Producer's Update February 26th

A quick update from the Executive Producer on what's coming up!

H1Z1 Quick Hits for Feb. 26^th, 2016 – Chris Wynn, Executive Producer

Hi everyone, and thanks for taking the time to give this a read.  I know that many of you have poured countless hours into H1Z1 and all of the developers thank you for that.  We are in a phase where we are regrouping and refocusing, so your dedication is really appreciated.

I wanted to start a weekly update to share some visibility into what the team is currently focused on and highlight some of the latest work.  I will write this up every week and shoot to post an update each Friday.  If I am out of the office then I might not be able to write up an update, but I will try and get the news out when it will not happen. 

It will be pretty brief, I am prioritizing speed and timeliness over a beautifully written piece.  I just want to get a more regular system in place to provide updates out to all of our players.  Each week I will provide a brief update on the current priorities and focuses for the teams, along with updates to the next planned update.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at what the H1Z1 teams have been focused on over the last week.

 

Bug Fixes that affect both games

We are increasing our focus on quality of life issues and getting focused on fixing a lot of the lingering bugs in the game.  Here are some of the fixes that we made over this last week.

• Helmets are the same now, no differences between motorcycle helmets and military helmets, they will behave the same.
• The camera is now a lot better to use for looking up and down.  This is great for looking at items on the ground, the player head is not so obstructive for picking up objects.
• The shotgun has been tuned and fixed.  We believe you will not see any more ghost bullets.
• Prone spamming is out.  There is now an animation cost to going prone and standing up.
• Real 3d models are in the world for pickups.  No more wondering if it is a regular backpack or military backpack.  What you see is what you get.
• There is a hit indicator on the reticule, be sure when you hit and do not hit an opponent.
• AU servers should now have shorter queue times.

Current Focus for Just Survive

The JS team has been working on introducing new zombie types (3 brand new zombies) and enhancing the AI.  In addition they are now able to pull from our full library of wearables so zombies will have way more variety in them.  I don’t have an ETA at the moment, but we are working on putting up a couple of servers that will have restricted base building areas around the populated areas of the game to see how that plays out and address issues that we see around base building.

Bug fixing will become a larger focus for the JS team, I have read some quality of life posts on Reddit and other places to help prioritize where the fixes will go, so if you have posted any bugs that you have seen then I probable read it and incorporated it into our plans.

Current Focus for King of the Kill

For KotK we have a new mode prototyped and will get out to our test server in a few weeks for large scale testing.  Most of the KotK focus is on gameplay balance and fixing bugs like the ones above.  We are paying attention to what you all are telling us and will continue to have bug fixing as a priority.

Next Planned Release

Tentatively March 9, 2016