If you weren’t already getting enough of the post-apocalyptic life simulator H1Z1, then double the content and see how you feel about it. Is it a horror fan’s dream zombie survival game?
As of February 17, H1Z1 has been broken into two different games: King of the Kill and Just Survive. H1Z1: King of the Kill drops players into the map and lets them duke it out for who exactly ends up on top. H1Z1: Just Survive is a co-operative experience focused on survival and crafting. They are exactly what they sound like, and the game’s developers, Daybreak, hope to accommodate both audience sets through focusing on the strengths of each game type.
From the announcement on the official site:
Last year, we started to notice new player trends emerging – both the initial Survival game and Battle Royale game mode now have strong populations who almost exclusively play one or the other.
The more we developed this game with you, our community, the more we realized that in order to fully support both aspects of H1Z1, and their respective players, we needed to make them their own stand-alone games supported by their own dedicated development teams. Many players in the community have been discussing splitting the game and we’ve heard you loud and clear. We want to make sure we give both titles the support they need and deserve to truly flourish.
So, we’ve decided to do just that – we’re excited to announce that the survival game will now be called H1Z1: Just Survive, with a renewed focus on truly delivering a persistent, open-world zombie survival experience where scavenging, crafting, and base building are the difference between life and death.
The announcement of the bifurcated game comes in the wake of some press detailing a coming console version of King of the Kill, which will be ported to both PS4 and XBox One in summer of 2016. Daybreak will be able to spread the property around, now that they are an independent company and not owned solely by Sony.
We had to see this coming — it’s been in the cards since the original release last January — but that doesn’t necessarily make it make more sense. What is disconcerting about this switch is not that they’re making a change, but that they’re splitting this into two different games.
Rather than just maintain the game modes within the structure of the original title, they’ve ostensibly created two revenue streams, where there used to be one. Each of the game modes is $19.99 on Steam, individually, while the entire game used to be $19.99 in total.
It wouldn’t really be a huge problem, if H1Z1 didn’t already have some weird issues surrounding monetization. The game has since cleaned up its image, but the initial release was plagued by claims of “pay-to-win” microtransactions being in the game.
As far as I can tell, the current set-up only allows players to buy skins and superficial items to sidestep any accusations of an unbecoming nature, but something about it still feels…off. That is doubly true when considering that players on the forums — big surprise, but listen — still seem to be encountering some of the same issues that hampered the title’s original release.
However, it should be noted that this kind of decision is no surprise. Daybreak, back when it was part of Sony Online Entertainment, before Sony sold them off, teased the idea of eventually splitting the two up. Layoffs hit the company in February and March of last year, so maybe that had a detrimental effect on either or both of the titles.
The upside of all this is that early adopters, people who purchased the game before February 16, will have access to both versions without penalty or extra charge. That’s a nice (and absolutely necessary) goodwill gesture to keep the wheels rolling until they figure out the business model.
Not that they don’t have time. H1Z1 sold over 1 million copies in the first two months of release, so it’s not like the game is drowning. Still, the previously mentioned shake-ups in the structure of the company are hard to ignore.
Also, there is still a question of how this will affect development of the game that does not sell as well, moving forward. King of the Kill appears to be the more popular, so how much development would then go into a version of Just Survive that sees an ever-dwindling player base? That’s something that’s still up in the air, especially given the fact that DayZ style survival sims are not blowing up en masse the way most people probably thought they would over the last few years.
Steam Early Access is beginning to be a place where games of this type go to, well not die, exactly, but linger in a kind of development limbo. When Daybreak had Sony backing them, there was probably more of a cushion than there is likely right now. Only time will tell how this gamble pays off.
How the Games Play
With the news out of the way, the real question remains as to how the games play. It’s been a year, the games should have had some time to grow and change, maybe to become something beyond a zombie survival sim also-ran.
What is painfully clear is that King of the Kill is the best bet, of the two games. Not only is it the most compelling on a minute-by-minute basis, but it is also where the audience seems to have settled. While Just Survive feels a little underwhelming.
Both games “work” just as advertised, but there are some problems still to be dealt with before either version will feel like something most people would want to play. The world feels as barren as it ever was. The UI is functional but clunky. The zombies are not interesting to interact with. If you’re playing Just Survive and stumble into one of the zones controlled by a major clan, then you’ll probably end up having a bad experience.
Not only that, but the game actively feels like a launch-week title. The servers have weirdly long queue times, and the survival game doesn’t have the feel of a complete survival game, even one year later. Last year, the open world aspect of the game was pretty uninspired, and it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much from the previous incarnation.
Now, what may be happening is that some of the server-side and connection issues may have something to do with the hiccups most online-focused games experience at launch, but H1Z1 has had a year to deal with them. It would be crazy for them to be developing other parts of the game but have ignored the most basic, fundamental aspect of creating a server-based game of this magnitude.
Also, in reading the H1Z1 subreddit and forums, a lot of people are still experiencing problems with other players in Just Survive. Players are getting killed-on-sight (KOS), even when they identify as friendly. It’s a complicated process, for sure, and the game is still in Early Access, but I have to say that I haven’t picked the game up in about a year, and I’m still seeing plenty of the same problems I did last year. I didn’t find it very exciting or interesting back then, and it also did not grab my attention in the time I put into the game this past weekend, either.
Overall, bothKing of the Kill and Just Survive are highly niche experiences, and I’m not sure I see anything about either version of H1Z1 that isn’t already being supplied by other games in this very specific zombie subgenre.
