H1Z1 comes to Early Access on 15 January

Zombies: still alive and kicking into 2015.

As promised by John Smedley at the weekend, Sony Online Entertainment’s H1Z1 now has an Early Access release date. Smedley announced on Reddit that H1Z1 will be available from 15 January.

There’s also the image above, which is a bit of a giveaway.

As part of his announcement, Smedley addresses a couple of questions people might have. In answer to why an Early Access launch took so long, he says “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.”

Regarding the state H1Z1 will be in when it shows up on Early Access, Smedley says it will “Absolutely not” be the finished article. “If that’s what you’re expecting, DO NOT BUY EARLY ACCESS,” he adds. Which is sound advice in most cases, really. If you’re wondering whether H1Z1 will be better than DayZ the moment it launches, apparently “it won’t.”

It’ll launch in two forms; the previously advertised $20 edition and a “more expensive one” which differs in terms of “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.” That sounds a bit dubious, and the price for the more expensive edition hasn’t yet been announced.

The initial world size will be around 64k Square Kilometers. There’s a live stream Q&A about H1Z1 happening right now on Twitch (at the time of writing.) If you’re reading this later, the stream has probably been archived.

Thanks to this stream, I’ve learned that the game “will have airports” and might get big guns like RPGs “eventually.” So there you go.