I find myself freakin’ paralyzed with fear sometimes. I don’t want to go out there! But it’s because of the other players right now. I’m hoping that with more aggressive zeds we will have some incentive not to KoS everyone. Not that I object in principle–I like this sort of PvP–but I also like consequences for actions. And I’d like a better weapon than my stupid bow too.
The food/water mechanics really make you keep moving, I’ll give 'em that.
Loot is MUCH better now with the latest patch. Or I should say, it was much better on a LOW population server as it seems some folks still having issues on higher pop servers.
In 1 hour of playing I looted a church, 2 small camps, and 1 home and came away with machete, lighter, goggles, .308 hunting rifle, 6x .308 rounds, hammer, twine, lots of metal (yay, I can craft useful gear now!), first aid kit. Left a bunch of stuff behind too including basic melee weps (knives, bats) and ammo for guns I didn’t have.
Also met my first real bandits. By real I mean not just fresh noobs trying to knock you out with a lucky punch. These 2 guys attacked me from my flanks with bows (while I was filling bottles at a well) but fortunately I’d heard them coming and was able to not get shot in the head immediately.
The fight was savage and no words were uttered by anyone. The only sounds were those of brutal combat (shots, swings, slices, grunts, groans) and the ambient noises of night. Ended up killing them both with 30% health remaining but the shots I fired alerted several nearby zombies and they were closing in while I looted the corpses. I dispatched them silently and continued my looting of the bodies.
It was a tense and eerie moment, going through their pockets with the crickets and wolf howling in the background. My heart was still pounding and my hands shook as the adrenaline rush subsided.
All in all, it was extremely satisfying to walk away from that encounter alive and stocked with their ill-gotten gains, knowing that they would have to start over, including relearning recipes they had “forgotten” with their deaths… (it’s a Hardcore Recipe Wipe server)
Anyway, I’m sold.
According to Smed, they’ve already hit 3M sales on this in early access. Damn, this genre is popular.
Yeah, though I can’t say I’ve benefited from the better loot yet (med pop servers), I’ve had some interesting experiences. Ran into several people who were friendly, or at least not hostile, avoided others and was avoided by others, and was ganked by a few. The best was when, at night, I approached a compound and was attacked by a zombie. I headshotted the zombie (with my bow, the rifle I had looted from another zed had no ammo) and was engaging a wolf when blammo! Some dude opened up from a window in the makeshift compound with a rifle. I didn’t run fast enough.
There are of course a lot of weirdnesses. Harvesting simply…stops sometimes. Can’t harvest berries or sticks, but can still loot containers. I have yet to see any metal stuff other than pipes (which oddly enough can’t be used as clubs, go figure), so no edged weapons at all. Critters get stuck on things a lot (though it was hilarious to watch a bear chase three players through a truck stop, I must admit). And some of the interface is a bit unintuitive. But I find the atmosphere and “feel” pretty cool.
Are you sure you are not confusing it with this announcement?
https://twitter.com/Hicks_206/status/558689350268252162
From Dayz dev.
Hah! Yep, that’s what I get for browsing Twitter on my phone whilst distracted with other things. Thanks!
So I found this AR-15, but no ammo, and I’m hiding in a closet. That’s where I logged out. No doubt I’ll get killed before I find the bullets…
Anyone able to compare this to 7 days to die?
So I’ve found some guns, but very little ammo, and a few more bits and pieces of stuff. I’ve also found that the lack of anything really to do, and the lack of any real threat from the zombies, makes this early alpha state rather brutal. About half the people I meet are like “friend, friend, easy dude” and the other half just shoot first. It’s also hard to tell who people are at a distance, as nameplates don’t show up from very far away, so trying to help someone fend off zombies or animals can easily be taken as a hostile act. It all creates a very distrustful and tense world, which has its gaming appeal, but it will be better I think when or if they get it balanced so that there are some real reasons to cooperate with people rather than simply shoot them on sight.
Loot spawns are still wonky, but that’s going to be a tough one to balance I think. Too much, and there’s not enough tension and competition. Too little, and it’s boring and overly frustrating, and the few who do get the stuff first tend to have an insurmountable advantage.
And apparently one of the consequences of the zombie apocalypse was that everyone had a strange compulsion to stick tactical flashlights in their footstools.
Compared to 7d2d.
h1z1 is uglier. Yeah, bear with me.
There are areas in 7 days that I can see more than 5 feet in front of me. There are areas with color, contrast, and variety.
None of those in h1. It’s just a wash of grey, with a ps2 era flat fog system overlaid on top.
IT’s a lot jankier. THe server authoritative nature, combined with a slow, or laggy server backend means that you really don’t know if something is working or not until about half a second later. That ends up making the whole experience a “Guess if that’s interactive” type of game. There’s no rhyme or reason to what you can interact with. INteractibles highlight sometimes, but generally, it’s a crap shoot.
There’s also the classic zombie game issue where they use useful object art as non-interactive debris.
Combat, at least very early, is mostly hope driven. You release and hope you hit their head. Very difficult to use and aim a bow. Haven’t gotten to firearms.
I’ll be honest. I bought it and really regret it. It might end up getting better, but as it stands, it’s a cash in. I’d be more willing to cut them some slack if it was an indie group, but it isn’t. It’s SOE, and frankly, in it’s current form, I think it’s a terrible zombie game.
It’s not really a zombie game right now, despite their advertising and, um, name. The game is really a sort of survival sandbox, and on PvP servers a sort of Hobbesian world simulator. It’s very rough and quite imperfect (though if you crank up the draw distance to the max you can actually see a LOT more, when it’s not, um, dark, raining, or foggy, which is not that often), and indeed the lagginess of the controls is really annoying.
But, it excels in some things already. The feeling of fear is real, but it’s not fear from zombies, it’s fear from other players. I will agree this is not a very compelling game if you are committed to a PvE server. The “zombie game” experience so far is lame. I have had exactly one case of two zombies attacking me at once, and never more. Usually, they are simply targets. Wolves are annoyances, and bears are things you run away from as fast as you can. Humans, though, are the real killers. Every interaction is fraught with tension, on a PvP server. Not what a lot of people want, and if you want a humans vs. zombies game right now this one has a long way to go, admittedly.
So far I’m playing it like a roguelike. Unless you play on a recipe wipe server (which seems masochistic but w/e), when you die you still know all the stuff you learned, so you know what to look for at least, but the process of finding stuff again is pretty much all there is to the game right now, so the grind back isn’t that terrible. I’ve lost guns and backpacks and stuff like that to gankers but, eh, you ain’t going to keep much anyhow for very long right now until they get a better handle on things like encampments and storage.
But I do agree that the damn thing is marketed as a zombie game, not a Lord of Flies simulator. It isn’t much of the former (yet, it’s still alpha), but it’s showing great promise as the latter, FWIW.
From what I understand, the Zombies are really dialed back right now.
They did this as a temporary thing while they fix the loot.
The Zombies can be quite fast. Seems there are 3 types of Zeds right now. The stand around and do nothing until you’re a foot away zombie. They swing at you, but if you move away they stop. May follow you a little bit.
The ones that will notice you at a distance and chase you a little before stopping. These ones move around some.
The last type I’ve seen are the ones that are moving around the most and will chase you for a good long time, or get distracted by something else…
Eventually the zombies will be worse, even forming large hordes to chase you around. I’ve only heard rumors of harder zombies being added, but it’s rumors.
This an older video of a zombie horde https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDA3MnevA-Q
This makes sense; they need the zombies to be a credible threat to give people hard choices to make about cooperation or conflict.
You think it will make a difference in how people behave toward other players? I do not share your sunny optimism ;) I think the scorpion is still going to sting the frog every time.
I think it will make a very small difference :). There are always some folks who want to try cooperation on a PvP server. But of course, the lure of the ruleset is largely in the dog eat dog environment. At least more active zombies will hold out the possibility of indirect revenge on the predators…
This is a very odd game in some ways. As it winds its way through EA/alpha, the zombies are getting stronger and loot is becoming more prevalent, and of course bugs are coming and going. But the game dynamic is still unsettled. As an early access title, that’s to be expected to a degree, but I do wonder what exactly is the design intent. The game is not a very solid shooter, as combat is floaty and imprecise, and hardly visceral. The survival aspects are sort of half-baked, with no account for things like exposure or any real benefit to being in a shelter as opposed to out in the rain, and with a crafting system that is pretty light on options and variety. On the other hand, it’s a great rogue-like, on PvP servers, in that there’s a perverse satisfaction you get to seeing how far you can get (measured in how much stuff you can find and how powerful you can become) before getting ganked. And it’s a fascinating sociological laboratory, as a lot of these free for all games can be. Watching groups of people act like they stepped out of Lord of Flies is sort of intriguing–as long as you can do so from a hidden site in the bushes a good ways away.
I’m actually not sure the game has much to do with zombies, though. Outside of the actual occasional shambling corpses, which at least have become a bit more aggressive, numerous, and almost dangerous at times, and the music and lighting cues, this is more a Psych 101 lab project than a game in some ways. Now, I haven’t even tried a PvE server; I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would play that way with the game the way it is now. I’d be up for PvE zombie apocalypse in an MMO setting IF the zombies were actually a threat and if you could feel the sort of tension that single-player games seem to be able to generate. But right now, the freakin’ bears are more of a threat than the walking dead.
The real foe is people like “DirtbagDan” or “xNoobFartx,” just two of the folks who have ganked me or tried to. Which doesn’t bother me, as that’s what PvP servers are, but I do wish the combat aspect of the game was better. Melee is an exercise in flailing about, and gunplay is, um, let’s just say not in CoD or even PlanetSide territory.
Yeah, that’s why I have been playing more Dying Light than H1Z1 of late. I want to play a zombie game, not a primarily PvP game with a few zombies in the background. Which is not to say H1Z1 is a bad game, it’s just doing something that I have to be in a particular mood to appreciate.
That’s it in a nutshell. Right now SOE doesn’t really have a clear direction for the game, which could evolve along different axes depending on what they decide I guess. I’m not sure they really will be able to define a clear niche, though. If you have only PvE servers, doing a full-on zombie game could be quite feasible, as you can focus on making the environment deadly and encouraging cooperation. Still, how would it compare to the single player and co-op experience of other, better looking, zombie games? If you’re committed to having PvP, how do you have purpose in the game? There’s no way right now for instance to really secure much so that you feel loss when you die–everything you really need is readily lootable, and/because everything you try to secure is easily stolen/raided. It’s fine right now as a cheapo early access rogue-like experience, but if they want it to generate StationCash sales and sustained participation like PlanetSide, say, they’ll have to have a better progression mechanism that will be balanced for the KoS PvP.
After the 2/5 patch, I’m still not sure where DBG (nee SOE) is going with this. The zombies are a bit more prevalent and somewhat more active, but still not much of a threat. Fighting other people is still sucky because combat itself is poorly executed. Melee fights are ludicrous, with each player sort of passing into and through the other, no real way to aim blows, and no real feedback. Movement is jerky and floaty and trying to hit anything that isn’t totally stationary with a bow is an exercise in futility, especially as the game often glitches the reloads. Shotguns work up close, which is fine, and the automatic rifle is ok; the .45 is so-so. Spears are great against dumb zeds but almost impossible to use against humans due to the crappy movement/aiming mechanics.
All of this renders most of the other systems improvements–loot, rate of hydration/energy loss, storage capacity–sort of moot, especially on the PvP servers, where there is still jack-all to do but wait around to kill people or simply go on a rampage until someone aces you. There are also a number of collision/physics glitches (it’s an alpha, I’ll cut them slack on that) that, together with what seem to be more organic problems, make the whole thing a sort of charlie foxtrot. It’s given me my 20 bucks worth certainly, so I won’t complain, but I do wonder where the hell this thing is going.
And I think I’m pretty much done, or at least I’m going to give it a rest for a few months. I got my early access money’s worth out of it and if it pans out as a viable game later on, all the better. Right now though the cheating/hacking combined with the lack of direction sort of makes it less than worth while to even log in. People exploiting the geometry to hide in the ground, one-shotting you in the head with an arrow even though you’re wearing a helmet (which is supposed to stop that), being invisible but seeing you, all the good stuff you expect from FPS online with the added benefit of a development team that may or may not actually have the resources to do much about it.
More crucially, though, the game still has no focus. They keep tweaking the lighting and shotgun pellet damage, but the core of the experience remains murky. Might be interesting in a month or two though. We’ll see.