hi guys and girls !
Just want to give you short update on what's going on with War Z and what to expect from the game between October 15th and October 31st.
Lets start with where we're right now. Today we finally merged code between two dev branches and fixed our most notorious bug - zombies being stuck. Thing is that this bug was like our nemesis for quite some time - it cam and go, it only affected map where we had over certain number of active zombies ( like 1000 or so ), etc. We finally fixed it, and additionally fixed bug that allowed some zombies pass thru barricades. No more . Also new system allowed us to spawn way more zombies, so now cities became really really dangerous places to visit.
We reworked zombie combat, so you'll find that zombies became much bigger threat than you saw in a ny of the videos. In fact ALL situations shown in any gameplay videos will be lethal under new AI settings. So - crouch, prone - this will be your only way to get past zombies, unless you have lots of stamina and willing to sprint for some time. Or you're super lucky son of the bitch and have lots of ammo and guns. Even in this case I'll run
So next thing is October 15th launch. In preparation to launch we'll upload game client to our CDN. As you know you'll need to download game launcher ( aropund 5mb ) from link you've got in email recept. Actually anybody will be able to download this launcher - so there's no need to enter any passwords, etc, etc. We also hope you'll spread this launcher thru torrents, usenet, other sites helping more people to get it faster.
Once you'll install it and launch you'll need to validate your serial by providing your serial number and e-mail used to order game. After that you'll create your account password and you'll be ready to go. Launcher will update game to most current version, and you'll be able to play game.
We'll have several hundreds servers available with more on standby. We're going to RESTRICT you to only part of the map - approximately 30%, opening up more and more as we;'re closing toward October 31st. Reason for that is that we want to make sure that you won't get lost and get most of the experience out of those two weeks of Alpha, but more important you'll help us fine tune game, performance, iron out bugs, etc. Trust me there's still shit load of places to explore for first week
Since we're limiting access to map area, we're going to limit number of slots available to public. Here's how it works - normally each server will be set for Alpha at 70 players per server. But in options we can "lock out" certain number of slots for "friends" of server owner ( person who rent server ) - in this case - us . So we'll restrict servers to some number that will feel "right" - probably around 30-40 players - don't really know - we'll find out as we'll start getting feedback from you.
Our goal for Alpha is to fine tune item spawns, zombie AI params, fix obvious gameplay bugs that we can't find until we'll have thousands of players online.
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