This weekend absolutely flew by, I don’t like it when they do that!
H1Z1 launched a week or so ago, and it was kind of surrounded by some controversy, a lot of people were worried it had a pay2win formula. As it was one of my most anticipated games for this year I wanted to try it out for myself and see if the worries were accurate.
Personally I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I didn’t notice many people super geared and I didn’t see one airdrop the entire time I was playing – in case you’re wondering the airdrops you can pay for, and they have a chance to have weapons in them. So, it seems like it might have all been blown out of proportion a little bit.
I managed to play through my first few hours with a couple of friends, which made things a lot more enjoyable.
On my first life I had no idea where I was, I was surrounded by woods, and didn’t know which way to go. I eventually picked a direction and set off, after stumbling across some cabins and finding a hunting rifle (no ammo) I found the edge of the map. Crap. Shortly after that I died.
I then respawned by a petrol station, there was also another random player there. He started punching me because I was ‘ugly’ – even though we looked the same, about 10 seconds later another player comes over and tries to axe us both to death, me and the first guy team up on him and put our past differences behind us. I died.
By this point I was now chatting with some friends, and I was informed that I could use a website to find my location, I quickly did this, and we made our way to a point to meet up.
I don’t know what it is about this game, but I find it so easy to get turned around. Numerous times I thought I was going in the right direction only to find out it was the complete opposite way…
Eventually we were able to meet up and we travelled around together gathering supplies, and just generally messing about.
After an hour or so, both my companions died, and I was on my own, I decided to call it a night. As this was actually on Thursday night, this still left me with Friday night to play.
So, when the weekend finally rolled around, I got back on to H1Z1, and carried on my adventure. Again friends were playing, so we made a plan to meet up. On my way to meet up with them I encountered my first glitch/random moment as shown below.
Eventually me and Ross (who has written for us a few times) met up, but our other friend was still a little lost. After eventually figuring out where we all were we managed to meet up on the south side of the map near Pisspot Creek (Yes it’s actually called that). We decided to make a camp of sorts and re-energise. We made our camp fire on a little hill not far from the river. It was quite peaceful, until a bear showed up. We took it down, but we had to use bullets to do it. This turned out to be a bad idea, because moments later 3 or 4 very well geared players rolled in to our camp. “Run, scatter!” Was all we heard from Ross. We all legged it in to the woods as quickly as we could.
We all made it out alive, but we lost a lot of water and some food in the camp fire. We headed east and found ourselves at De Soto Service stop. We had a scavenge around *Bang* “I’m dead. I got sniped” One party member down, me and Ross hid in a building doors closed. After a couple of minutes Ross ventured outside *Bang* dead… I was on my own, my adrenaline starting to pump. I crept out slowly, keeping an eye out, and that’s when I saw him, looting my friends dead bodies, revenge had to be mine.
And that was my first kill in H1Z1. After that I made a hasty exit and almost killed someone else when they startled me, but he got away. I wasn’t actually intending on killing him, he just scared me. I called it a night after that.
So far I’ve rally enjoyed playing H1Z1, it’s very different from games like DayZ, mainly because you meet people so much easier. I’ve bumped in to more people in my first couple of hours than I have in my total time playing DayZ.
Recently I’ve kind of got in to making my own burgers and on Saturday I wanted to make some more, including the buns to go with them. This takes a fair amount of time to do, so I didn’t really go out much on Saturday apart for some brunch because brunch is cool! Anyway in between making buns and stuff for burgers I started playing Dragon Age Inquisition. I’ve actually had this for way over a month now, but just not started it because I knew it would take up a lot of time, so wanted a good few hours straight to be able to get in to it.
Over the course of the day I was able to play it for around 7 hours I think. Which is a good start. I haven’t actually played any of the previous Dragon Age games, but I thought I’d be able to get by without them anyway.
Here is a quick rundown of the story – A peace conference between mages and Templars is destroyed in a large explosion which also opens the Breach and numerous smaller rifts, from which demons from the Fade emerge. The Chantry’s senior clerics, including its leader, the Divine, are killed in the explosion, along with many mages and Templars. The only survivor of the blast is you, who emerges from a rift with a mark on his or her hand capable of closing the rifts, but no memory of what happened. Cassandra and Leliana, former assistants to the Divine, enlist you to help in closing several rifts. You then begin to be referred to as the Herald of Andraste. Together with former Templar Cullen and ambassador Josephine, they carry out one of the Divine’s last orders and establish the Inquisition, an organization which can act independently to address the crisis and close the Breach and defeat the one who created it.
For the most part I’ve been doing loads of side quests, and I’ve been having an absolute blast playing it. I’ve barely scratched the surface on what the game has to offer, but I’m really looking forward to getting back on to it. I’ve only encountered one Dragon so far though, and it was kind of by accident – it wrecked me. Needless to say I won’t be heading back to it any time soon.
– Will
So I’ll be keeping my blurb brief this time as my weekend itself was far from Geeky. But before all that, I’ve completed Thief! Hooray!
January stands at 4 games completed (AC:IV, COD:AW, Last of Us & Thief) So i’ll be hoping to keep the completion rate going with Killzone and Knack still to do.
As for the weekend, I was on a stag do in Prague. What goes on tour stays on tour yadda yadda. It wasn’t the geekiest weekends but I did get to try my hand at firing some real guns. It’s safe to say I should stick to Call of Duty as I finished a respectable 4th from 4 in our shooting competition. The kickback from some of those guns was immense and the smell of the gunpowder just added to the experience.
My particular favourite was firing a sniper rifle. When the instructor told us we’d be aiming for a baked bean can 100m away I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. We got 5 shots on it each, and it was incredible pulling the bolt back to reload each round.
I got 4 of 5 on target, slightly cautious about the scope giving me a black eye with the kick back.
On the final day of the 4 day weekend away we calmed things down with a segway tour of the city and did some site seeing. The place is beautiful and somewhere I’d love to visit again, just perhaps not on a stag do.
And now I’ll use this week to recover and get back to reality.
– Murr
