Since dropping its King of the Kill appendage earlier this year, Daybreak Games' battle royale 'em up H1Z1 has sought to improve its menus, UI, and weapon balancing, among a number of other features on the advice of its community. Now, it hopes to open up to more players still by going free to try for the next seven days. 

From tomorrow, December 14, H1Z1 will be free to download in full. Existing players can team up with new faces in Solo mode, Duos, Fives, the Combat Zone, "and everything else present in the full version", so reads an FAQ on the game's website. 

All progress made during the free trial period is also transferable to the main game, should you decide to make the jump. If this applies, you'll probably want to take advantage of the game's coinciding Steam sale which knocks 75 percent off its recommended retail value. At the time of writing, H1Z1's full Early Access price is £14.99/$19.99. 

H1Z1's free week kicks off tomorrow at 10am PT/6pm GMT, and runs till the same time on December 21. More information on can be found in this direction. 

And for those of you feeling festive, H1Z1 is also hosting its Wreck the Halls event running now through January 1. More on that can be found here. 

Last month, developer Daybreak Games suggested the still-in-early-access battle royale shooter aimed to simplify its UI and menus. It's been taking directions from its community on this front—and its latest update implements a number of weapons balances based on this advice.  

As outlined in the following trailer, the latest update also brings with it a new so-called Combat Zone map, and a series of Daily Challenges. Here's lead systems designer Tony "Carto" Morton with the skinny on that, as well as details on the game's next competitive circuit event:

Speaking to the new Combat Zone, it's designed to give players "non-stop action" and a practicing ground to hone their skills within. The new map is 2x2 km in size and includes a shooting range. The dev points out that players won't parachute into this map—but that they'll start full equipped and ready to go from the off. Instant respawns also apply in the event of your demise.

As for the Daily Challenges, these are built to encourage "bragging right opportunities" whereby completing in-game objectives results in rewards. Daybreak notes that each day brings three levels of difficulty to challenges, and that players will earn Skulls as a currency to purchase items such as skins. 

"Daily Challenges aren’t just limited to one match and can be completed over a series of games in a day," says the developer. More information on this and more can be found via H1Z1's official site. 

You'll be forgiven if H1Z1: Just Survive (now simply called Just Survive, having dropped 'H1Z1' from its name) has slid from your radar over the past year or so. Daybreak's Early Access multiplayer survival sandbox has been a bit overshadowed by a beast of its own making: H1Z1: King of the Kill, which began as a battle royale mode for Just Survive (Brendan Greene of PUBG helped develop it) but was split into its own separate game. King of the Kill blew up, sold millions of copies in Early Access, spawned tournaments (including one that aired on TBS), and remains a fixture on Twitch and a top five game on Steam in terms of playercount.

So it's understandable if its older brother Just Survive hasn't gotten much attention lately. Work has continued, however, and there's a big update out today that makes some substantial changes and adds new features. There's a trailer above, and words below.

Probably the biggest change is the new map, which completely replaces the original that players have scavenged and built on for the past few years. It's called Badwater Canyon and it's not complete yet: initially only a portion will be available to play, an area called Pinemill Reservoir, with more regions to be added as they're completed.

There's also a new stronghold system, which will allow players to build massive forts. "We moved away from allowing players to just build hundreds of bases all over the map, which really impacted performance and really didn't add a lot of gameplay value to the world," said Ben Jones, creative director of Just Survive when we spoke over Skype last week. 

In Badwater Canyon, there will be specific areas for stronghold building, and these locations can be purchased with in-game currency from an NPC at a military base. The idea is to create flashpoints of contention over the areas these strongholds can occupy. "If you've got a really expensive stronghold location near a big [point of interest] like the dam, for instance, or near a town," Jones said, "that's going to be highly desired by the community and they're going to fight you for it."

Stronghold raiding will be on a timer and attackers will have a limited window in which to achieve their objectives. So, instead of waiting for a group of players to log off and then having as much time as they want to completely raze the base, raiders will have to plan ahead and raid quickly and strategically. At the end of the raid timer, the NPC military will arrive to dump poison gas on the raiders, and they won't be able to mount another raid for a set period of time. This is to ensure that while a stronghold may take damage and get looted, the owners won't log in to find nothing but rubble left.

Upon hearing the military base would have vendors and an NPC character to buy stronghold property from, I asked if in the future this might expand to include quests or missions given to players by the military presence.

"We absolutely have plans for a quest system in the future," said Jones. "It's something that I think is really important to fit in with PvE gameplay, which is something we're still very dedicated to supporting despite the clear focus on PvP with the stronghold system."

There's still no release window for Just Survive to exit Early Access, where it's been playable since January of 2015. You can read the patch notes for this update at Just Survive's official site.

King of the Kill, the multiplayer Battle Royale mode that spun off from H1Z1 to become a standalone game, will leave Steam Early Access on September 20. The price is rising to $29.99, but developer and publisher Daybreak Games has announced that the current price of $19.99 will remain as long as the game is in Early Access, meaning you'll be able to buy it for the lower price right up until launch day. You can watch the announcement trailer above.

I got to watch developers play a round of the latest build of King of the Kill during a private Twitch session (I had been invited to play myself but couldn't make it) and I did see a number of improvements from the last time I played. The UI looks better, inventory management is simpler, and I also noticed lighting improvements that make the game look significantly crisper. There's also some slick integration planned that will allow players to connect their Daybreak and Twitch accounts, so streamers and their fans can easily enter team matches with each other.

Most notably, the vehicle physics have been completely overhauled. I watched one developer race a Jeep around for several minutes, and at no point did it flip over and skate across the pavement upside-down after hitting a tiny bump (as I experienced when I played H1Z1 a while back). The handling is different for different vehicles, and the cars now look fun, rather than frustrating, to drive.

The launch will include a new map called The Arena (Early Access playtesting will begin on September 2) and for competitive esports players, King of the Kill will also introduce a season system, though a start date and season length haven't been determined yet. The H1Z1 Invitational will take place on October 2 at Twitchcon in San Diego.

You can learn more at King of the Kill's official site.

I haven't played H1Z1 in a while: I initially spent some time in survival mode, both alone and with "friends", and took a few stabs at winning its Battle Royale mode (note: I lost). Since then, Daybreak has split the game into two separate Early Access titles: Just Survive, and King of the Kill. With the introduction of a new Battle Royale mode called Ignition, it seemed as good a time as any to jump in to the King of the Hill side of the game.

What I found is that Ignition is Battle Royale for people who are incredibly impatient to kill and die. Rather than BR's slowly paced hunt for gear, the long runs through the wilderness, the careful searching of buildings, and the tense build up to the final few confrontations, Ignition is in a big hurry to get players heavily armed and careening toward each other at top speed.

A match begins with players being lowered from individual helicopters wait, no. A match begins with players trying to entertain themselves in the multiplayer lobby before the match begins.

I, too, entertained myself. I ran around punching other players. I went prone and tried to roll across the entire map. I used the various emotes. I fought a crowd to see who had the right to sit on the lobby's only toilet. I added my boots to the pile of boots that appears in every lobby for some reason.

I also traded in some of my boring pants to try to win a new pair of pants with H1Z1's loot gambling thingie. Let's see how I did!

Oooh. Brown pants. I won brown pants. Of all the colors, brown is the brownest. All the other players are going to be brown with envy when they see my new brown pants.

Finally, the match began properly. As I was saying, players are lowered to the ground from helicopters, and begin the match already sitting on gassed-up ATVs. Then everyone speeds off to get equipped. Every player has invisible explosives attached to them, and has only a few minutes to reach a safe zone before they detonate. Safe zones are visible on the map, and you can spot them when you get close as a chopper hovers above them casting down magical green beams of safety-light. Any player not in a safe zone when the timer expires blows up. Surviving players must then race to the next safe zones before the next timer expires. As the match progresses, there are fewer zones and less time to reach them.

The driving physics are about how I remember.

My first round didn't go so well. I was lowered to the ground and sped off toward a brown clump of buildings I'd spotted from the air. It registered that player death notifications were appearing almost immediately. And not the usual kinds of early BR deaths: by axes and fists and maybe a pistol. Players were being killed moments into the match by shotguns and assault rifles.

This is because Ignition is swarming with guns. In fact, upon spotting another player about twenty seconds into the match, I ran up to punch him to death only to discover he was already packing.

I'm not sure how he managed to shoot me dead without ever raising his pistol, but the point is there's no real scavenging for gear in Ignition. Pick a building and you'll almost certainly find it stuffed with weapons, ammo, armor, and of course other players looking for the same.

My next match didn't go much better. While speeding down a road again, mere seconds into the match I was first injured by one player with a shotgun and then another wielding an AR-15. Discovering I couldn't bandage myself while driving, I had to pull over to stop my bleeding before my health ran to zero. Just as I did, more bullets arrived to finish the job.

Eventually, I started surviving a bit longer, mostly by avoiding the bigger settlement areas and aiming for more distant, lone buildings. There's a strong impetus to loot the first place you see, but there's plenty of time on the clock before the first detonation, so it doesn't hurt to loot in less crowded areas and let the first gaggle of players kill one another. I got myself armed, took a few other players out, and eventually made it to a safe zone.

Crouching in some bushes and watching through a scope, I saw other players arriving in the zone and begin culling each other. I also got an idea of just how many players die when the timer expires and their explosives detonate. You can see the notifications spamming below.

And it was like that in every match I played. If you can make it to one of the first safe zones, you've got a decent shot at being one of the final survivors because a good handful of players will wind up getting blown to bits due to poor clock management or not knowing the map very well.

I later became one of them because don't know the map very well. This was the second instance of safe zone spawns, and I picked the one the map showed as being on an island. Unfortunately, the map didn't show that most of the island consisted of sheer cliffs, so I wound up just driving around it looking for a way up. I didn't make it, but I still placed 9th.

My strategy from then on was avoid players whenever possible, get to the first safe zone in one piece, hide if I hadn't picked up weapons or shoot players as they arrived if I had. It typically worked OK, except just about everyone is better at shooting than I am, and one time my rifle wouldn't fire despite being loaded.

I never won, though I did place 9th a second time. The third safe zone was located on top of a mountain, and since I'd once again forgotten the details of the map I couldn't find the road up, so I attempted to just drive up the sheer side of it. It was a slow and agonizing trip, but I did manage to get my ATV into the safety circle. Though I immediately slid right out again.

A few more adjustments and I was back in the circle and no longer slipping down the side of the mountain, but here's a funny thing: when you spend long minutes sliding around on a sheer cliff on a noisy ATV, other people tend to see you from miles away. Just as I'd safely parked, another player shot me in the back. I hope, at least, he enjoyed the show.

Ignition mode is clearly an attempt to goose up Battle Royale into quicker rounds with more action and fewer lulls, and I think it works. Like the rest of H1Z1, it's sort of sloppy but a lot of fun, and nothing to take too seriously. I think Ignition's shorter, gun-happy, action-heavy matches might do well for Twitch viewers who don't want to spend quite so much time watching players slowly run around scavenging in Battle Royale, and it's a good option for players who enjoy BR but want to get right to the carnage.

Big changes are on the way to Early Access zombie sandbox H1Z1. Later this month H1Z1 will be split into two separate games—the open-world survival mode being one, and the competitive Battle Royale mode being the other—and each will be sold separately. Daybreak Game Company also told us that it no longer plans to make H1Z1 free-to-play in the future, as was the originally stated intent.

Here's how it's going to shake out. One game will be called H1Z1: Just Survive, which will contain the multiplayer survival portion of the game. The other, consisting of Battle Royale plus some new planned competitive modes, will be called H1Z1: King of the Kill. These games will be completely separate from each other beginning on February 17, and each game will be sold at a price of $19.99.

For those who have already purchased H1Z1 in Early Access, you'll have access to both games after they split without having to buy anything else. Also, if you buy the current version of H1Z1 in Early Access prior to February 17, you'll also receive both titles. And, you'll get to keep any cosmetic items, keys, unopened crates, and event tickets you've acquired or purchased before the game splits in two. After the split, we're told, premium items collected in one game won't be available to your character in the other, even if you own both games.

As far as release dates go, King of The Kill will leave Early Access sometime this summer (at which time it will also appear on consoles) at a price of $19.99. A date for the full release for Just Survive is still unknown, and Daybreak wouldn't even confirm if it would leave Early Access in 2016. And, when I asked if H1Z1: Just Survive would still become a free title when it left Early Access, as was the original goal, I was told they no longer have plans for it to become free-to-play.

I've dabbled a bit in H1Z1 from time (I did a diary on survival mode here and here, and one on Battle Royale here), but not being a regular player I don't have particularly strong feelings about this news. I know survival fans have complained that most of the recent development attention has been focused on BR, so maybe having a separate team working on just survival will help (provided they add enough additional staff to the survival side). As far as ditching free-to-play, I can see both pros and cons. Dedicated players won't see their favorite servers swamped by swarms of newcomers, but on the other hand, multiplayer-only games need a constant supply of fresh blood to replace the players who have moved on to other games.

I'd love to hear what regular H1Z1 players think of this split. Let us know in the comments.

Update: You can read the official press release here.

Daybreak's zombie survival sim H1Z1 is still in Early Access but the game keeps growing. Today, a spokesperson for the studio announced a major new update rolling out Wednesday (Thursday in Australia) which will bring a range of substantial new additions, including a new hospital area and female zombies.

As is common, both player profiles and the world itself will be wiped to usher in the update. "The world will reset back to its pristine apocalyptic setting and you will need to create new player characters," the spokesperson said. "So if you always wanted the name FluffyPantsExtreme, after the patch you will have an opportunity to claim it for yourself." 

Here's the full list of updates. A more thorough rundown of the new additions and bug fixes is expected tomorrow. In the meantime, why not revisit Chris Livingston's reports from the zombie battleground?

• Hospital content + new interactive content
• Female zombies
• ATV
• Improved Zombie responsiveness
• Item Exchange system
• New Mercenary Crate
• Player wipe and server wipe
• And more

From humble origins as a mod for a mod, H1Z1's Battle Royale mode will feature in the game's first invitational next month. It's happening at TwitchCon, and will involve players and Twitch personalities going head-to-head in the American zombie apocalypse. 

Until September 22, 25 per cent of H1Z1 Invitational Crate Key funds will go towards the prize pool. These special Invitational Crates have vaguely useful stuff like weapon skins and emotes, but they also have T-shirts emblazoned with prominent Twitch broadcasters.

The Invitational itself will take place on September 26 and will be streamed on Twitch. The three-week contest leading up to the event starts today and runs until August 31. Full details on how to get involved are over here, with three players selected to be flown to TwitchCon 2015 in San Francisco.

For those unfamiliar, Battle Royale is basically a combat-oriented game mode forcing players to fight to the death. We spoke to the creator of Battle Royale in January, and it's worth a read. It was originally a mod for the original DayZ mod (ie, the Arma 2 version, not the standalone), but Daybreak licensed it for H1Z1 late last year.

TwitchCon takes place on September 25 and 26.

John Smedley, president of Daybreak Game Company, is retiring from his leadership role. Formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment, Daybreak is responsible for titles like Everquest, H1Z1 and Planetside 2, and has recently been the target of repeated DDoS attacks by hacking group Lizard Squad.

Daybreak confirmed the news with VentureBeat. I can confirm that John Smedley will be taking some time off from the company for the near-term and transitioning to a different role to be determined, the statement said. Upon finalization of his plans, further communication will be provided.

According to the report, Daybreak's current COO Russell Shanks will be promoted to company president. Smedley's short term plans are unknown, though he's expected to take on another role at the company at some point.

It's good to hear, because Smedley has always been a very generous, public-facing president. While the reasons for his departure haven't been detailed, Smedley has been subject to some terrible online harassment of late: he's been swatted numerous times, and was the target of an airline bomb hoax.

A couple of days ago, 24,837 H1Z1 cheaters were banned, en masse, from the game. According to Daybreak president John Smedley, the bans have since prompted many cheaters to confess to and apologise for using cheats. In a series of tweets, Smedley explained that, before he'll even consider lifting a ban, the apologetic cheater must go a step further.

"If you want us to even consider your apology," Smedley wrote, "a public YouTube apology is necessary. No personal information please. Email me the link." 

Smedley stressed that the apologies should contain no personal info, and also that they should be directed at fellow players, and not Daybreak. "Although you hurt our business this is about them not us."

A few hours ago, Smedley tweeted the first such apology.

"Going to be honest," Smedley wrote, "I wish it wasn't about the money, but he's first and that means something."