Interview DoubleBear talks Zombies at Gamasutra

[Jason]

Tags: DoubleBear Productions

Brian Mitsoda has been making the pre-hype rounds for <b><a href="http://www.doublebearproductions.com/?page_id=7" target="blank">DoubleBear's Zombie RPG</a></b>, including this <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25008" target="blank">interview at Gamasutra</a>.
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<blockquote>One of the staples of the zombie genre, at least in the initial days of the event, is the confusion and disarray the survivors find themselves in. Obviously this would lend itself well to an open world setting. Is that the direction you intend to go in?
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We’re an open world game, yes. That was another draw of the setting. When you don’t have any access to communication or information, you wouldn’t know what to expect outside your immediate area. People have no idea if there are safe areas out there or if there’s help on the way, which leads to rumors and misinformation.
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Coupled with the need for supplies, it sparks curiosity and encourages the player to explore the surrounding area looking for facts, food, and friends. We also like the setting because you might grow to like some of these survivors, but true to the zombie genre, anyone can die or be infected at any time. Every time you leave the safety of your shelter, a few bad calls could leave your most trusted ally dead. I think it’s an expectation for the genre and the non-linear aspect – no one is safe.</blockquote>
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On a side note, some of you might be interested to read that the "Age of Decadence team has been transitioning onto our project as they finish their tasks on AoD." Does that mean Thursday is right around the corner?

 

[MetalCraze]

Zombie survival RPG with the need to do something else than grind for exp (like survive) sounds cool. I hope the dangers he's talking about are real and annoying if you do something stupid and not mere gimmicks like they usually turn out to be.
Brian better pull this off. And he should hire a good gameplay designer.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I just hope you're running away from danger most of the time. Being able to kill most things would turn the survival thing into a fetch quest for food.

 

[Silellak]

Zombie survival RPG with the need to do something else than grind for exp (like survive) sounds cool. I hope the dangers he's talking about are real and annoying if you do something stupid and not mere gimmicks like they usually turn out to be.
Brian better pull this off. And he should hire a good gameplay designer.

The infection and noise systems described on their forums sound pretty cool. Any NPC can be infected by zombies, and the infection can only be "delayed" through use of anti-biotics. The character is fucked; it's just a matter of how long they're fucked FOR. And anti-biotics are supposed to be rare-ish, so I imagine if you have multiple infections in the party, you'll be forced to choose who is "most important".

In the "hardcore" mode, anti-biotics don't exist and even the PC can be infected.

The noise system should add a nice strategic level to the combat. Sure, you can blow off zombie heads with a shotgun, but that's just going to attract more zombies. You can get in close and deal with them more quietly - but then you risk infection. I imagine the human NPCs you fight will also attract zombies with the noise THEY make, so you'll have to figure out the best way to deal with that situation as well.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Edit: read above post, noted that they're going the 'disease' explanation. Still leaves open a plotline about the cause of the disease, though.

Any news on what is supposed to have caused the zombies? One thing I liked about the early Romeros, and hated that they changed in the action-movie recent version of Dawn of the Dead (not that the films have much in common - the recent one was fun, but it is a totally different film, more of a remake of Aliens in some ways than Romero's Dawn) was that no-one knew for certain what the cause was. It isn't as though it's naturalistic ala 28 Days later, so spelling out that it's a virus actually exacerbates the sillyness of it. I much preferred the approach in NoTD and the original Dawn (done better in Dawn than in Night, come to think of it) where different characters, news reports etc give various 'theories', ranging from it being a disease, a curse, an experiment gone wrong, nuclear radiation, a weapon, through to the apocalyptic preacher on TV saying 'there's no more room in hell'. The survivors don't know for sure, and aren't likely to find out - they're ordinary people, not military heads (though in Dawn, 2 of the main characters are military deserters, who left their unit when they realise the pointlessness of the fight).

It's a good thematic counterpoint to the idea that whatever the cause, it was people's fault that it spread - like a natural disaster, that could have been contained (which is why Romero made the zombies so pissweak compared to most films - especially in Dawn, where you've got a character who slowly starts to like killing them a bit 'too' much, punching them in the face and laughing etc) but isn't. Romero-style zombies aren't overly strong, and it's made clear at the start that the cities are fucked because of all the impoverished, uneducated ethnic slums: big opening scene with the main pair's military squad 'cleaning' a mexican/black slum, with crowds of ghetto-residents making it almost impossible to separate the undead from the living, 20 people squashed into an apartment, who don't speak english and have no idea what the soldiers are there for, and have an 'ill' uncle that comes down and starts biting them, soldiers going nuts and randomly shooting all the blacks, infected or not, etc. It makes the infection look like a great big flood, a force of nature, but one that could easily be stopped if there weren't social holes for it to seep in through.

In a game, though, I think you SHOULD find out the cause, and that discovering that cause should be a major side-plot in the game. In a film, it's ok if the characters are just trying to survive, but in the game you need a purpose.And you don't want to feel hopelessly pinned by nature the entire way through an rpg - lategame you eventually want to start to become a genuine force of your own. But the cause does not laid out modern action-film style - I'm thinking make it a subtle and difficult side-quest, that players can get a few hints of by following the main quest, but that they'll need to do some off-the-path searching, and puzzle-solving of a more difficult level than the main quest (I'm thinking of Morrowind's cure-for-vampirism 'quest', where two books on vampirism were common, but there were only 1 or 2 copies of the volume that had the cure in it, requiring the player to (a) find out that there IS a cure out there, (b) do much sneaking/killing his way through the best public and private libraries in search of the missing volume, and then (c) do a fairly tough dungeon-crawl in a very hard to find area, located only by a rough description in the book you found)).

I'd prefer it if you didn't get a 'I saved the world by curing all the zombies!!!' ending. Maybe that's just personal preference, but I think the setting favours a more personal storyline with goals specific to the protagonist, rather than saving the world. Global zombie pandemics just don't seem all that tough if a small band of adventurers can defeat them.

 

[Silellak]

I believe the developers have said you will come across multiple theories regarding the origin of the plague, but may never discover the truth. I do KNOW that Brian flat-out said "You will not be able to save the world, sorry."

 

[Forest Dweller]

On a side note, some of you might be interested to read that the "Age of Decadence team has been transitioning onto our project as they finish their tasks on AoD." Does that mean Thursday is right around the corner?

How could they be if they haven't even released the combat demo yet?

 

[Texas Red]

Sounds impressive so far but...

Why should food be a problem? Every apartment, office, house and not to mention stores are filled with food. Just snatch a crate of Ramen noodles and something dried.

 

[Multidirectional]

Why should food be a problem? Every apartment, office, house and not to mention stores are filled with food. Just snatch a crate of Ramen noodles and something dried.

Your words reek of Fallout 3..
Do we even know how much time has passed since the beginning of zombie apocalypse in this game?

 

[Emotional Vampire]

"dry and cool place" is suprisingly hard to come by when there's no electricity.

 

[Volrath]

Sounds impressive so far but...

Why should food be a problem? Every apartment, office, house and not to mention stores are filled with food. Just snatch a crate of Ramen noodles and something dried.

Looting for one. Eventually canned goods will run out.

 

[Morkar Left]

because I don’t really play or make games for the story, but because I like to play games. The systems for our game came first, and we just happened to marry them to what I think is a great setting for both intriguing gameplay and compelling character and story possibilities.

That´s what I expect for gamedesign and how it should be.

 

[nekkerbee]

I'll never make a zombie rpg of my own, but here's something I would try to incorporate if I did: the makeup of the survivors (gender, occupation, etc.) has a major impact on the functionality of the shelter. It shouldn't be a simple matter of more people = more strength, but the distribution has to be balanced. Think Dwarf Fortress, or the cities in Civilization.

Does your shelter have 20 guys and 2 women? You're gonna have a problem, unless there are other morale boosters present. No doctors? Be prepared to lose members from illness. Is one survivor a chef? Great, morale is boosted because she can work wonders with canned lentils and some spices. During your scouting mission you locate a cancer patient; do you bring him into your shelter if he has no usable skills? Will the other survivors resent a dying man using their limited resources?

I thought of this because the survivor group dynamic is usually the most interesting thing about zombie films (and other disaster scenarios). Just thoughtlessly adding members to the group is somewhat boring; the risk that it could all fall apart if it's not organized correctly makes it exciting, at least to me.

 

[MetalCraze]

@Silellak: that is a good design choice. But I'm worried about the realization. It always sounds good on a paper - in the game it may turn into something repetitive and artificially looking - Brian maybe a good writer but that's it without a good gameplay designer.

Why should food be a problem? Every apartment, office, house and not to mention stores are filled with food.

You are not the only one surviving human in the game's world.

 

[bhlaab]

Do we even know how much time has passed since the beginning of zombie apocalypse in this game?

Dawn of the Dead amount of time. Long enough for it not to be a surprise (as in Night of the Living Dead), but not long enough for it to become "normal" (Day of the Dead)

 

[Texas Red]

Does your shelter have 20 guys and 2 women? You're gonna have a problem

Why will there be a problem?

 

[tilting_msh]

One thing I liked about the early Romeros, and hated that they changed in the action-movie recent version of Dawn of the Dead (not that the films have much in common - the recent one was fun, but it is a totally different film, more of a remake of Aliens in some ways than Romero's Dawn) was that no-one knew for certain what the cause was.

IIRC in the remake of Dawn of the Dead nobody is certain what the cause is, either. There was no explanation like in 28 Days Later. The characters even had to discover on their own that it was transmitted by bite.

 

[bhlaab]

The original night of the living dead actually made an awful, half-assed explanation about gas from venus or some shit

 

[Pliskin]

The original night of the living dead actually made an awful, half-assed explanation about gas from venus or some shit

Wasn't it something about radiation from a crashed satellite?

As to the food issue: If it's only been a few months, probably not that much of a problem --- if you take into account that 3/4 of the former population don't eat canned goods anymore... A bigger issue would be ammunition. Shotgun shells don't grow on trees, and despite what yr typical Eurotrashistan media would have you believe, America doesn't have a gun shop on every street corner.

 

[Micmu]

All 39045894567 zombie movies made so far are beyond pathetic, right next to all the 87452345783425 vampire movies.
Sometimes, games in these fucked settings/themes can be good, though :bloodlines:

 

[Tardvapor]

All 39045894567 zombie movies made so far are beyond pathetic

Yeh and I hate all these zombie rpg clones that keep coming out. Why can't anyone try anything original for once? Fucking pathetic.

 

[Micmu]

Read my next sentence dumbass

 

[laclongquan]

Dry and cool places to store foods could might well be caches in basements. An airtight box there could protect the foods for certain times.

And I think they should make a difinite number of , non-respawn food caches like that. Once they are gone they are gone. The other sources of food may be plantations/ports under heavy zombie sieges. So if your party is bigger than 1, you damn well better protect such places to have more foods. Creating the scavenger element.

The trade-off of loud guns and melee weapons also are good ideas. But there's a kind of sporting crossbow with pretty good rate of fire, sold in certain sport stores, or in private collections.

The vehicles to move quick should also have loud noise and guzzle gas like no tomorrow, so that each convoy is like a moving lodestone dragged through the floor with lots of iron filings. you must choose move silently with 1-2 guys in bicycles or a group in buses/trucks.

 

[Murk]

The combat mechanics is kind of interesting. Is it going to be "destroy the brain, destroy the zombie" or is it a matter of the flesh moving no matter what?

If the latter, than the above mentioned method of "silent crossbow" is going to be very ineffective as you're going to want to remove limbs, not just poke holes in them. This would leave to cheesy chainsaw/sawed off shotgun combos but... hey why not?

 

[Azrael the cat]

The original night of the living dead actually made an awful, half-assed explanation about gas from venus or some shit

It isn't confirmed as being correct - it's just a theory they hear on TV, together with other theories. If anything there's more of an emphasis on the nuclear waste as a cause, rather than the space gas. But yes, that's why I preferred the treatment in Dawn - it was a bit more obvious that the TV theories weren't supposed to be accepted as 'truth'.

In any event, Romero confirmed the 'bacteria slows the onset, but doesn't cure it' theory when fansites asked him about the zombification of a character in Dawn, which seems to take many days, or possibly even many weeks, while taking antibiotics. But he also said it wasn't supposed to be evidence confirming the bacteria theory - in the Romero films it is pretty much all recent and intact corpses that reanimate, not just ones that get bitten, so if it's a disease then it's airborne. Director's commentary says that bites cause the victim to get ill and die simply because it's a bite from an ultra-bacteria-filled-diseased-corpse that is going to turn pretty much any wound gangrenous. He got the idea from reading about Komodo dragons - they don't have a poison per se, but their bites are pretty much 100% fatal unless the limb is quickly amputated, because they cultivate so much bacteria between their teeth that a bite invetably leads to blood poisoning. Given that komodos live on island habitats, that's as good as a poison, because the prey isn't going anywhere far, and so if it dies in a few days that's fine.