Sony Online Entertainment are building a survival game about unusually active dead people, inspired by DayZ and its ilk. They've never done that before! What they have done, though, is a humongous open-world shooter with plenty of complex systems the H1Z1 team are taking advantage of.
"Something that's cool with us being here at SOE is that we have a lot of things to really pull from," said game designer Jimmy Whisenhunt in an H1Z1 stream.
"We have worked on games like Planetside 2 with that sort of scale and really solid iteration on a large playerbase."
H1Z1 doesn't share any tech with EverQuest Landmark's land of voxels – instead pairing the terrain system from Planetside 2 with "a lot of modifications for destructibility".
"So we have an engine that can that many players, massive environments, and a lot of really cool stuff that we want to pull into this game," pointed out Whisenhunt.
Planetside 2's Forgelight engine is built to handle "arbitrarily sized worlds" – which means the H1Z1 team can take "the core of anywhere USA" as their map size.
"When we first open it up to s the map will be huge, but nowhere near as big as it's going to be in short order," said SOE president John Smedley in a recent Reddit thread.
The studio's map editing system allows them to quickly add "massive" areas to the game – but they want to ensure they understand how players are playing H1Z1 before doing so.
"On Planetside 2 we made a mistake by making multiple continents before we had a strong enough idea of what worked and what didn't," explained Smedley. "This game is different. We're doing it smarter."
H1Z1 will also share Planetside's anti-hack system, which will be a relief to DayZ Mod players. Is it map size or malicious logging in and out you're most concerned about for H1Z1?