Spoilers: H1Z1’s New Season Is Still An Unmitigated Mess

Daybreak has no intention of fixing this mess.

I’m sitting here looking at my TV screen and the only thought going through my head is “what is wrong with me?” I have walked down this road before, I know how it goes, and yet something compelled me to sit down today and boot up H1Z1 on the PS4 and check out the new season. Drop $5 on the pass? Of course, why not? I could buy a vinyl record at Savers for $5 if they weren’t still closed due to the pandemic.

But no, I’m watching my fifth straight match of H1Z1 that was rendered unplayable because of the same bug that has been present in the game since…I don’t know, I’m going to say it’s been in since the Free For All mode launched. So February 11, 2019. Free for all has a game breaking bug where your character never respawns, and it’s been there for nearly one and a half years.

IT’S STILL THERE, IT’S ALWAYS THERE. I KEEP COMING BACK TO THIS GAME MODE BECAUSE IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE MEANINGFUL PROGRESS IN THE SEASON PASS BUT THE BUG IS ALWAYS STILL THERE.

I’m long past the point of notating what a pathetic, embarrassing mess H1Z1 is, but I’d like to state for the record that if I had anything to do with this game it would probably stay off my resume. It’s as if H1Z1 shot Daybreak’s dog and now the company is just dead set on torturing it and keeping it alive long enough to suffer a long, very painful death. There is no other explanation other than total contempt I can give for why a company would take a game that had this much potential and not just screw up that potential but actively break it with each iteration.

Every season for over the past year or so has been a tragedy in motion as Daybreak offered less and less for what was admittedly basement-level prices. Five bucks is five bucks, and I can spend a dollar more and get two Whoppers at Burger King and that will give me far more enjoyment than the last season’s lootbox-riddled season pass did. Lest we not forget that last season was predicated on you spending double the season pass just to unlock all of the loot boxes you received.

It’s like Daybreak looked at the five bucks we spent and said “yeah but what have you done for me lately?” And by we I mean nobody.

This season I am happy to say that the battle pass is chock full of cosmetic items. Well okay not chock full, but there’s a lot of them. 100 levels and you can also obtain 500 gold crowns to replace the ones you spent on the pass. Awesome. Well not awesome.

But I feel like I have to preface everything wrong every time with this game with “I have never seen it this bad.” I have never seen so many free for all matches, sometimes in a row, bug out like this before. I have never seen a free for all match drop from 25 to 7 players because people were crashing out before. I have never had to wait this long, upwards of a minute for the items in the map to render in before. I have never had this many audio problems before. I have never heard my PS4 Pro sound like a vacuum sucked up a sock before.

It’s clear that H1Z1 sucks because the community sucks, and the community sucks because H1Z1 sucks. The last post on the official forums is dated nearly two months ago. The game is no longer able to fill free for all matches more than halfway. Free for all has become a disgusting crapshow where in order to compensate for nobody playing they funnel people into existing matches, meaning odds are more likely than not that you’ll jump into a game where the #1 player has 17 of the 25 kills necessary to win.

All of the standard modes I have played are less than half full, most barely able to break 30 players of 100 at what should be peak times for the game. There is an event challenge going on for Swagnum Opus and guess what game mode isn’t actually active?

H1Z1’s current patch operations basically run down to changing what is and isn’t available in purple airdrops which at this point is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Daybreak could have fixed the enormous game breaking bugs that have been present for over a year and H1Z1 might be in a more healthy position now than waiting in a free for all lobby because only one other person is in here with me. But they didn’t, and now they won’t.

As if to prove MMO Fallout Rule #77 which is that any video game no matter what will attract at least one fanboy outside of the developer, I had to take a look at Twitter to see how many people are still stanning out for this game. I’m not sure where one’s life has to go so tragically wrong that they find themselves shilling hard for a functionally broken has-been mess of a game and going off on Twitter about how it’s perfect and the only people who have problems are haters and trolls.

Okay, if you want a genuine example of how bad the H1Z1 community size is I have the perfect photo. Here is a screenshot I took on June 16 with three people in the free for all lobby, one of whom is a player TwoSick_Nine1_98. I don’t know this person.