You might have thought zombie survival sandbox H1Z1 had already launched, considering you probably paid for it back in January of 2015 when it hit early access, or maybe again when it split in two this past February. But you’d be wrong! In fact, Daybreak announced today that one half of the game, King of the Kill, will formally emerge from early access and launch for PC on September 20th with a price hike from $19.99 to $29.99. (It was originally planned as a free-to-play game, but Daybreak scrapped that long ago.)
What about the promised console launches? Executive Producer Chris Wynn says that the goal to launch on console this summer was deemed “too risky” and that work on those platforms has come to a halt. “I have decided to pause our efforts on the console versions and put 100% of the focus on to the PC version of the game for right now,” he writes. “As soon as we ship the full PC experience out of Early Access, we will turn our focus back to converting that same experience to run on the consoles. I don’t want to promise an exact date.”
And what about Just Survive, the PvE survival mode half of H1Z1 that Daybreak vowed wouldn’t be abandoned post-split? Daybreak told us that it still does not have an official release date for when H1Z1: Just Survive will be coming out of Early Access. And in the wake of losing some devs to a rival company earlier this month, Wynn told players that the studio’s focus over the next few months is “cleanup and bug fixing” and “getting back to the core experience.”
“Your takeaway should be essentially no corner of the game is going un-examined. […] We are still wrapping Z2 up to be ready for King of the Kill, bug free and fully optimized. Once we hit that milestone, we need to do some work to prepare it for Just Survive. It is hard to give you a timeline until we really dive into the work, but as soon as we have an idea of when that lines up, I will be sure to talk about it and our plans to start getting the new map into Just Survive.”
