Daybreak Games has announced that the PC version of free-to-play battle royale game H1Z1 will soon officially become Z1 Battle Royale. This was recently revealed in the patch notes for H1Z1 PC‘s upcoming full 1.0 release. The H1Z1 1.0 update will be the first major step towards the eventual transition.
According to the patch notes, the development of H1Z1 PC has been taken over by a newly re-formed dev team, which will work closely with the game’s community. The new team will also prioritize features and changes that will improve the game’s competitiveness to match that of other popular battle royale games like PUBG and Fortnite. There are several noteworthy changes stated in the patch notes.
One of the biggest changes to the game includes reducing matchmaking time, which will be set at a maximum of no more than 135 seconds. That’s a huge leap in improvement from the previous potential maximum wait time of eight minutes for each match. Furthermore, all matches will soon be counted as ranked matches, with spawn selection removed for all Solos, Duos and Fives.
Additionally, there will be major tweaks to weapons, several of which will receive stat adjustments based on their third preseason characteristics. The default time of day will also be set to 2 pm, which means sunnier weather for players in the game. Check out the complete patch notes here for more details and information on upcoming changes and bug fixes in H1Z1 PC, or Z1 Battle Royale.
At the moment, it remains to be seen if these changes will be enough to turn the tide around for H1Z1 PC. The open beta for the PS4 version of H1Z1 Battle Royale amassed a whopping 10 million players over the course of merely one month. We’ll have to wait and see if the transition from H1Z1 to Z1 Battle Royale will help the game pull enough players away from other battle royale games.
