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H1Z1, the zombie survival MMO from Sony Online Entertainment, will launch for PC in Early Access on January 15, studio boss John Smedley has announced.
Posting on Reddit, Smedley explained why the Early Access will launch slightly later than initially planned.
“After a lot of hard work, we’ve decided to make the release date January 15th, 2015,” wrote Smedley. “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. What you’ll be playing January 15th is a really fun game, but it’s early. It’s everything Early Access should be – a fun and compelling game that isn’t finished. Our goal is to have you help us finish it and have it be a game we can build a large community in over time.”
Smedley was also clear that the initial release should not be considered finished, so set your expectation levels accordingly.
“Is it going to be a finished game? Absolutely not. If that’s what you’re expecting, DO NOT BUY EARLY ACCESS. The goal here is to let you in early and help us mold it into a game you want to be a part of for quite a long time.”
Two SKUs will be available: A basic early access SKU for $19.99, and a more expensive one which will provide access to some of the game’s different mode servers.
Smedley also, somewhat bizarrely, admits that the Early Access version of H1Z1 won’t be better than Day Z in its current form.
“I wanted to be up front about it. We’re not as feature rich and they have a lot of really cool stuff we just don’t have yet,” he explained. “That being said, we’re also a different game. We’re an MMO and our goals are to create a large scale world that gives you the incredible feeling of being a survivor in a zombie apocalypse.
“We’ll be starting out with roughly 64k square Kilometers, but we plan to grow it right away.. and over time create our virtual version of the US post apocalypse. Look for us to start adding land right away post launch.”
Source: Reddit
