H1Z1 Game

Another zombie survival game, H1Z1, hit the virtual shelves as a new early access from Sony Online Entertainment, to a mixed bag of reactions. The market has been saturated with games in this genre, but we’re always looking out for that one ZHS that will finally fill all the aspects we’re looking for. H1Z1 was promising, helmed by John Smedly, President of Sony Online Entertainment. Early access to the game looked pretty good, but then again, several of these games do. And then things started to fall apart.

I, like several other people, were hesitant yet looking forward to this newest iteration of the Zombie Horror Survival game. We paid the money, knowing full well the aspects of an early access game in alpha development. At first, it had almost everything we wanted, a beautiful atmosphere with hauntingly creepy locations like the housing development with unfinished homes and bare foundations with unfinished framing and tool chests lying about like the workers clocked out for lunch only to become said lunch. The crafting was a near dream, needing realistic parts to craft the more complex items like a wooden platform for a base, scrap metal to melt down to make nails, etc. And no more unlimited storage in the backpack! If you looted metal from various vehicles or structures, it took most of what you could carry because, well, metal in large quantities is heavy! And putting 60+ black berries in your shirt pocket is going to take up room. Needing to craft better backpacks and storage crates made it a bit more manageable, but first you had to survive. The first real killer you encounter is starvation. For some reason, while touting near-realistic mechanics, your character can die of thirst or hunger in less than a day unless you find something to eat or drink every ten minutes. Last I checked, a fit person (what most characters are in the game) can survive three days without water and up to two weeks without food. The NPC Zombies were not much of an issue, unless you got swarmed, nor were the wolves. The bears on the other hand, unless you were driving a tank with tactical missiles or could fly, you were dead almost every time you saw them. Running away didn’t help, as the bears did not stop following you, and could clip through terrain or walls and kill you in one hit. Unfortunately, after about two months of dedicated attention to the multi-player aspect of the game, it would seem these attentions were redirected towards the PVP Battle Royale servers, leaving the PVE portion of the game to gather dust as various glitches and upgrades are ignored in favor of updating the micro transaction store for the PVP servers instead. Recent changes to the company, mostly changing the name to Daybreak Game Company and the recent leadership leaving the president slots has players wondering if the company will survive.