The president of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, has announced that the Early Access for H1Z1, the MMO zombie-survival game, will commence for PC gamers starting on January 15th, 2015.
The news comes courtesy of a Reddit thread on the H1Z1 sub-reddit, where John Smedley himself posted the update to give fans and eager gamers a heads-up on when they can expect to jump into the game's zombie-apocalypse playpen.
Smedley writes...
“After a lot of hard work, we've decided to make the release date January 15th, 2015. This gives us just enough time to polish what we have and put out something we'll be proud of and hopefully you'll be excited to play.“Why did it take longer than we originally thought? It's a fair question. The simple answer is once we saw what we could have had earlier it wasn't good enough and we wanted to put something out that we would be proud of.”
Smedley makes it known that the game is still far from complete and requires a ton of work. Remember, this is Early Access and this means that the game will be incomplete and likely to contain a lot of bugs.
Originally the game was supposed to enter Early Access at the start of this fall and then later on release for the PlayStation 4. However, the team wanted to focus more on the quality of the game and decided to delay the Early Access phase so they could add in more features, clean up the existing features and give gamers a more sizeable experience.
Smedley goes on to state...
“We'll have 2 SKUS when we launch. The basic early access sku for $19.99 - which will let you into the game and have a great time, and a more expensive one which we'll announce here shortly. The difference between the two will be things like access to some of our different game mode servers (which you can get access to by purchasing tickets or earning them as well) and other specifics we'll be outlining soon.”
For those who may not have been keeping up to date on the progress of H1Z1, the game is an open-world zombie game very similar to DayZ. The title allows players to create their own character, battle against the undead as well as hunt animals and wildlife in a fully simulated ecosystem – and yes, the wildlife and zombies do get into fights with one another.
Smedley makes it known that the Early Access of the game will pale in quality and content when compared to DayZ, but they already know they're coming in slightly behind the curve and will adjust accordingly. The other thing that's pointed out in the Reddit post is that H1Z1 is more MMO-oriented, where-as DayZ is like a hybrid zombie-survival simulator and large-scale multiplayer deathmatch. While the descriptions may sound the same, keep in mind that H1Z1 will eventually grow to house as many players as SOE's other popular MMO, Planetside 2.
You can keep your eyes peeled for the Early Access launch of the game by paying a visit to the official website. Expect news about the PS4 version after the PC version gets stabilized and eventually moves out of alpha and into the beta phase.
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