Q&A - World of Class3 6/29/12

[Undead Sanya]

Q&A: The World Of Class3

All right, Zeds, Survivors, and the merely infected, here’s the Q&A. By popular vote, you wanted to see the world-related questions first. Next week we’ll feature the questions on zombies and survivors.

We’re always looking for more people with the survivor mentality, and these forums need bookmarking, so don’t forget to share this link.

Buildings

Ghost Kage, jaffin21, Pieter, and others asked: Can you turn any building into a refuge?

There are two types of player-established refuge: Homes and Outposts. Your Home is your base of operations. It is where you keep your supplies, research new technologies, build facilities such as infirmaries and training areas, and where you and your fellow survivors can safely sleep for the night. The main requirement for a potential Home site is that it have a perimeter fence or wall. Outposts are buildings you choose to establish as a supply and refuge points away from your Home. Just about any building can be an Outpost, including houses, stores, and commercial buildings.

Rick added: Can a police station, prison, hospital, or other public building be used?

Public buildings can be used for Outposts. Some public buildings may also be suitable for Home sites.

Pieter wanted to know: Is every building enterable, and is every room enterable in that building?

If a building is not damaged in such a way as to prevent entry, you’ll be able to go inside. The vast majority of buildings in Class3 are indeed enterable. It was a hell of a lot of work to make that happen, but we felt it was core to making you feel like you were in a real world.

Jack and Pieter wondered: When we’re building, do we go through menus, RTS-style? You said we don’t have to find the wood; do planks magically appear or do we fetch them in backpacks?

Building in your Home is accomplished by selecting the type of Facility you’d like to create (or research) in the Journal UI, and then gathering the required resources (building materials, additional survivors, special needs such as copper wire or fertilizer). Each Home site has a number of interior and exterior locations appropriate for building. It’s not free-form building like Minecraft; our goal is to streamline the building process so you can focus on the strategic impact of your research and building decisions, rather than requiring you to micromanage the details of the construction process.

When barricading doors and windows, you don’t need to gather wood — we assume there is plenty of broken furniture and other appropriate barricade materials laying around during the apocalypse.

Jack also wanted to add: Are there any places in the world that you can only get specific equipment in that you can't find anywhere else e.g. military base that will have army issue guns and vehicles and such? Obviously they would be high risk places to go, but they'd be worth it if you got out alive

Yes, certain weapons, items, and vehicles can only be obtained in certain parts of the world.

Sander wanted to know if, in addition to hammered planks: Will we be able to move objects like chairs and tables to barricade windows?

You can’t rearrange furniture to barricade doors and windows. We are prioritizing the strategic impact of the decision to barricade over the actual mechanics of doing so. That said, I think it would be cool to be able to barricade with furniture, and it’s definitely on the consideration list for Class4.

Sean asked: With the right supplies/manpower, can primary bases be built from nothing or is a pre-existing structure always needed?

You must use a pre-existing structure, and then modify it as suits your strategy, materials, and survivor skill set.

CaptMugwash, along with a dozen other people, had this question: When you go and clear a building, closing all doors and barricading windows, etc, making sure no zombies can enter... if you leave via a secret entrance and come back later, will zombies have spawned there?

You can barricade and secure buildings after you’ve cleared them out and claimed them as an Outpost. All buildings under your control — Homes and Outposts — create a radius of protection around the building and immediate area, which decreases the density of ambient zombies, prevents infestation of nearby buildings, and prevents zombies from spawning in the controlled building. Zombies will continue to attack the perimeter of the building if you are spotted (or heard) inside, and if they overrun the building you could lose control of the building, so you better have the resources to protect what you claim!

Vehicles

Bryan and Killerairman wanted to know: I know we’ll drive cars and trucks but will we be able to fly helicopters and airplanes? Will we be able to drive bicycles, ATVs and dirt bikes? Motorcycles?

We’re going to start with cars and trucks, but those are all great ideas for someday.

Sean asks: Will vehicles be laying around in a fully functional state or will most, if not all, require some repair?

When you find a vehicle that has never been used before, you’ll be able to drive it right away. But vehicles do get damaged to the point where they can’t be driven anymore. Some of the survivors in your Home may have the ability to repair them, and you may choose to provide a Facility to speed up repair and add improvements.

Many ask: Do vehicles require fuel?

Fuel is one of the resources you need to manage in the game, impacting your ability to create certain types of explosives and fuel generators for electricity. It may also have an impact on your vehicles, but we’re still working on this system. We won’t be modeling fuel on a per-vehicle basis, so you’re not going to be running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

Weapons

Ghost Kage asked: Will the weapons we see be realistic and gritty or are they going to be Dead Island’s electrocuting, flaming, and glowing style?

We’re going for realistic and gritty. All weapons — including guns, melee weapons, and devices you can build, such as Molotov cocktails and mines — are on modeled on realistic real-world counterparts that you’d be able find or construct. Sorry; no flaming chainsaws of doom!

Deffcon 1 left no stone unturned with this question: Will I be able to piece together and craft a machine gun or grenade launcher from scrap metal? Or will it be more realistic where I actually have to have the the correct parts, not just generic gun part A and barrel B? Will there be a need for different types of parts for different weapons or will we just need basic parts that can be combined to make what we need?

You can’t build guns. You can build other types of weapons, including a variety of incendiary devices, and you can build silencers for your guns, provided you have upgraded your Workshop to a Machine Shop or Munitions Shop.

Sean wants to know: Will weapon maintenance play a role in the game in any way? Meaning will blades need sharpened, guns need repaired, etc?

We’re experimenting with weapon durability models right now. We should be able to provide more details on this system in a future Q&A. In the meantime, now is the time to weigh in on how you think this should work!

Savage Saint asked, and plenty of other people were right there with him:: What if I run out of bullets or my bat breaks etc. and I’m left with nothing? Can I grab a shopping cart and push it into a crowd as a desperate attempt to save my life? Or can I use random decor as a last resort? Basically what I’m getting at is if it came to it, are we able to use items that wouldn’t necessarily be your first pick to go out and kill zombies?

You can’t grab random world objects to fight zombies. This is always good fun, and some zombie games have focused on this mechanic with great results, but we decided to invest the necessary development resources in other areas, such as a realistic melee combat model. That said, most houses and buildings have items you can find to protect yourself in a pinch, such as crowbars, baseball bats, golf clubs, and frying pans.

How realistic will the damage be? As Pieter put it: I also hope that when you hit a zombie with an axe you will see a cut on his body where you hit him, or see his arm or leg be cut off. Same counts for guns. I want to see the bullet holes and see blood spit and drip out of there.

You can indeed chop off arms, blow holes in torsos, and nail the perfect head shot. It’s not a dismemberment simulator, but you’ll definitely see lots of flying body parts.

(More next post)

[Undead Sanya]

Co-op Play

Lots of people had questions about the plan for co-op play in Class3.

Class3 will not have co-op play at release.

Since we announced our co-op goals more than seventeen months ago, we’ve been working nonstop and sorting out what we can and can’t accomplish in Class3. It’s an ambitious game — certainly among the most ambitious XBLA titles ever created — and we had to prioritize our development resources. Since we plan to rapidly build a massively multiplayer online world around the Class3 design foundation, we decided to defer co-op play in Class3. Our hope is to add co-op play to Class3 during the development of Class4, but for now Class3 will be a single-player experience.

We wanted to let you know what the deal was as soon as we knew. While we are extremely happy with the way the game has come together around our core design goals — strategic base building, slick combat, open-world sandbox, survival simulation — we’re of course disappointed we couldn’t get co-op play in for release, so we’ll understand if you are too. At the same time, we’re looking ahead to the future — a future we hope we’ll share on a massively multiplayer level.

The Story

Austin and half the internet wants to know: Is there an actual plot, and/or an ultimate goal for the protagonist beyond surviving?

We have the great fortune to have an excellent game story writer with us on Team Zed — Travis Stout, (er, I guess he’s going to be Undead Travis around here). Travis has spent the better part of the last year developing the world, plot, and around 50 named characters with their own backgrounds, traits, hang-ups, and desires, who you will rescue, trade with, protect, and learn to live with over the course of the game. The story of the survivors of Trumbull Valley, and their attempts to stay alive long enough to escape to the larger world, is a big part of making the apocalypse feel real and personal, rather than an excuse to destroy meat. Not that destroying meat isn’t plenty of fun...

Johnnyboy is interested in the timing: How far into the outbreak does the game start? For example, does the player wake up at home one morning to find the neighbours breaking through the front door, cops shooting zombies in the streets, martial law etc, or does this begin a few weeks after the Collapse begins?

The game starts in a remote fishing camp on Mt. Tanner. You’ve been on a fishing trip — sans internet — for two weeks. Everything was peachy when you left, but on the way down the mountain you’ll find that everything has gone to hell.

Survivalting, David, and several other on Facebook asked: In the last Q&A, you said "play from start to finish." Can I keep developing my base and doing stuff after I "finish" Class3?

You can continue playing the game after you complete the story. It’s a sandbox world, rather than a strictly mission-based game, so there’s a simulation driving events that keep it fun after you’ve completed the story. You will come to a point where you’ve upgraded your Home as far as you can go with the resources available, but fighting zeds and tearing around Trumbull Valley in your Mustang Shelby is always going to be fun.

Odds and Ends

Will we be searching for batteries for our flashlights? - Big-Brai

You won’t need to search for batteries. It’s irritating enough in real life.

Will there be world events? Live things you spawn and control from the Lab?

There won’t be live events in Class3, but developer-spawned world events are a key component of the online-world sequel, codenamed Class4.

Will I be able to use farm land, to grow and eat my own food? Can I raise cows , chickens etc for food? - William4

You can choose to raise vegetables in a garden inside your base. That’s a good way to feed your survivor band without having to venture into the zombie-ridden world. Raising livestock (and hunting and fishing) are options for future content.

[Undead Sanya]

One note: Let's keep this thread devoted to discussion of what's here. No new questions, please - unless they're needed to clarify something in the Q&A, of course!

[Comrade Kaizer]

Details are great so far, glad to finally see more and more pour out about Class 3 over time.

There is a general concern with the lack of Co-op. I'm primarily a PC gamer, to me the main draw about experiencing Class 3 and ease of bearing the news of its Xbox 360 exclusivity was the potential premise of playing with my friends who solely are console gamers.

Hopefully this can be implemented at a later time (sooner rather than later).

[Zach]

Great Q&A can't wait for next week

[RetroMutt]

I'm honestly pretty dissapointed about the co-op part ^^;; My friend and I spent quite awhile talking about what we were gonna do in this co-op game, BUT HEY at least it won't always be single player right? I just hope Co-op gets put in a few months after release rather than a year... Oh well though, still very excited about this!

[jynxinator]

Pretty dissappointed that there's no coop. A free roam coop zombie survival game was me and my friends' dream game, and we were super excited for this. I understand that Class4 will be coop, but I can imagine the release window of that game is a long time from now.

[Senax]

This game sounds more amazing every time I hear about it Seriously hyped!

[BigMistake]

Really interested in hearing more about the Outposts en Homes!

[Trayu]

Unfortunate about the co-op but this is still a game worth getting. Along with Kaizer I am happy to see all the new info and updates for the Class 3. I've been following the game since i went back to school for Game Production and have been trying to keep up with what ever is put out.