SOE’s John Smedley himself shared a brief video of H1Z1, and we’re here with a small analysis. You can click through this pic to watch the video on Twitpic.
As you can see, the video simply depicts zombies rising from the ground, amidst trees and shrubbery, in the opening rays of dawn. The video is actually a good demo for the developer’s Forgelight Engine, which was also used in Planetside 2, and will be seen again in Everquest Next. Forgelight does a good job of depicting light passing through trees, and casting zombie shadows on the ground.
The blue haze that surrounds the forest is also a demonstration of the engine’s abilities. While our source believes this is intended to bring about a feeling of isolation, I don’t remember it showing up in any gameplay footage, at least none that I’ve seen. Again, I think this is just dawn.
Increasing contrast and brightness on the video, you will notice draw distances are high, which could have actual payoffs as you can pinoint and attack zombies from much farther away. Lastly, you can observe the different gait animations each zombie has.
Now that SOE has gotten the comparisons out of the way, H1Z1 is actually looking good, better than DayZ even. While Bohemia Interactive has been shown to be working slowly on development for Dayz, H1Z1 appears to be leaping through development. To be fair to Bohemia, they did pick up the entirety of Cauldron Studios just last month, adding 25 devs to their workforce. At this point, however, Bohemia would have to go into overdrive to match SOE's progress.
SOE is releasing H1Z1 to Windows and Playstation 4 this year.