H1Z1: On Death You Will Now Rise as a Zombie

H1Z1: On Death You Will Now Rise as a Zombie

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since I posted one of these. Although I do apologize for the extended dry period, I do want to clarify my update cadence going forward. As you noticed last update, our current build was on the Test Server for a good amount of time. This supports our general philosophy that publishes remain on test until they reach a quality level we are comfortable with. I know some of you are thinking, “Yea, there were still bugs in that publish”.  Fact is, H1Z1 has been receiving a lot of changes under the hood and we just adopted some of the combat improvements from KOTK which we feel are relevant to JS. This includes many bug fixes and performance adjustments.  As much as we would love to avoid a single issue, as soon as we publish an update to the masses, issues tend to show themselves more rapidly. We are happy that we could turn a lot of these around quickly and we want to thank all of you who helped us out by reporting issues.

Moving forward, you can expect an official updated from me AFTER we do a live publish. This way, you get the new stuff and you see what’s coming next. Pretty straightforward! 

So, what’s happen in development?

As usual, no guarantees for release date of the following topics. They’ll go live when they’re ready and they will hit the Test Server first!

Weapon enhancement recipes

You’ll now be able to kill rare zombies to find prototype weapon parts.  You’ll combine these prototype parts with normal weapons to discover a recipe.  The newly crafted weapon will have special abilities and stats. They will also have finite lifetime and cannot be repaired.  So, save these for a “Special” occasion.

Here’s an example of what you can expect:

 

Upon death

You player will now rise as a zombie. So you or your friends will have to….um….kill you again to get your stuff back. Should be fun!

Boss zombie experimentation

I don’t want to spill the beans too much on this one. As we continue growing Just Survive, we’re always looking for ways to introduce new play loops into the game.  Having boss encounters plays well with many of the things we want to do going forward. So, don’t be surprised if you run across a more vicious situation sometime soon.  And you thought bears were scary! Hah!

Survival Score Servers:

We’re putting together another server ruleset. This one is designed around the notion of “How well did I survive?”

It’s going to work something like this:

A few designated servers will be on an auto wipe system. Every XX weeks (1, 2 or 3 possibly) the world will end. The server will wipe itself and give a final score to each player. This score is accumulated and displayed in the UI as you are playing. You’ll get points for things like zombie kills, recipe discovery... Etc.  Think of it as a more advanced version of the death screen when it presents your end stats.  Past scores will be available for some undetermined length of time also.

We are still designing and working out the kinks with this one and you can expect to play it on the Test Server first to provide your own feedback. Expect to hear more about this in the future.

Limited Base Building

Couple fixes:

The Villas are being opened for base building

Campfires, torches and flares are no longer restricted from the rule

Sorry Krakow players….we missed you in the rule update. You are getting the rule also. 

Exploiters

We are fully aware of the current exploits going on. We do not speak publically regarding steps being taken when dealing with this sort of thing.  But I will say, if you are caught exploiting, you will be banned. Please pass it along.

Loot

For a long time now, loot has been in a state which wasn’t on par with a survival experience. We’ve read all your posts; we’ve gone invisible and observed many players.  We’ve checked high, low and medium pop servers. We spoke to many players live in chat.

I’m sorry if we’ve given you the easy life in the past but times need to change a bit. In a nutshell, the current loot drop rates are intended.  Building a base was never intended to be a simple task btw…

That’s all I have for now.

Peace out and see you all in game!

H1Z1 Patch Buffs Combat and More

Combat Update Notes:

For those that don’t know me, my name is bronstahd (Garrett Fern), and I’m a combat and gameplay designer working on H1Z1: King of the Kill. Tomorrow we are releasing an update we’ve internally termed “the combat update” which is the result of a focused push toward improving combat and related gameplay systems. I wanted to spend some time talking about several of these changes in greater detail to give some insight into what’s changed and why we’re excited about this update’s release.

Shotgun

We’ve continued working to improve the consistency of the shotgun. Our goal is that the shotgun should be a powerful, up close threat. This update further tightens the shotgun’s spread of fire, making it more powerful up close. In addition, the shotgun’s damage will fall off over distance, so it isn’t too powerful at range. The feedback we’ve seen has been positive so far, so we’re really looking forward to seeing these changes on the live servers.

Cone of Fire

Recently, we added Cone of Fire adjustments based on your character's movement state. We did this because, put simply, guns were performing far too accurately when running and jumping. Philosophically, our belief has always been that aiming down sight should be the most accurate method of aiming; this change made sure that's the case.

However, it was also possible to aim down sight while jumping, which also allowed for tremendous accuracy in a way that didn't make sense. This update addresses that issue by preventing ADS while jumping or falling. This has also allowed us to ease up on some previous combat restrictions around movement and it will now be possible to shoot and ADS directly from sprint. You'll no longer have to wait for your character to slow down and suffer a delay when trying to shoot.

General Weapon Polish

This update also contains a lot of general weapon polish. In no particular order, here's what you should expect to see:

• Historically, melee weapons have been underwhelming and of little use. As a first step toward addressing this, we've increased melee weapon damage across the board. This won't entirely fix melee weapons, but it should be a noticeable improvement:

• Fists: 4.5 damage -> 9 damage

• Combat Knife: 10 damage -> 21 damage

• Machete: 12 damage -> 25 damage

• Wood Axe: 16.5 damage -> 34 damage

• Since our last change to the AK-47 we've been listening to the community and the feedback has been pretty clear: it's not powerful enough when compared to the AR15.

We've been internally testing a faster fire rate for the AK-47 which we'll be rolling out with this update. Here's what you should expect to see:

• The AK-47 should be faster than AR15 in full auto fire, but more difficult to control.

• The AK-47 should be closer in speed to the AR15 when tapping.

• Specifically, the delay between shots has been reduced from 160 ms -> 145 ms.

We think this change will create nice some trade-offs between the weapons and make the AK-47 a compelling choice once again.

• Increased the damage of the R380 from 15 -> 17 to reduce the number of shots required to kill with it by one.

• Decreased the damage of the M9 from 19 -> 18 to allow time to apply healing after taking five shots. Previously it wasn't possible to apply any type of healing before bleeding to death.

• We've made some adjustments to the M47 Gas Grenade that should make them far more viable as a thrown weapon option:

• Damage increased from 1/tick-> 3/tick.

• Duration reduced from 60 seconds -> 20 seconds.

• Depending on the weapon, it used to take anywhere between 0.5 seconds to 1 second to change from one weapon to another. This time has been reduced to 0.15 seconds for all weapons.

• Weapon slots will always be assigned the same number, regardless of whether or not there are weapons in other slots.

Damage Log

We believe that when a player dies it should be very clear to them what killed them. That’s not always the case currently. As a first step towards remedying this, we’ve added a damage log to the death screen that will display how much damage the attack that killed you did and whether or not it was a headshot. Moving forward, the plan is to re-work the death screen so we can display even more information about cause of death.

Body Armor

EDITS MADE

We've also made some changes to the way Armor works that should improve the reliability of body armor:

• The entire body (chest, arms, and legs) is protected by Body Armor.

• Helmets still protect the head.

Hit Reactions

Hit reaction animations would cause the other character's head moved, often preventing a quick follow-up shot from registering as a headshot when it should. Other characters will no longer flinch out of the way when shot.

Camera & Reticle Improvements

We've made a couple of improvements to the reticle.

• We’ve added a new element to the reticle that increases in size to display Cone of Fire information based on player movement.

• Improved color saturation and added clearer outline which should make seeing the reticle, even small reticles, much easier.

• In most cases, projectiles now originate from the camera rather than the weapon model. This change significantly reduces projectile collisions with medium-height cover like fences, rocks, cars, and similar objects and also improves projectile performance when fighting uphill or against players on top of buildings.

In some cases, it was possible for one player to have clear line of sight on another player, due to the camera being offset above their head, while actually being obscured from the other player’s view. We felt this would be unfair, and in these cases (generally, when your character is very close to medium-height cover) projectiles will still originate from the weapon model. We’ve added feedback to the reticle to make it clear when this is happening.

General Gameplay

KotK Crafting

In this update we're also adding some new crafting recipes to King of the Kill.

Makeshift Armor

We're pretty happy with the current scarcity of Body Armor, and like that finding it feels special. However, the changes to Body Armor outlined above meant that players without Body Armor would be at an even bigger disadvantage than before when fighting against an armored player. For that reason, we've added a new crafted armor, Makeshift Armor, which will block one shot and can be worn as a fall-back to Body Armor.

• Components: Components: 1 Duct Tape, 2 Armor Scraps, and 4 Composite Fabric

• Motorcycle helmets can be “shredded” to provide armor scrap

• Military Backpacks can be “shredded” to provide composite fabric

Procoagulant

• Procoagulant is a quick-use item that can be used to quickly stop bleeding without any additional healing effects.

• Components: 10 Field Bandages, 1 Tactical First Aid Kit.

5x Explosive Tipped Arrow

• Obviously, explosive arrows are very powerful, so we'll be keeping a close eye on feedback for this recipe and monitoring its impact on game balance.

• Components: 5 M67 Frag Grenades, 5 Wooden Arrows, 1 Duct Tape, 5 12 Gauge Buckshot Shells.

• There are some small item spawn changes that support the additions to crafting:

• Duct Tape now spawns on the map for use in some of the new crafting recipes.

• Explosive Tipped and Flaming Arrows no longer spawn on the map.

Footwear Changes

With these changes we wanted to create some more interesting choice when selecting footwear. To accomplish this, we're introducing a new type of footwear and making some tweaks to the existing options.

Stealthy Shoes (New!)

• Replaces boots as new starting shoes.

• Similar in volume to bare feet.

• 2% faster than bare feet.

• Reduce falling damage by 5%.

Heavy Shoes (boots & variants)

• Loudest shoes.

• 7% faster than bare feet.

• Reduce falling damage by 40%

Speedy Shoes (conveys & variants)

• Louder than stealthy shoes, quieter than heavy shoes.

• 16% faster than bare feet.

• Reduce falling damage by 15%.

Interaction Responsiveness

We’ve long had problems with delays in picking up items. It isn’t really a combat related thing, but it was a big enough deal that we wanted to pursue a fix for this update. The time it takes to pick up items, open doors, and perform other interactions has been greatly improved and is now nearly instantaneous.

Additional Patch Notes:

• Items should be more consistently highlighted during looting

• Removed dynamic weapon slot numbers from the UI

• The team auto-fill button is back and should behave correctly

• Fixed a bug where hit-markers would occasionally get stuck on

• Fixed a bug where players could not melee others on ATVs

• Fixed a bug where explosions could damage players through structures

• Fixed a bug where the Molotov’s fire effect would sometimes be invisible

• Corrected Molotov behavior so that they damage vehicles but do not cause them to burn

• Fixed an issue where players would render incorrectly if they exit a vehicle at certain distances

• Fixed a bug where thrown grenades could go through players

• Fixed a bug where equipping a weapon while inventory is full could cause the player to lose the weapon

• Fixed an exploit where swapping backpacks a specific way could create infinite bag space

• Fixed a bug where the UI would make it appear that multiple hits were registering at once

• Fixed a bug where character would appear to be falling when strafing against concrete barriers

• Fixed a bug where the reloading the AK-47 while firing could prevent the reload animation from playing

KNOWN ISSUES:

• There is a bug where Bundles of Arrows cannot be picked up using “E.” However, they can be picked up using Proximity (done by opening your Inventory / Tab Key).

• There is a bug where the pickup truck moves slower than usual in Reverse.

• The Auto-Fill button does not appear to be working as intended. We are investigating the issue.