Sovreign said:
I read the zombie survival guide a few years back and I got really into it. I mean really into it. I was imagining zombie proof houses and vehicles. I was daydreaming of scenarios of gathering resources after the apocalypse hit, going through tactics of destroying the undead hordes. Then one day I thought, 'Hey, this would be kind of a cool game' I imagine it would be obviously a sandbox open world game. I think it would be cool to integrate RTS style resource gathering, micromanagment of a "team" of survivors, but also to put in harvest moon style farming and what not to sustain food. I think a GRAW style shooter would fit in well when you are venturing out into the wastelands of the old world.
When I saw your idea I immediately thought of UFO: Afterlight, because your idea contains strategic, base management and combat elements. Personally I prefer the TBS (turn based strategy) option when managing a team since I've never met an AI that controls my team members with the degree of sneakyness that I prefer.
I ideally like to set up ambushes and it's really irritating when I position my sniper only to find that he's wandered off for a coffee break at the critical point... or that my runner (the guy I use to bait the trap) has run into the enemy while I was busy setting up my sniper... or countless other idiotic things that the AI generally does unless you spend 3 hours customising every setting before the ambush then another 4 hours resetting everything when you want to make the final assault after you've taken out their sentries and spotters...
Umm.. I seem to have drifted off topic. Yes to the idea, no to RTS or rather no to RTS unless it's the starcrafty/tower defensy RTS. Personally I like to feel some sort of investment in my team members so some sort of progression/levelling up option is a must, even if it is RTS if there's a levelling up/promotion option I find I get quite attached to that one plucky little grunt who survived long enough to get promoted and now has a minigun and a big cigar
.
If you're thinking of going the MMORPG route then I'd definitely be playing on the zombie side, because eating brains is just fun
. For the MMORPG route it would actually be fantastic to have the game start in a modern city, but with destroyable terrain and just one or two zombies and everyone else start out as normal Joes, and then watch as the civilian players scramble for weapons (which don't regen, so there are a limited number of guns, bullets, etc in circulation, and melee weapons would become a must eventually), the city gets trashed and the slower civilians get turned into zombies and join the zombie army!
That would be amazing, seeing that progression as a player, feeling the pressure of knowing that ammo's not going to repop so unless you kill another player or manage to find a zombie who's corpse is still carrying around rounds then what you've got is all there is... scavenging for makeshift weapons, etc. The human players would have to eat so there would be plenty of room for micromanagement since some players would want to farm on the side, and of course it would be interesting to see what sort of "governments" formed. I think a good physics engine would be critical, allowing human players to occupy a building, pile up rubble to form defenses, build booby traps, craft make-shift weapons, etc. Various camps might have different ethics, with some Mad Max style raiders who attack other camps for food and weapons, some with a Wild-West style Sherrif, etc.
As for playing zombies, I think level-ups would be based on how many brains you eat, and you'd get smarter and able to do more stuff (normal zombie powers like figuring out how to open doors, wall-crawling, spitting venom, faster movement, can opener skills, etc). And the zombies would also probably form some type of communities to organise to attack the humans as the game got more advanced.
I don't think the game would get stale either. The limited space to grow food in any one compound would force humans to be exclusive about who they let in, and some people would need to live outside, or at least go out to grow food.
I think this could be a great MMORPG, but you would need very "hands off" GMs, which is a very unusual. If I have one big peeve with online gaming it's that GMs tend to interfere too much and that doesn't let players get on with scheming because they're waiting for the GMs to spoon-feed them their next quest or objective, and some GMs even discourage player innovation and plotting because it distracts from where the GM wants to the game to "go", which is absolutely ridiculous since it's the players who decide where the game goes, not the GMs.
