Dead State Revealed (ZRPG)

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Elhoim

It Wandered In From the Wastes
Zombie apocalypse isn't our genre, but this game is close in gaming genre to the Fallouts, and it's still a kind of apocalypse, so here's a note for the interested: ex-Troika/Obsidian developer Brian Mitsoda revealed in an interview with RPS the name of his ZRPG project, as "Dead State" also revealing new details of the story and the first official screenshots.
 
It sounds really interesting - turn-based combat, psychology of NPCs, highly interactive relationships with the other survivors... Seems like it's gonna be a lot more about realism than the classic L4D-type zombie carnage:

One thing we really wanted to capture with the gameplay was that feeling of dread that was a big part of X-Com. You only have line of sight to what you and your allies see. It’s very easy to be in a situation where you turn the corner and there are five zombies waiting there or a case where you fail to properly sweep a bedroom and one lunges out of the walk-in closet while you’re about to search the dresser. I think that’s a big part of the zombie genre, that experience where your friend gets bit that one time you weren’t careful. It makes the zombies in the game scary and the exploration very tense, rather than just consisting of killing all the enemies in the area and opening all the containers, repeat ad nauseam.
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Visually, however, it looks a lot like The Sims :(

I hope that constantly maintaining friendship with allies and micro-managing the base and supplies won't take over the fun of exploring and killing zombies:

We definitely wanted Dead State to be about survival, and we needed a resource to reinforce this. Allies need food every day. If they start to starve, it causes morale problems, which can start to impact the ability of the shelter to function. Having to go out for food is risky, but necessary. For gameplay mechanics, it prevents the player from just turtling in their shelter. It also organically raises the difficulty of the game – more allies, more food needed, more (and farther) locations need to be reached to gain access to food (and the chance of running into more hostile groups). Then you factor in luxury items to help with morale and fuel for generators and parts for shelter upgrades and there’s an awful lot of reason to go out and search for more people to help. The more you have, the more you need, and so on. Also, food and other items can disappear over time due to the looting efforts of other groups, so the game gets a bit harder as it goes on, and forces you to start taking risks, like trying to loot riskier areas or take on larger groups for their supplies.
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I reckon that right now, this game could go either way - great, mediocre or crap. They're certainly aiming high - this could surely be the most complex game ever made in the zombie-genre.
 
I'm pretty stoked about this. I'm not a hardcore zombie genre fan, but I like zombie movies and games in general. It does look a little like the Sims....
 
The only problem I have with this announcement is... that I now want to play such a zombie game. Sucks, that there are only shooter around.
 
I'm just wondering what exactly the narrative of such a game will be.

Merely surviving won't hold my interest long as it would basically boil down to doing the same thing over and over.

I demand to know more before I consider investing my monies into this.
 
Holy shit, an RPG from a top-down perspective? That's madness!

So glad to see someone fighting the current trend of First & Third Person RPGs. That said, I guess it's more like F:T/Jagged Alliance/X-Com than a standard RPG, but it still sounds very interesting.

I'll definitely add this to the radar.

ETA: Sounds sort of like The Walking Dead: The Game, which is definitely a good thing. It's a character-driven comic series that's going to be an AMC TV series shortly.
 
Since there's no mention of a main plot line and/or main story, the shelter being a fixed location, and the apparent big emphasis on micro-management of allies, food and other resources, it does sound a little Sim-like. (Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but some more info would be nice).

On the other hand; turn-based combat, top-down view, good writing... oh yes please. :)
 
x'il said:
Since there's no mention of a main plot line and/or main story, the shelter being a fixed location, and the apparent big emphasis on micro-management of allies, food and other resources, it does sound a little Sim-like. (Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but some more info would be nice).
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There is quite a bit of info in the FAQ:

http://www.deadstate.doublebearproductions.com/faq/

Basically, it's not micromanagement at The Sims level, where you have to manually take care of each NPC. You have resource management at a macro scale, and when thinking about NPC management think about how X-COM handled the bases, and add dialogue, meetings, and crisis events to that.

To summarize, it's like X-COM but with named allies you can interact with.
 
I'm intrigued by the different skill levels of all NPCs - not everyone's gonna be a badass mercenary. So far it seems like they're going for a whole load of realism in terms of leadership, resource management, survival... The zombies are more or less just a backdrop.

I'm totally excited about the turn-based, top-down style. That's something that needs to be done in a real game again - these days it's used more in low-budget games or for fans of 'casual gaming', but this ZRPG could very well bring it back.

Couple of things I hope for, but are hard to guess at this point:
- flexible engine (MODS!)
- more RPG than turn-based strategy (characters will always be more fun than resources)
- more grime & gore, less Sims (so far, it looks a bit too clean for such a horror setting)
 
That mods thing is something I am interested as well. I've checked out the Age of Decadence combat demo a while ago and it looks like some parts are easy to edit, while others can't be accessed. Also I wonder if there will be a map editor release (for AoD for now).
 
a short while ago i'd sworn off gaming aside from Fallout titles, but for this i'll most likely make an exception. i've been following some of Brian and Annie's updates/posts at the codex for some time now, and it's all very encouraging.
 
I wonder if I'd like it more if they replaced the zombies with just an invading military, think Red Dawn. It would be a different style than they are going for, as you wouldn't really just "forget" about a smart enemy that actively sought you out, but they could do a lot of fun things if they mixed in guerrilla tactics to this type of game. Just rambling now but I think I'm excited for this.
 
It's good that there is virtually just one type of zombie as well.

I think all games/movies of the zombie genre felt the need to evolve their zombies - nowadays you hardly get anything with the old school slow, shambling zombies.
 
I personally think, that faster zombies are okay, as long as they are "fresh". The older a corpse is, the slower it should walk, until the body is so weak, that the zombie breaks together by itself.

I don't like sprinting zombies, but a kind of half walking, half running doesn't looks too bad as well.
 
I like the fact that it'll be playable on lower end systems.

Lexx said:
I don't like sprinting zombies
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8klp4Ruw0Y[/youtube]
 
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