even the disgusting PVE carebear servers will be ready day 1. I’m not happy about that but people tell me I need to get over it.
-John Smedley, on ramping up for H1Z1
I found that quote amusing if only because I thought I read somewhere that H1Z1 was striving to be more of a cooperative survival MMO, at least when compared to Day Z and… wasn’t there another one… zombie apocalypse games aren’t really my thing… which by all reports quickly devolved into solo ventures where you fought or avoided any other players you encountered. PvE seems like a way you could fix that problem and make the game more social or cooperative.
But maybe SOE has a fix for that end result when it comes to PvP servers. We shall see.
Anyway, I am sure Smed was kidding around with that quote.
Then again, he is the PvP loving boss of a company that caters to a lot of carebears. He has always championed Planet Side and PlanetSide 2 even as PvE in Norrath paid the bills. (Planet Side isn’t paying any bills, having no revenue at all now, and, as noted recently, PlanetSide 2 just hit the point where it brings in more money than it costs to operate.) And I would guess that he might have pushed some of the unsuccessful ventures into PvP with EverQuest games. (How many EQII PvP servers are there now?) So I guess it is no surprise that the PvP side of H1Z1 is where his heart is.
Still, it sounds like SOE is going into this… closed beta… early access… Landmarkian zone of featureless despair… whatever it is… in a big way.
looking like we’ll have 150-200 H1Z1 servers on 1/15.
we’ll be announcing the distribution of them (i.e. rulesets, etc) in the next day or two. I think people will be happy.
150-200 servers? I am going to guess that server populations are planned to be pretty low. That is a WoW level of servers, and I don’t think this game will get WoW numbers when it comes to players. Also, good luck playing with friends if you don’t coordinate in advance. (Also, wasn’t early access going to be 4-6 weeks from April of last year?)
l will be interested to see the rules sets and distribution of servers… that is to say, how many of each type they run with. And I will be even more interested to see how things shake out as the game goes live, gets past its initial burst of activity, and settles down to a steady pace. Will the “disgusting PVE carebear servers” end up paying the bills?
Addendum: I see Syp picked up that quote as well, though he had a more direct response to it. So did Aywren.
Addendum 2: Smed has some further words:
so for you PVE loving folks, we will have vanilla PVE and hardcore PVE that requires headshots, and only support First Person. (twitter)
so despite my jokes, we really have gone out of our way to make sure PVE players will be happy. Not everyone enjoys KOS (twitter)
for PVP we will support hardcore as well.. first person only, headshots required and you lose recipes when you die (ouch). (twitter)