President of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley has revealed that the post-apocalyptic zombie sandbox game H1Z1 will be much bigger than PlanetSide 2. How big? Basically ‘Orders of Magnitude’ bigger.
Furthermore he also revealed that fire will play a central role in certain gameplay mechanics. “Here is something that you can do here [in H1Z1] that you can’t do in other games, light things on fire. You will be able to burn down trees, burn down stuff and that is going to be a lot of fun,” he said in an interview with GamerTalkLive.
Unlike other zombie games, H1Z1 will feature dynamic zombie AI resulting into different experience every time the player plays the game. “H1Z1 is the first game that we will be putting out that will have emergent AI. The zombie themselves have their own individual AI, they are not on some pre-programmed script and they actually think of themselves.,” he explained.
He also believes that H1Z1 features the deepest crafting system ever. “This game has the deepest crafting system that I have ever seen in any game. If you find a vehicle, you have to find a battery, you have to refill the cell, find spark plugs. We are not screwing around, this is going to be a hard game. If people don’t like hard games that don’t play this game. ”
Early access of H1Z1 is expected to begin in around four to six weeks. The game does not have a final release date yet and will launch on the PC and PlayStation 4.