H1Z1 – Early Access Already?
227 words.
So apparently John Smedley of SOE called PvE players “disgusting carebears” on Twitter. (Covered by TAGN, BioBreak, and Clean Casuals.) It’s yet another example of how executives should never attempt to be funny in public.
More interesting to me was the sudden news (to me, at least) that H1Z1 is launching on Steam today (January 15). (Well, I say “launching” but I really mean “crowdfunding” because it’s an Early Access game.) This surprises me because I thought it would be a long, long time before we saw this game.
But then SOE seems be building their business around releasing games roughly two years before they are ready. I was burned once by SOE’s “early access” with Landmark, so there’s simply no way I’m buying Hizzy until launch day (and/or a deep, deep discount sale that puts it around $5), because if it’s anything like Landmark, they are releasing it way too early and what we’ll actually get is a game engine demo with maybe two hours of actual gameplay.
Not to mention that it’s a zombie survival game with, so far as I can recall, no distinguishing features. (Zing! Actually I don’t know if it has any features or not. I watched the very first live stream of H1Z1 and saw nothing but a running and driving simulator where you could hit zombies with a baseball bat.)
Archived Comments
Wilhelm Arcturus 2015-01-15T16:20:21Z
I think one of the amusing bits is not only is early access probably too early, but it is also late. Smed was talking about early access for H1Z1 coming 4-6 weeks after they announced it last April. This is why you don’t make those sorts of statements either… though I may be one of the few who even remembered that he made that statement at this point. Blogging for the win!
Anyway, as I said with Landmark, call me when it is open beta.
UltrViolet 2015-01-15T23:35:36Z Now that I’ve declared I won’t be getting it, I see that it’s only $20.. which is a tempting price despite the burn risk.
UltrViolet 2015-01-16T18:38:31Z But then I read about these Airdrops, and that temptation evaporates.
Izlain 2015-01-17T03:04:39Z It’s worth $20 currently, the money spent gets you an equal amount of RMT goods you would get in the store. I got the $40 version and am happy with the purchase. It’s going to be free to play at launch, so if you don’t want to spend a dime, wait til then. I was on board with the whole dissing the carebears and having a true PvP experience, but there are already PvE servers up. Money talks apparently. Airdrops are a big deal to some, but there’s been clarification on Reddit as to how they work and how they might be changed. It is Early Access after all, so expect changes. Full release isn’t supposed to be til later in the year so I imagine all kinds of things will be added and changed before then.
UltrViolet 2015-01-17T14:26:34Z Given how people tend to overreact on forums, I’m sure the Airdrop thing is nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be.. still, I think I’ll wait a little bit before I take a look at it. It sounds like it’s designed to be more of a PvP-style game anyway, and the PvE experience is pretty limited, at least for now.
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