at a solid 25% utlization (8 * .25 = 2 cores) and my frames < 30, it makes me sad.
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Have you played PS2 since they did their optimization pass? It runs a lot more consistent now even during the big Amp/Tech plant battles.
 
That screenshot is actually pretty sweet. The one thing I don't like about the PS2 engine though, is the draw distances feel tiny. It could be because you see so much, it feels tiny, but it's actually huge. Though, all I remember from PS2 is seeing very little detail in the distance, and when I take the 1 or 2 minutes to walk there, suddenly there is a lot more going on in that area. That was bad for a combat game like PS2, but it could potentially be even worse for a survival game.

Perhaps that's changed since I last played though. I think that was like a year ago.
 
QcGuy said:
Have you played PS2 since they did their optimization pass? It runs a lot more consistent now even during the big Amp/Tech plant battles.
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I havent played in a couple months. I'd love to though. I'll check it out now that I saw this.
 
Man i am getting tired of zombies its getting beat to death like ww2 games were a few years ago. that being said i am still looking forward to see how this shapes up
 
shifty68 said:
Man i am getting tired of zombies its getting beat to death like ww2 games were a few years ago. that being said i am still looking forward to see how this shapes up
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That was my first reaction to this announcement - zombie genre being further run dry .. But then you factor nobody has done a definitive, polished zombie survival sandbox game - they've either been mods on wonky engines (DayZ, Breaking Point) or cash grab knockoffs (WarZ aka Infestation: Survivor Stories, Nether). SOE has the resources to do it right, and will benefit from the trail DayZ blazed by analyzing what it did right and what it got wrong.
 
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GearChoices said:
Let's hope SOE actually does that, since Bohemia and Rocket never had any interest in doing so themselves.
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I think Bohemia's main problem is the ability to execute. And that they're basically figuring it out as they go along. At a high level, Bohemia seems good at making "SDK games" or game creation kits -- providing what's mostly a framework that modders in turn make their own creations with. Especially true of the Arma series. I think Bohemia is great, but they're not moving fast enough with DayZ. I've seen behind the scenes videos of Bohemia's office where they interviewed Dean Hall and all the developers working on DayZ, and you get a sense of nice people but a lot of them seem fairly green and like maybe its only their first or second videogame.

Whereas SOE has the perspective and expertise of Planetside2 and other games, and the ability to execute and scale quickly. If they need more finances, if they need to bring in technical expertise, they'll do so quickly. Just the sense I get based on how PS2 was managed. A bigger commercial interest with more manpower and financial power. Of course whether or not the "F2P" model really works and is viable versus an upfront buy-in.. is a whole 'nuther topic.
 
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shifty68 said:
Man i am getting tired of zombies its getting beat to death like ww2 games were a few years ago. that being said i am still looking forward to see how this shapes up
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I agree, but as DPI said, and like I have been telling my friends. No one has done it RIGHT or as PROMISED. IF, BIG IF, a studio actually did it would wash away every bit of fatigue and negative feeling I have for the genre currently. My fatigue comes from developers, not the genre. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, BF1942 and a few other WWII games burnt me out but they were all EXCELLENT titles.

DPI said:
I think Bohemia's main problem is the ability to execute. And that they're basically figuring it out as they go along.
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Pretty much. Their failure to deliver so far revolves around 3 things. 1. They chose the Arma engine. 2. They put an experienced idea man in charge of running a team. 3. They have no experience/track record in delivering anything other than an authentic military sim.
 
Looks really rough. I don't think I want to play in that early access in 4-6 weeks. Not in the state it is in now. :(
 
Amaroth said:
I agree, but as DPI said, and like I have been telling my friends. No one has done it RIGHT or as PROMISED. IF, BIG IF, a studio actually did it would wash away every bit of fatigue and negative feeling I have for the genre currently. My fatigue comes from developers, not the genre. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, BF1942 and a few other WWII games burnt me out but they were all EXCELLENT titles.



Pretty much. Their failure to deliver so far revolves around 3 things. 1. They chose the Arma engine. 2. They put an experienced idea man in charge of running a team. 3. They have no experience/track record in delivering anything other than an authentic military sim.
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Yeah. It blows my mind how they could have squandered their opportunity to such epic levels. sad sad :(
 
Amaroth said:
Looks really rough. I don't think I want to play in that early access in 4-6 weeks. Not in the state it is in now. :(
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lol, have you seen DayZ SA or Rust? both worse by far when they came out - probably still worse than h1z1 is now from the looks of it

they've got the right things going, still looking forward to it
 
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