The Fallacy of Alpha

Dehydrated in the Rain

Last night I was finally able to get in and play some H1Z1 and I have to say…  I am fairly impressed with what I have seen.  While the game world is not as pretty as the current generation of FPS games… there is a real world charm to it.  Everything feels bleak and gloomy befitting a world rampaged by the living dead.  I have been playing on the Willamette server which is of course a full on carebear server.  It is in fact the very last PVE server in the list, and I am not really sure what my logic was in doing that…  I likely would have been better off picking something in the middle as it seemed like a lot of other people thought the same thing as me.  When I spawned into the game I was quite literally in the middle of nowhere.  In all seriousness I spawned into a forest and walked to the nearest clearing… and could see the texture distortion of the “end of the world”.  On the positive however this belt on the far side of the forest was populated with nothing but blackberries… something that would come in handy later on.

The problem I have with the game so far is it feels like the deck is stacked too much against you.  There is a point in Minecraft where you can reach equilibrium, and are able to gather enough resources to allow you to explore with greater freedom.  In H1Z1 I felt like I was always moments away from death, really limiting how much I was able to go out and explore.  Which in itself is a catch 22… if you are not exploring, you are not finding resources, and therefore dying more quickly.  One of the most humorous things about the game is the dehydration gauge…  which continued to happily tick down as I was standing in the freaking rain.  I did figure out how to capture rain water with a bottle…  but the end result was “dirty water” which seemed a little counter intuitive.  In the real world if you are able to catch fresh rain water, that is about as pure as you can possibly get since our cycle of precipitation is a massive filtration system.

Zombies Mean Business

Early on I found a branch, so that ended up being the first weapon I went out exploring with.  It was horrible but did more damage than my fists so in theory… a much better choice.  When I first encountered a zombie I was wandering back through the woods to try and find my way to civilization.  I was able to knock it down in a single blow of the branch, but it just laid there…  and I should have followed the “double tap” rule.  Instead it got right back up and proceeded to chomping on me.  I was able to kill it after a few more swings of the branch, but I found it far harder to avoid the attacks than say the zombies in 7 days to die.  In that game you can do this whole bob and weave motion and pretty much avoid taking any damage.  In H1Z1 if you tangle with a zombie… no matter how good the melee weapon you have…  you are going to take some damage.  Later on I found a Machete and a Combat Knife…  the best of which seemed to be the Machete because it was able to knock things down.  The Combat Knife technically did a lot more damage but it forced me to get closer to the zombies to stab them to death.

The biggest problem I had with zombies is the fact that they did not seem to drop shit.  Again I am used to 7 days to die, when zombies are a smorgasbord of interesting object for you to repurpose.  The zombies I killed… and ultimately I killed a lot of them…  only seemed to drop cloth scraps.  After some time I made my way to a city that was already swarming with other players.  At this point I was on the verge of starvation… only having found blackberries to eat, which do not offer much reprieve.  After a point I started feeling like a zombie myself, desperately looking for my next meal and finding nothing.  I am not sure if resources really are that scarce… or if the place had just been picked over by the other scavengers.  In any case the game play felt very dark and hopeless…  which I think is probably what Sony is going for.  There are a lot of issues with the world, but they seem to have a firm base to build upon.

The Fallacy of Alpha

Everything about the world is in a state of flux at this point, because the game is in its Alpha state.  The problem is this word does not mean what it used to mean.  Alpha used to be this phase of the game limited to only friends of the company, when they worked out the game breaking bugs in private before letting progressively more players into the game turning it into beta.  We live in this strange world of “pay to alpha”, which to me means “not alpha at all”.  The Alpha phase was the one that was done internally that we have been watching for the last six months.  This phase that we are in now..  is simply a “broken release”.  I have various maxims that I live by, some of which are simple like “anything that gets in the way of me playing with my friends is bad” that no one can really argue with.  Others like “If you are taking money for your product, it is release” are probably the cause of some debate.  To me H1Z1 is a released game because they are actively taking player money for it.

The problem with the Alpha and Beta system is it acts merely as a shield for the developer to deflect criticism.  They can fall back on the bulwark of “its only alpha” to explain why things aren’t working the way players want them to work.  It gives them time to dodge and weave before the official reviews start showing up, since the Metacritic score has become this all important metric that is ultimately meaningless… but I can rant about my hatred of metacritic another day.  However if you are taking money for a product I feel like you are completely culpable for criticism.   I will always give SOE credit for the fact that both for Landmark and H1Z1 they have offered refunds for players who were angry about the product.  That said I feel it is still completely valid for me to complain about the things I feel are broken in an alpha product, and as such while some of them are absolutely hilarious… I feel like every single one of the almost 2700 negative reviews on steam are also valid.  Game developers have decided that opening up the alpha process gives them a trickle of money, and early exposure to build hype.  However they also have to realize that every action is being watched, they are on camera now and if they screw up… even if it IS supposedly alpha…  it now matters.