I awake in a forest. All I have to my name is a flashlight, some gauze and a flare. It’s not long before I have something else. Hunger and thirst.

I’m a dead man.

H1Z1 is out now on Early Access on Steam. So let’s get all of the negatives up front. Early Access is Alpha. This is a game in an unfinished state and still missing certain systems like for example a character creator. It is undergoing repeated patching as people find bugs, break things and have to have tweaks made. It does have microtransactions in which appear to form a part of its roadmap to completion but even those come with some…twists.

So if you are looking for a completed experience, a zombie apocalypse survival mmo replete with robust systems. Look elsewhere. Maybe check the future. Many people fall foul of the idea of early adoption only to get a product that is by definition not yet feature complete. Others see the hype of some of the early adopters and assume that someones reported experience will mirror their own.

It won’t.

First To Die

Logging into H1Z1 I was greeted by a wall of server choices. SOE are working on these as well. So for example if you wanted at the time I was trying to play a European Player Versus Enviroment server, you were out of luck. It seems that the EU was all about the PVP but they are working on adding to the EU server list. Other worthies of note were the differing server rules. Some servers have no permanent recipes. If you die, you start over with a clean slate. It doesn’t matter how much you liked your biofuel, you need to do all the groundwork again. Finding the ingredients in sufficient quantities to rediscover the recipe.

Other rules include First Person Only, which locks you into the FPS view. This does add somewhat to the atmosphere as you aren’t piloting a random avatar around the scenery. You can only see ahead of you. Honestly if someone doesn’t work on some sort of VR support for that I’ll be hugely surprised.

Headshots Only is exactly what it says on the tin. Granted I didn’t open that particular tin because I wanted to ease myself into things. Let’s go out on a  limb and say if you don’t shoot the zombie in the brain, it won’t die all over agan.

PVE and PVP are self explanatory. Finally there’s Battle Royale where… last one standing wins. So get out there and make anything living well… not.

Given the various options on hand and wanting to not die immediately, I settled for a server with Recipe Wipe, PvE and First Person Only.

Second Chances

I awake on a hill overlooking a motel. There’s going to be trouble down there. Supplies are limited, everywhere supplies are limited… but there’s a chance. Not a great chance but a chance.

We’ve front loaded the talk about Early Access. Here’s one more important tidbit. Your only win condition at the moment is staying alive. Death is  probably to be expected and to be properly feared. If you die, you start in a random spot with just a few things in your pockets. You need food, you need drink, you need weapons and tools.

Worse. None of them are forever.

My first life I got pretty lucky finding skinning knive and an axe. I had the tools but no food. I found a bottle of stagnant water and it was no huge help. There’s something zen in your first attempt at a survival game. You know you’re going to die. You know that no matter how clever you are or how much you prepared (or not in my case), that you are new and you will make mistakes. Mistakes can kill.

The mistakes that killed me the first time were a lack of food and water. You need to eat to keep up your energy and you need to drink for hydration. There is of course a lot of talk on the subreddit for H1Z1 about the appropriate levels for how quickly those values go down. Anything that tells you they’re too fast or too slow is probably out of date. Heck my own recollection is already out of date. This is what you have to survive in. An emptied area that has been all but picked clean. A place with dangers from the living and the dead. Wolves howl in the night and come seeking your flesh. Zombies groan and want nothing more than to sink their teeth into you. Bears? Don’t even go there.

Really. Bears are lethal.#

There is always the element of luck. Good luck and bad. My second life ended as I dashed towards a fire. The dehydration and starvation were sapping  my health. I’d just managed to kill a wolf and chop out some nice steaks. They wouldn’t have saved me, being without water. They might have staved off death a little while longer. If nothing else, I’d have died well fed.

I died two paces away.

Third Times The Charm

I awake lost in the wilderness. My supplies aren’t worth mentioning. Sooner or later hunger and thirst will catch up with me. For now though, not a soul  in sight. Nothing. Maybe…. Maybe I’ll strike out this way. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe that power pylon that is coming into sight will lead me somewhere better…maybe.

Where everything comes down to how lucky you are at the moment, it breeds caution. My third life has been my longest. The luckiest find wasn’t the  surburban area to pick over. It wasn’t the houses to cower in. It wasn’t even how to make a bow drill so I could always light a fire.

It was an orange backpack.

Finally I had the carrying capacity I needed. I’d shredded my shirt to make my bow. All that had left me with was not enough scraps to make a satchel and not enough carrying capacity to work with. That backpack saved my life. Suddenly I could carry all the empty bottles I might want. I could carry a ready supply of arrows and anything else that struck my fancy. I could fight back against everything that wanted me dead. Zombies? An arrow in the eye fixes that. Thirst? I have bottles and they’re all full. Even better, they’re all purified in fire. No dirty water for me.

There’ll be luck in everything. Luck in what you get for your microtransaction keys. Luck in whether you get your airdrop or die trying. Luck in finding what you need early on or not. My luck came in the form of an orange backpack. It’s stuffed with goodies and it’s given my third life a proper lease on life. I’ve got a shack I can put down, though why bother yet when I can hide in apartments?

Nothing lasts forever though. My axe has broken and I have no knife. No more wood, no more meat. I need to get back out there. I need to pick my way through a dead world and hope against all odds. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe I’ll find some food to keep me going until I can get my tools again.

Maybe I’ll last even longer.

Maybe. Maybe not.