A new upcoming XBLA title is just the first step toward a dream zombie game.
Ask Jeff Strain what ultimate goal of his game studio Undead Labs is and he'll give you a big answer, without a moment's hesitation - Strain wants to create "a cultural phenomenon, rather than make mere games."
The company's vehicle for this has never been a secret: when it announced itself in 2009, its opening statement to the world was direct and to the point. Undead Labs wants to create the definitive, open world, online zombie experience, and it wants to do it on home consoles.
"We want to create the definitive zombie survival experience," Strain told us in an interview. "It hasn't been done yet, and we think that there's a tremendous game there to be made, and we want to be the ones to make it."
"We all go to zombie movies like Zombieland and come out afterwards and have a beer with our friends or significant others and kind of sit around and say, 'What's your plan?'
"'Well, I would try to go to the Costo,' or 'I would go to the cell phone tower on top of the hill and crawl up there and make myself a little fort.' Everyone has their own surivival plan. And what we wanted to do in terms of the game we're creating is to model that, to put the tools in your hands as a gamer to answer the questions. Let you explore, let you figure out if your strategy is a good survival strategy or not."
Strain's dream online zombie game is still quite a ways away, but Undead's small team has been working hard since its inception to make it happen. On Thursday, the team announced that it had partnered with Microsoft Game Studios to release its first title exclusively on the Xbox Live Arcade platform - a single-player, open world zombie survival game that will serve as both a sneak peak and a testbed for what Strain ultimately hopes to accomplish.
"The reason we're doing it that way is because this is a big undertaking that we're launching into here," said Strain. "It's a new market, and a new class of game that has not existed on consoles before, and we'd really like to get players involved in helping guide us in terms of making that full online world experience. "
Codenamed 'Class3,' the Live Arcade title will be a story-driven glimpse at what Undead's eventual MMO will be like. The game will control like a third-person, 3D, open world action game, but will focus more on survival than zombie slaying.
"The idea is to drop you in a world post-zombie apocalypse and give you a lot of freedom about how you want to survive," creative director James Phinney told us. "I think pretty quickly, players are going to realize that they're not going to kill all the zombies."
Gameplay examples Phinney gave included estabishing a base of operations (among many available in the world), rescuing other people to build up your group, managing your resources (will you grow food to improve youf food supply? Try to reestablish power?) and generally trying to reestablish order using the tools around you.
"We're talking about all the stuff that you'd expect in an open world action game," said Phinney. "Driving around, running over a bunch of zombies, booby-trapping a truck so that it will blow up. Grabbing a boombox, finding that the battery is still working. You can turn that on and use it as a lure for zombies, and hopefully you have some plans for dealing with it when they're there.
"Maybe it's a way of attracting them to kill a bunch, maybe it's to attract them so you can sneak past them to get to that food you're trying to collect or the survivors you're trying to rescue. You're going to find a spot and say, this has a supply of guns and ammos that we need back at our base, and bring in a bunch of the survivors you've rescued to pick that up and escort it back through the city. So, very action-oriented, a very organic experience, and at the same time you've got a base to build. How ambitious you want to be about it is up to you."
The game is still too early in development to show, but scroll through the following images to check out some of the concept art and get a feel for the atmosphere the team is trying to create.
