Sony Online Entertainment is putting a lot of effort and time into the upcoming open-world, zombie-survival title, H1Z1. They recently held a press event to showcase some of the progress being made on the title, as well as how some of the game's mechanic work in a real-time gameplay environment.
The video above comes courtesy of Attack Gaming from MMO Attack, where the group managed to get some hands-on time with Sony Online Entertainment's title in San Diego at the end of April, just two weeks ago.
The video is nearly 30 full minutes of unfettered, uninterrupted gameplay straight from the fingertips of a gamer's hands. No “vertical slice” from a fake trailer, or a collage of CGI gameplay clips to give the impression of a game that will never exist, or some other interpretative form of marketing to mislead gamers.
Instead, we have a half-hour of gameplay that simply shows what the game is about: You scavenge, you gather items and material, you survive.
I like the fact that the game makes no hidden agenda to point out that it's basically a DayZ clone that's guaranteed to arrive on the PlayStation 4 at some point. As we all know, DayZ's release on home consoles is such an up-in-the-air sort of thing, so much so that we have no idea when (or if) it may come to the Xbox One or PS4 within a reasonable time frame.
H1Z1 is expected to head into Early Access quite soon, so Sony Online Entertainment is moving quite quickly in trying to get the game up and running.
Based on what was showcased in the video above, you can see that the inventory menus are quite serviceable and offers easy functionality for getting, gathering and previewing items. I don't know if it has the depth of the inventory system of DayZ's standalone alpha, but as I mentioned, it's serviceable.
Right now combat is looking quite clunky. As you can see in the video, there's a rather long delay between taking swings and hitting a target. There's also an issue with some lag and the reaction times between synching the client with the host server. There's a few moments where the zombies are zooping around or not reacting to being hit, even when he's laying into them thick with an axe.
Hopefully the melee is vastly improved along with the synching, but I suspect we'll see this ironed out by the time the game is ready to for public consumption (or at least, I hope).
After making its debut on PC and getting fixed up nice and neat, we can expect to see H1Z1 launch for the PlayStation 4. For more info, feel free to pay a visit to the official website.
