Zombie MMO! Hell Yeah!
AUTHOR: Jeff
Welcome, zombie fans!
And MMO fans.
Oh, and of course console gaming fans.
And if you don’t fall into one of those categories, you are welcome to hang out anyway if you are console-zombie-MMO-curious.
Today Undead Labs proudly announces… well, our existence. Here’s the official word.
So what’s this site all about? Well, you’ll notice a few non-traditional things going on here.
First, the name of the studio. It’s not “Grumpy Gopher Games” or “Silver Platter Studios” or some generic name that can be applied to any kind of game. Traditional thinking is that your studio name should be genre-neutral, the rationale being that even if you want to make a game about the rotting undead today, in five years you might want to make a pet monkey simulator, and you don’t want to tie your name to a genre.
Um, yeah. Honestly, if we decide to make a pet monkey simulator in a few years, we’ll start a studio called MönkeyWerks or something. This studio is all about making the ultimate zombie apocalypse game, so we are Undead Labs.
You’ll also note that this website is very “blog like” in its layout and focus on news-style content. The fact is that we don’t have a game to put in your hands today, or a marketing team insisting on a “marketing focused” website, so right now the focus of our website is to let you know how it’s going.
We plan to be very transparent during the development process, and to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the early life of a new development studio and the process of bringing a triple-A MMO (or, MMOZ) to life. It’s too early to build a real game community, so hang out here if you are into the behind-the-scenes stuff. If you just want to hear about the game, file all of this in your “cool stuff to check into later” box and we’ll be sure to make some noise when the time is right.
For now, you can expect a few posts a month with features on the studio, the development process, design direction, the industry, and so on. A great way to keep up with new articles is to click that big orange RSS button at the top of this page, or you can just click here to subscribe. We’d also like to encourage you to be part of the Undead Labs community by sharing your thoughts on the articles we post (after reading the Lab Etiquette Guidelines, of course). Many of the initial articles will be written by me, but as new developers come onboard you’ll be hearing from them as well.
Thanks for reading. We look forward to getting to know you. Stay tuned.
Jeff
I’ve never been more excited about a videogame…ever!
I’ll be keeping a clear eye on this game’s development. And you already have this customer in the bag for sure.
ZOMG I LOVE YOUR GROUP already! T_T i am crying with joy bcuz i love zombie games for life T_T thank you guys so much! i swear to god, you guys just made my day hearing this lovely news T_T! you guys should make a zombie rts! that would be amazing!
I’ve been waiting for this since I beta tested the original Everquest. Amazing, I cannot wait. Please send me a beta invite!
—
Subject: Justin
Date Recorded: November 23, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Game suggestion:
As a person goes from choking a zombie with a backyard swing to having access to draw up a bridge to blockade part of a city there should be no difference in health nor damage. Every person should have the right to say they have experience with certain things. Instead of finding the best weapon in the game, you should be able to stick with a weapon you like and over time your proficiency with that weapon will be a show. Your proficiency will change the way you:
-Attack with it(how it’s handled slowly or fast, ect.)
-How quickly you recover with it (reloading a gun, the drawing back of your knife to a zombie chest, ect.)
Example: you pick up a hand gun that you found in a dresser drawer. When you first start using it you don’t grasp the concept of it right away. So you fire it and the kick back is tremendous that is when your proficiency goes up because you just learned to handle that gun more firmly so that it wont kick back as hard. Then you eventually gain a point on reloading when you learn what bullets it uses and how to reload it.
Summary: instead of leveling, the more you do something the better you get at doing it, giving people a purpose in the scarred cities of the world
—
I actually really, REALLY like this idea, maybe with the class system too. Sort of reminds me of Guild Wars with firearms (which isn’t a bad thing).
I’m very curious to see how this turns out. I’m judging that you all ready have a plan in place, so, besides saying Justin’s got a cool idea, I won’t pretend to know how to implement any of that. XD
I’ll be stalk- err, watching this page closely.
-Silver Dreamer
On another note. Will the game give the player NPC’s that they can populate a town with or control? Like after you reach a certain level or do a certain rescue mission will that mean you gain a NPC into your colony/base or will bases be like WoW in that the NPC’s are already there?
I have been dreaming of this moment for years! I have been a zombie fan since Resident evil came out and have always dreamed of this moment. I always thought to myself”Like that will ever happen” and yet here we are. I would love to beta test when you get to that point and will be buying your game without question. Good luck and remember to keep an eye on your community, listen to them as I know you will.
Wow.I just want to say WOW! And no I do not mean that other game.
I love zombies, games, movies, books, anything really and I must say that this game is something I look forward to with great interest! The gaming scene needs more zombies.
Subject: A concerned zombie Date Recorded: November 23, 2009 at 3:18 pm On behalf of zombies everywhere I would beseech you to pay attention to “the zombie survival guide”, in particular the section that talks about the speed at which zombies are capable of moving. We are SLOW!
=====
Good reference for Zombie survival Guide. Another good reference point for both zombie mechanics and Character development would be Max Brooks other book World War Z. if there are not characters you want to root for and against the game could fall flat. AKA – House of the Dead
Topic: How did we get our Zombies: Military, Industrial Scientist, Arcane Voodoo Magic, Hell why not all 3
I’ve always dream of a, Zombie MMO, I wish I could work with these guys on it. I always thought of it as, a small town has an outbreak and it’s up to the players to stop it before it spreads in real time, even if one single zombie becomes lose you can become screwed and have a massive outbreak on your hands to contain
every town/city/country would have a certain of amount of people who have not been torn with the disease
this could be brilliant as long as it’s not instances ..which it probably will be for a console which would suck..i think it should be seamless