Why Early Access?
“Project Zomboid is a much more ambitious game than we could ever have hoped to fund ourselves. It has grown massively over the years, and it’s been a rollercoaster, but we now find ourselves in a stable financial situation with an overall positive reaction from the Steam community. We hope you will join us, but if not we understand. If you're not ready to jump in yet, then please consider us when we break out of Early Access.
How often do we update the community?
We have weekly newsletters known as 'Thursdoids’ which we publish on our
site and on Steam every Thursday. These detail what we've been up to during the week, often with sneak peeks of upcoming features, interviews and videos. If a blog is fairly dry they’ll sometimes only be posted on our website, but we've had this unbroken chain of ‘doids for a long time and (although when milestones have been reached we may switch to doing them every two weeks) we certainly intend to continue them for the foreseeable future.
How often do we update?
We have a reputation that seems to diverge greatly when it comes to update frequency depending on who you ask. Many consider our game frequently updated, some consider us slow. Some public builds have arrived after three months, others with bigger features have taken more than six. You can see all our public build content, and the dates of release,
here.
After a build is released and patched we reopen our public unstable beta, known as the IWBUMS (I Will Back Up My Save) branch – so the community can test it, and help out by reporting bugs. During these times, the greater proportion of the development calendar, we try to update the IWBUMS beta every Thursday.
Some features, particularly NPCs and the new animation system required for their implementation, have taken a very long time to implement. This is largely out of our commitment to getting the features right and them not disappointing on release, but it should be noted that we make no apology for delaying their release until we feel they would be enjoyed, live up to people’s expectations, and most importantly do not have a detrimental effect on the gameplay or stability of the game.
We now work in partnership with several other companies to facilitate all this (General Arcade, and The Eccentric Ape for example) and have also greatly expanded our own staff in the past year.
We will admit to a few long waits between updates in the past, and far longer waits for big features, but we feel from community feedback that the majority of our customers are satisfied with the development of the game.
It should be pointed out too that the game has significant modding support, with map editors and full unrestricted lua modding access, and as such have a vibrant modding community for players to check out.
It should also be taken into consideration that the game is already very far through development, we’d estimate that we’re 75% complete at this point, and we also now have many 1000+ hour players. There is a lot of content to enjoy in the game already and we firmly and proudly believe it worth its current price as it stands.
Please consider reading some reviews if you are still unsure about the content of the game, the release frequency or the debate over the features that have been implemented and those still to come.
Again, full details of all updates to PZ since the release on Steam can be found
here.
What is required for 1.0?
Now vehicles have been released to PZ players there are two major features that are yet to be implemented, the first of which is a requirement for what we want to achieve with the second.
- New animation system – a new animation and model system that will allow for more varied and engaging interactions within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone. Allowing better character clothing, more variation in zombies and far greater modding power for the community.
This system is now being developed alongside our friends at The Eccentric Ape, and will also allow for new animations for stealth mechanics (looking round corners, crouching behind walls, cover etc) as well as a rewrite of the combat system to leverage new animations to make combat more involved, intuitive and fluid.
- NPCS - A far reaching and in-depth NPC system with character relationships, personalities, and an emergent story engine that allows for diverse and emergent character based zombie survival story unique to every playthrough. This will also include the return of Kate and Baldspot who starred in the early alphas of the game.
Several features also require either significant modifications, rewrites or completion before we could consider 1.0.
- Map completion - We still have a major city (our fictionalised version of Louisville, built to a more PZ scale) and an Army base. The rest of the map, which is already pretty vast, can be found here.
- UI Rewrite - The UI isn’t perfect by any stretch. We would like to get a more intuitive and ergonomic UI system implemented.
We avoid ETAs because Early Access development in particular is often filled with unknowns. We want to ensure we get these highly anticipated features right.
In the meantime however we will continue to update the game and provide new features for our community to play with. While certain developers work alongside our friends at T.E.A. and General Arcade on the ‘bigger’ features we have others devoted to the day-to-day maintenance of the current game: balancing, new crafting recipes, vehicle gameplay, weather systems, professions etc.
What about after 1.0?
At this point, once we feel we have fulfilled
every promise we gave when the Project Zomboid site first launched (except the last one, ahem, ignore that. Absolutely no one wanted that, it turned out), as well as the extra things detailed above, and the game is sufficiently polished and bug free, we will launch the game as 1.0 and leave Early Access.
What happens at this point depends entirely on whether the game is making money or not, but given the past solid performance of the game we see no reason why it shouldn’t be. Several developers within the team will likely start exploring our second project, however we have dedicated and passionate devs who were brought into the company via the Project Zomboid modding community, emotionally invested in the game, who are already a big part of the development and communicating with the community. As long as Project Zomboid is making enough to support their continued development of the game, and they are happy to continue working on it (which seems likely), we will continue making Project Zomboid. ”
Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“See above!”
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“See above!”
What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“See above!”
Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“It will likely be £5, $8 more expensive once we hit 1.0. Due to our commitment to making sure early adopters get the cheapest price in appreciation of their early support PZ will never appear in sales that take it below the original alpha price of £5/$8 until we are a long time post 1.0. This commitment also means that, until 1.0 and the price increase, we will never be willing to go beyond a 40% sale.”
How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“See above!”
but I can't stop watching videos about this game lol. When it's finalised and polished it just might be the ultimate survival rogue game.
