There's a lot of companies that have cashed in on the DayZ craze since it originally debuted as a mod for ARMA II way back when. One of those that seemed to come late to the party was Sony Online Entertainment's H1Z1, but it's now coming on apace. The developers have now released a bunch of screenshots showing some of the different weather effects the game will have, all of which will have a profound effect on how difficult it is to survive in the open world environment.
As well as changing up the gameplay though, this is an indication that the weather effects will be constant for all players, which means certain aspect of gameplay will be much more nuanced, as you'll be able to sneak up on others in the fog, or hide at night much more easily. Navigation via the stars should also be possible.
"While it's true each person's game instance will currently still play the same weather patterns without moving this over to the server, this move will prevent hackers from turning their own fog or visually disadvantageous settings off," said H1Z1 programmer Ryan Favale in a devblog.
Other weather systems coming up, includes falling and melting snow, which adapts automatically to the environment and will reveal footprints, or hide them as it gets heavier.
"We're planning on moving even more weather features into a much more powerful server controller which manipulates things like how and when fog rolls in and where, how the overhead clouds are forming, sun angles, haze, and bloom effects, and possibly even meteor showers and more impacting weather patterns like dust storms and thunder and lightning storms."
This is something other open world zombie survival games don't have in the same depth, which could help H1Z1 stand out from the crowd, especially now that Rust is on hold to some extent as the developers begin from scratch and DayZ is taking an age to finalise.
