Tag: Daybreak

Column: Planetside Arena and the Friday Night Whatevers


It’s Friday night! I’m playing a few rounds of H1Z1 to get my anger on before throwing my Gamefly rental of Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a good weekend film to watch.

I’m going to tell you my wonderful readers what I told Daybreak before Planetside Arena launched into Early Access this week: It’s a neat concept that definitely has something going for it, but your biggest struggle is going to be convincing people to play it. What I didn’t tell them because I didn’t want to seem to blunt or immediately burn bridges with the new PR people (the old ones stopped talking to me) is that they have an uphill battle for two reasons: First, they are Daybreak Game Company. Second, it’s a free to play battle royale game.

I’ll be frank; Daybreak Game Company doesn’t have a great reputation as far as battle royale games go considering how badly they managed to mess up Z1 Battle Royale and H1Z1 and grasp failure from the hands of market dominance in both cases. There are a lot of people still very angry about Daybreak’s continued mismanagement of the PS4 H1Z1 and I should know. I’m one of them. Expect an H1Z1 season 5 roundup at some point in the future. Actually Daybreak doesn’t have a great reputation period. It just seems like large swaths of people that they’ve come across have come away feeling burned in one way or another. Everquest players, Planetside players, H1Z1 players, the ones hanging on to those games that shut down like ten years ago. All of them. Daybreak couldn’t have a lower public perception if John Smedley was still employed and inviting people to DDOS the servers again.

Second; it’s a free to play battle royale game in a market full to the brim. Sure, Planetside Arena has massive battles with upwards of 300 people. Is it filling them up? Nah. We’re in the opening Friday night and the game is having trouble keeping above 700 people concurrently. There are over 1,300 people playing Planetside 2, nearly double the amount in Planetside Arena and one of those games is seven years old while the other should be getting its early access launch rush. Over on the Twitch side of things, Planetside Arena has 434 viewers as of this publishing. You know what has more? H1Z1. So people aren’t playing and they aren’t really interested in watching and again, we’re in weekend #1.

And ultimately Planetside Arena isn’t even that bad of a game, which is why I’m sitting here typing about it at nearly 1am on a Saturday when I could be doing weekend stuff like sleeping. My big fear with Planetside Arena is that it would release to a shrug and a “whatever,” and that appears to be exactly what is happening. Who knows, maybe Daybreak can pull it around and convince people to actually play the game. They haven’t managed it with the streamers, but after all this is just weekend #1 and who ever said you only get one chance at a launch?

Oh right.

Planetside Arena Launches On Steam


Planetside Arena is here. The battle royale spinoff by Daybreak Game Company launched today, September 19, 2019 and is available completely free to play.

Early Access launches with squad mode (12 player teams) and teams mode (3 players per team) with matches up to 300 players. The main call of Planetside Arena, the gargantuan massive clash mode, will be available in Q2 2020 when the game fully launches and will feature matches of up to 1,000 people. Hopefully the Daybreak team can keep the ball rolling until that time.

Check it out at the link below.

Source: Steam

[Video] Planetside Arena Footage


Daybreak Game Company this week released new footage of Planetside Arena. The footage features Squads, a massive game mode pitting teams of up to 12 players in matches with up to 300 people.

Planetside Arena goes into early access on September 19.

[Column] I Came Back To Call Daybreak A Dead Husk


Hey folks,

You may have heard comments down the grapevine that MMO Fallout is planning on a comeback of sorts, but right now I’d like to pick up the mantle to talk about how Daybreak Game Company is a dead company with a bare bones, barely functioning development team. They just don’t care anymore folks. How do I know they don’t care? Whoever wrote the patch notes couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the spell check and left numerous obvious errors in the final publication.

So what brings me back briefly from my vacation early to talk about a game that I specifically said that I would never talk about again? The launch of Season 4, or the last season that I expect Daybreak will launch for H1Z1. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room to really get you excited for what Daybreak has to offer this season: The company has gone and slashed the price of the season pass by 50% over last season. That’s right, for around the cost of a two cheeseburger value meal (#9) at your local McDonald’s, you can feel disappointed and ripped off.

That’s a joke, folks, McDonald’s value meals are far less disappointing.

And what do you get for your money? Jack-freaking-squat. Season 3 annoyed me into quitting H1Z1 because the challenges were stupid and mostly broken, as was free for all, but ultimately I stuck around to complete the season pass because it didn’t take long and there were a hell of a lot of cosmetics to be unlocked. By comparison, Season 4 offers one outfit split up over the course of the season as well as accompanying AK-47, M17, and crossbow skins to match. Eleven items total. The rest of the pass are coins (2,600 total) and experience boosts. Enough coins to buy one and a half rare skins.

  • Scrub M17 (Level 1)
  • Scrub Jacket (Level 1)
  • Scrub Skirt (Level 18)
  • Scrub Pants (Level 40)
  • Scrub Backpack (Level 55)
  • Scrub Offroader (Level 60)
  • Scrub Shoes (Level 65)
  • Scrub Armor (Level 80)
  • Scrub Crossbow (Level 90)
  • Scrub AK-47 (Level 100)
  • Scrub Watch (Level 100)

Eleven bleeding items total. Stamp missions have been completely removed from the game, as have daily login rewards. You do now have the privilege of occasionally finding locked chests that you can pay a discount in order to unlock (ala Team Fortress 2) and you’re in luck because there are now six rotating arcade modes.

Six rotating arcade modes for a game that can barely get people into its standard modes. I played a few rounds of arcade mode on launch day and found that Daybreak can just about break 40/100 players at peak hours on a week night. The arcade modes are all based around ideas that probably took a good half hour to program into the game, such as headshot damage only, faster run speed, ATVs only, and pistols/explosives only. And this update was delayed by a week! And the season only runs for 36 days this time around for reasons I can’t honestly comprehend.

As far as game updates go, H1Z1 Season 4 is the That 70’s Show Season 8 of video games. Topher Grace is gone and so is Ashton Kutcher. Instead we get Randy, a guy so hated by the audience that he doesn’t even show up on the cover of the season DVD set. At this point, I can only assume that Daybreak is in need of a big success like say DC Universe Online becoming a smash hit on the Switch, and by smash hit I of course mean the game releasing and making a lot of money as opposed to just getting a lot of people to download, notice that the game has major performance problems, and uninstalling before investing anything in the title.

Now it’s time to go back into my hole and read legal documents. Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Diaries From H1Z1: I Walked 100 Levels, And I Won’t Walk 100 More


I promise this is my last piece about H1Z1 for a while, because I officially quit.

Last week I reached the promised land, the deluxe apartment in the sky if you will. I hit level 100 on the H1Z1 battle pass. That’s right, praise me for accomplishing in roughly two months what most of you likely finished by the end of week three. Gaze upon my mediocrity and be amazed for all the wrong reasons. I won’t be coming back.

I could go on for hours about how absolutely incompetent the H1Z1 team is, but I think anyone reading this wouldn’t be too surprised that the same company that has fumbled the ball so many times with H1Z1 and its other projects would do it again. For more information on my gripes, please refer to my last rant. In the time since I wrote that article a few weeks back, H1Z1 has not improved. In fact, it has managed to continue degrading. The shotgun is so stupidly overpowered that it can one-shot someone at full health wearing armor, while the crossbow was severely buffed with an EMP explosion that will knock out cars for an extended amount of time, do a lot of damage, and basically ruin your enjoyment of the game.

Last time around I complained a lot about challenges. Week 8 challenges sound like someone at Daybreak saw all of the complaints about the challenges being stupid and decided to ratchet it up to 11 just to spite the players. We have;

  • Place in the top 10 while having 10 first aid kits in your inventory in fives
  • Go to the hospital in map grid B7 and get 7 kills
  • Destroy 20 camping tents
  • Get 10 kills with the RPG-7, grenades, crossbow, or air strike signals
  • Parachute into Cranberry

Nothing says fun like ridiculously convoluted “challenges.”

These top Week 7 having only two depraved challenges being two kills within the orchard in map grid J2 within a single match and getting to the transmission tower at the top of Spence Hills while specifically driving a pickup truck. Parachuting into Cranberry is a lot harder when you have no control over where you start and the game has still refused to drop you in that area after all this time. Getting 7 kills in the hospital in B7 is difficult enough as it is, assuming that (1) B7 isn’t part of the area immediately or shortly thereafter covered by fog and (2) you can even find people in there. I’ll add in a (3) for good measure, that the game doesn’t bug out and actually tracks the kills.

The same goes for getting 10 kills with the explosive weapons, it wouldn’t be on the list were it not for Daybreak’s shoddy programming meaning the challenge is basically broken. Going back to prior challenges has shown multiple that by all means I should have achieved by now that are either not properly tracking or just flat out broken. Daily challenges similarly seem to be riddled with bugs and many of them can’t be completed. The game for some reason absolutely abhors recognizing the player performing emotes, I noticed it has started handing out ridiculous daily challenges like “destroy 99 chairs within Cranberry” which is just fantastic and isn’t a tedious chore.

And it seems like the population in H1Z1 is dying fast as the ratio of full games to not full games during what should be relatively peak hours is declining. I played a few fives matches on Saturday afternoon this past weekend where the game couldn’t grab more than 70 players before the match began. Played a few free for all matches that same day that weren’t even half-full (some were as low as 11 people). H1Z1 hasn’t hosted an arcade mode in a loooooong time. Lag in matches seems to be getting worse as the game goes on, as I have seen numerous rounds where I die because the person is literally teleporting around the screen and can’t be shot. It’s like playing old Quake on dial-up. Had this been on the PC, I’d suspect foul play. Since it’s on the Playstation 4, I’m fairly certain it is the game. Obviously these are all anecdotal and from my own perspective.

So I am officially washing my hands of H1Z1, and will start posting Diaries From articles for games that I am actually enjoying playing.

Diaries From H1Z1: How Does It Get Continually Worse?


I want to talk about H1Z1 on the Playstation 4.

H1Z1 has become the Battle Royale of choice for me, partially because I have invested enough time and money ($20) into the game that I’d rather not start anew on another BR title and partially because I like the simplistic gameplay. I don’t have the reaction time to build and play Fortnite at a decent level and PUBG is a bit too much of a broken mess most of the time to keep my attention while Realm Royale’s player base was crashing hard. Plus my character looks like a total badass.

That said, I have to hand it to Daybreak for instituting the battle pass into H1Z1, because if it weren’t for the fact that I can log in a couple of times a week and churn out some decent ranks, I would have stopped playing out of frustration a long time ago.

It could be because the stamp missions in H1Z1 are broken beyond recognition. It only took five times entering and reentering the training grounds before the game recognized me picking up an AR weapon for the achievement, and after the third time I picked one up in solos for it to register that mission completed. While writing this article I spent the fifth match in which I used the “wave bye” emote three times during a match without it registering completion. What the game did register is me surviving to place in the top 15 in Fives which we didn’t (we placed in the top 20), me driving an ARV 1000 meters in any BR mode (I didn’t), placing in the top 15 without using bandages or first aid kits (I had used numerous), and one achievement I had actually accomplished in reviving a teammate and one for finishing three fives matches.

Free for all, to put it bluntly, sucks on ice. The Battle Royale engine that Daybreak has put together is clearly not built to house this many people in this close proximity on the Playstation 4. I play with the Playstation 4 Pro which is connected to an ethernet and sits within arm’s reach of my router, on a Verizon FiOS line running to the tune of 150mbps. I’m not humble bragging about my internet speed, I’m just pointing out the kind of connection I’m working with. At many times, H1Z1 Free for All gets such bad lag that the original Everquest has less character rubberbanding by comparison. There’s nothing that says engaging gameplay quite like pumping a full clip from an automatic weapon into someone at close range and having none of the shots register, only for the game to recognize that you actually died five seconds ago from a guy who was probably killed before he pulled the trigger.

And because the zone is so small and seemingly randomly placed, the spawn points are absolute trash. You’ll find yourself getting thrown into the wide open valley only to be immediately popped by the group of snipers that were already aiming in your direction. If not an open valley, you’ll be lucky to minimize the number of times that players will spawn in right in front of you, only to gun you down while still in an immune phase, or twenty feet behind you only to do the same. Get a good spot? Think again, because the random spawn system loaded you up with the worst weapons possible and screw you.

This of course assumes that the game properly loads itself while spawning you into the world, and doesn’t let you die while the loading screen is still up. This also assumes that the game grants you any immunity and doesn’t just let someone with a high powered sniper pop you in the head the second the loading screen does disappear. This assumes that the loading screen appears and doesn’t just leave you hanging as a spectator. This assumes that the game responds to your pressing X to respawn and doesn’t just ignore your controller. This assumes it doesn’t crash to the console dashboard. This assumes that it lets you bring your weapon out.

It’s incredible how the further H1Z1 gets away from launch, the more it seems to degrade in quality. Some stamp missions are broken, some weekly missions are broken, Free for All is broken, experience boosts seem to be broken, the master coins you get after completing the battle pass are (for some) broken.

Daybreak’s Player Studio Program Isn’t Dead, Revival Coming


Daybreak’s Player Studio program allows modders to create and submit their custom models in Everquest, Everquest II, and Planetside 2. If Daybreak sells the item in the in-game cash shop, you’ll be able to take a portion of the revenue. The future of the Player Studio has been in doubt ever since Daybreak’s acquisition and mass layoffs, however Planetside 2 producer Nick Silva posted this week on the Daybreak official forums to announce that not only has he been put in charge, but that the Player Studio will be given renewed attention.

Silva notes that the process will involve disabling new artist registrations temporarily, set to begin on March 25.

“In the meantime, we will be evaluating options for overhauling the Player Studio site with the intention of allowing broader categories of submissions and a more streamlined submission process. Provided that comes to fruition, we will be once again allowing new artists to join the new and improved program. Before that discussion takes place, we will be sure to process the backlog of Player Studio submissions already waiting in queue. Some of our artists have been waiting for a very long time for any sort of action to be taken on their projects, and for that I apologize.”

Source: Daybreak

[Video] Daybreak Game Company Discusses Weapons/Vehicles In Planetside Arena


A new video has released for the upcoming Battle Royale shooter Planetside Arena showcasing weapons and vehicles that will be available to players when the game launches on January 29. Senior Artist Chris Bishop and Senior Game Designer Troy Schram showcase weapons and upgrades as well as mobility and the role of vehicles.

Planetside Arena launches into Early Access later this month.

Daybreak Game Company Hit With More Layoffs


Daybreak Game Company has decided to round out 2018 by laying off more employees, marking the second round for 2018 and one of many over the past few years. In a statement to Gamasutra, the developer referred to the layoffs as “optimizing our structure” to ensure continued success in the years to come. While Daybreak has not confirmed exact numbers, former head honcho John Smedley posted on Twitter that upwards of 70 people are now without jobs. Smedley has since deleted his tweet.

“We are optimizing our structure to ensure we best position ourselves for continued success in the years to come. This effort has required us to make some changes within the organization and we are doing everything we can to support those impacted in this difficult time. As we look to improve efficiencies and realign resources, we remain focused on supporting our existing games and development of our future titles.”

Ex-Daybreak employees have seen the usual outpouring of support that follows layoffs of this size, with open job offers from other developers oddly enough including NantG Mobile, the company headed by Jace Hall who MMO Fallout readers will recall is currently partnered with Daybreak and actively developing Z1 Battle Royale on PC.

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Source: Gamasutra

Black Friday: Check Out All Of Daybreak Games’ Deals


Black Friday is upon us, and that means deals on everything! For Daybreak Game Company customers, there is a good week’s worth of deals on every game in Daybreak’s library.

Check the list below to see what’s on sale for your preferred title.

  • DCUO (Nov. 23 – 26, 2018)
    The DCUO Black Friday Sale is back for 2018 with major discounts. Be sure to visit the in-game Marketplace this weekend, and check back on Cyber Monday for some additional superhero-sized deals!
  • Dungeons & Dragons Online (Nov. 22 – 26, 2018)
    Dungeons & Dragons Online offers Black Friday deals including double bonus points for point bundles, sales on all versions of the Raveloft Expansion and deep-discounts on the Deep Gnome Iconic Hero, Dragonblood Prophecy Adventure Pack and more! For a limited time, Otto’s Box is back with with a big character level booster, reincarnation reset timer, cosmetic pet and other bonus items.
  • EverQuest (Nov. 21 – 27, 2018)
    Even though Fall Fun is still in full swing with 50% shorter instance lockout timers for ALL players, EverQuest is ringing in the season with holiday items available in the Marketplace. Members can also score a 25% off sale on the in-game Marketplace.
  • EverQuest 2 (Nov. 21 – 27, 2018)
    EverQuest 2 is offering a 25% off sale for Members on the in-game Marketplace. Added bonuses for Members include double status and double guild XP.
  • H1Z1 (PlayStation Store: Nov. 21 – 27, 2018; In-game: Nov. 23 – 27, 2018)
    Get great deals in-game in H1Z1 on PS4 with its Black Friday sale on crates and Battle Pass Season 2. North American players can also check out the PlayStation Store for even more deals on crowns and the Black Friday bundle starting today at 10 am PT.
  • Lord of the Rings Online (Nov. 22 – 26, 2018)
    Lord of the Rings Online brings the Black Friday deals with double bonus points for point bundles, sales on the Mordor and Mines of Moria expansions, and discounts on Crafting XP Boosts and the High Elf Race. In addition, players will be able to grab the Keepsakes of the Grey Mountains Bundle, Bombur’s Bounty, Weapons of the Depths Cosmetics, and more!
  • PlanetSide 2 (Nov. 23 – 26, 2018)
    Cheers to 6 years! In addition to the anniversary bundle, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, PlanetSide 2 will have four days of different sales on the Marketplace. Don’t miss out on your chance to score 40% off on infantry weapons, vehicle weapons, infantry & vehicles cosmetics and all camo.