H1Z1 – Early Access Already?

So apparently John Smedley of SOE called PvE players “disgusting carebears” on Twitter. (Covered by TAGN, BioBreak, and Clean Casuals.) It’s yet another example of how executives should never attempt to be funny in public.

More interesting to me was the sudden news (to me, at least) that H1Z1 is launching on Steam today (January 15). (Well, I say “launching” but I really mean “crowdfunding” because it’s an Early Access game.) This surprises me because I thought it would be a long, long time before we saw this game.

But then SOE seems be building their business around releasing games roughly two years before they are ready. I was burned once by SOE’s “early access” with Landmark, so there’s simply no way I’m buying Hizzy until launch day (and/or a deep, deep discount sale that puts it around $5), because if it’s anything like Landmark, they are releasing it way too early and what we’ll actually get is a game engine demo with maybe two hours of actual gameplay.

Not to mention that it’s a zombie survival game with, so far as I can recall, no distinguishing features. (Zing! Actually I don’t know if it has any features or not. I watched the very first live stream of H1Z1 and saw nothing but a running and driving simulator where you could hit zombies with a baseball bat.)