H1Z1 early access date announced

As promised, Sony Online Entertainment announced today the early access date for its upcoming post-apocalyptic, zombie-survival MMO, H1Z1. It'll launch through Steam Early Access on January 15, 2015.

"This gives us just enough time to polish what we have and put out something we'll be proud of and hopefully you'll be excited to play," SOE president John Smedley said, explaining why development took a little longer than originally thought.

"The simple answer is once we saw what we could have had earlier it wasn't good enough and we wanted to put something out that we would be proud of. What you'll be playing January 15th is a really fun game, but it's early. It's everything Early Access should be – a fun and compelling game that isn't finished. Our goal is to have you help us finish it and have it be a game we can build a large community in over time."

Smedley was adamant in pointing out that when H1Z1 hits early access it will not be a finished game. He even warned gamers not to buy early access if they are expecting a finished product. "The goal here is to let you in early and help us mold it into a game you want to be a part of for quite a long time," he said.

Although H1Z1 will be free-to-play at launch, early access will come at a price. According to Smedley, two SKUs will be available when early access launches next month — a basic early access SKU for $19.99 and "a more expensive one" which will be announced shortly.

"The difference between the two will be things like access to some of our different game mode servers (which you can get access to by purchasing tickets or earning them as well) and other specifics we'll be outlining soon," Smedley explained.

Towards the end of the post, Smedley also addressed comparisons to Bohemia Interactive's similar post-apocalytic survival game DayZ, admitting H1Z1 won't be better than it — at least not at first.

"We're not as feature rich and they have a lot of really cool stuff we just don't have yet," Smedley admitted. "That being said, we're also a different game. We're an MMO and our goals are to create a large scale world that gives you the incredible feeling of being a survivor in a zombie apocalypse."

In early access, H1Z1 will start off with roughly 64k square Kilometers, but SOE plans to expand "right away… and over time create our virtual version of the US post apocalypse."

As a reminder, this early access date applies to the PC version of H1Z1. Although there are plans to bring it to PS4, development on the console version won't start until after H1Z1 is released.