Ways to make a Zombie game innovative again.

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GunnerGraye

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I'm all for the basic idea of "Fallout 3 with zombies". But maybe have more survivors to make things interesting. Some people you could get to join you, some people you'd have to fight. I'm sure that would make things a bit more interesting. And there should be like a safe house. And as you go on, you can collect more things for it and eventually make it very nice and protected. Oh and no future guns like plasma rifles, it should take place at about this time.
 

Ionami

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JakalMc said:
Rocksa said:
They could play it as you actually being a survivor of a zombie apocalypse. What I mean here is that you have to barricade yourselves in safe houses, go out and try to find needed supplies, and basically just survive.

Could play out a bit like this. You're trapped in 'big arse city' which is currently overrun with the undead, curiously enough though, they're only really active during the night. So, with this game we have a set day/night cycle and a sandbox type of world going on already. Now then, you need to make it to the other side of the city to an evac point. The catch is that you won't be able to make it in just one day, and you're still going to need food and everything else to make it, so you'll scavenge during the day and try to find a safe place to hole up at night. During the course of the game you'll meet other survivors that you can more or less recruit, some have special abilities to be able to make things for you, some help scavenge, some will actually join you on hunts, etc. Throughout the whole thing you'll be given a choice of moving your base or to just fortify the hell out of your starting one, even if it does end up being very cramped. You'll also have the option to spread out your survivors to multiple bases, or clump them up, or if you're a jerk, clump them up and make them zombie bait while you sneak towards safety. There's safety in numbers, but then the larger the group of people, the more zombies you'll have heading for them.
A Sandbox zombie game is something that I reckon could really be pulled off. Nice idea.
I have been wishing for a zombie sandbox game for years!!!
 

The Rogue Wolf

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A lot of good ideas here; I like 'em!

However, there's an issue to overcome here, and we're already seeing it in regards to Left 4 Dead: People are always screaming for "moar gunz". "zomg i want a AWP" "how com i cant carry a minigun" "wheres my bazoka" There are just too many people out there who, instead of craving the survival-horror tension of limited ammunition and limitless enemies, just want huge numbers of slow unarmed targets so that they can scream "BOOM HEADSHOT" until their testicles drop vocal chords explode. If the game industry can resist the urge to cater to them and deliver a truly harrowing experience, where you're literally counting every shot and making life-or-death decisions on the run, zombie aficionadoes will have the game they crave.

What would I like to see? Something along the lines of what would happen if a zombie outbreak occured in a setting, say, 300 years from now, where interstellar space travel is possible and humanity has conmingled with other species, but weaponry is still recognizable and hasn't progressed to the "pew pew lazur gun" stage. Imagine a trade city on a rather distant world whose sun has just undergone an unexpected core compression and spewed radiation into an orbiting hydroponics rig, mutating a common bacterium into something terrible. Due to complacency and cost-cutting, this bacterium gets past screening devices and into the food supply, causing widespread illness and panic in the rather heavily-populated city whose communications beyond the planet are cut off by the star's radiation field. Enter your standard zombie situation, only now significant military help isn't even on the same world as you.

Now, here's the key. Instead of just hordes of shambling undead humans to deal with, we're facing several different species who have been altered in different ways by this bacterium, and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. Separate mutations could make for a wide variety of enemies and situations to deal with. For example: Imagine an intelligent fungal creature (hey, WoW did it [http://www.wowwiki.com/Sporeling]) that had been infected by this bacterium. Instead of an "aim for the head" situation, you're fighting something that doesn't NEED its head- your only options are abjectly overwhelming firepower (difficult to obtain, as this is set in a somewhat peaceful settlement), chemicals, or extreme heat or cold... or you can just run away. Of course, there's the chance that it may try to infect you with its contaminated spores, which would steadily degrade your abilities until you could find medical supplies.

Instead of a class system, you'd get the chance to play as a member of several of these species, each with their own abilities and drawbacks. Humans would be the "middle of the road" type, whereas a quick predatory species would be faster and stronger but less maneuverable in tight spots (air ducts, etc) and more susceptible to injury, and a slower reptilian species would be stronger, tougher and able to handle extreme heat better, but would be vulnerable in prolonged exposure to cold. Toss in a real-time day/night system, weather, constantly-changing environments (collapsing buildings, so on) and you'd have a game where you could challenge yourself in a whole lot of different ways.

EDIT: Almost forgot to add a social angle to it. Of course you'd find other survivors, but with the thin veneer of society stripped away, you're now trusting your back to alien mindsets whose priorities and responses may be entirely different than yours. There's also the chance that they may still be nursing that bloodfeud their species has had with yours for a hundred years and plotting your messy, painful demise even as they hand you another box of ammo.
 

IndieRocker

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Rocksa said:
They could play it as you actually being a survivor of a zombie apocalypse. What I mean here is that you have to barricade yourselves in safe houses, go out and try to find needed supplies, and basically just survive.

Could play out a bit like this. You're trapped in 'big arse city' which is currently overrun with the undead, curiously enough though, they're only really active during the night. So, with this game we have a set day/night cycle and a sandbox type of world going on already. Now then, you need to make it to the other side of the city to an evac point. The catch is that you won't be able to make it in just one day, and you're still going to need food and everything else to make it, so you'll scavenge during the day and try to find a safe place to hole up at night. During the course of the game you'll meet other survivors that you can more or less recruit, some have special abilities to be able to make things for you, some help scavenge, some will actually join you on hunts, etc. Throughout the whole thing you'll be given a choice of moving your base or to just fortify the hell out of your starting one, even if it does end up being very cramped. You'll also have the option to spread out your survivors to multiple bases, or clump them up, or if you're a jerk, clump them up and make them zombie bait while you sneak towards safety. There's safety in numbers, but then the larger the group of people, the more zombies you'll have heading for them.
Basically a game of I Am Legend
 

a big stupid idiot

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Actually me and my friend came up with an idea for a zombie apocalypse like game, except it would be more like Half Life, IE a zombie apocalypse with more than just zombies.

We were thinking an open world kind of game, that opens up with your character traveling with a caravan that is attacked by these flying disk monsters that we call "Death Saucers". During the attack your separated from the caravan. It would sort of be like a Fallout/Oblivion like open world game, just with less story. It would basically be you finding ways to survive. Maybe finding a house and barricading it for the night, becoming a mercenary, maybe even finding a strong hold or survivor city.
 

DirkGently

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johnx61 said:
Why not make a zombie game where you're the bad guy who's raising zombies from the dead for whatever evil purpose strikes your fancy. And you could send your zombie minions out to kill people, overrun towns and military bases and the more places you infest the more scrap you can get to make nastier undead things. And while you're doing this, cops, soldiers and would-be vigilantes show up to save the day and you have to strategically use your army and it's resources to make them fail and die.

And your zombies could have different abilities and resistances to certain types of damage. And if you wanted to you could make large, unique zombies which are expensive and time-consuming to construct but can shred the forces of good in ways other zombies just can't. Of course if the good guys take it out, your army would be crippled severely. So unique zombies have to be carefully dispatched. I would make it so that sending a lone unique into a military base or police headquarters would probably be a bad idea. You'd want to balance him out with low end zombies or place them strategically to defend important areas where you would churn out minions.

I guess this all seems to have an RTS pattern to it. But you rarely see zombie games taken from the bad guy persective. It's always about outgunned heroes taking down zombie hordes. Flipping to a scenario where you're trying to infest the world with zombies for whatever arbitrary reason seems like a good idea to me.

And there's lots of prospectives you could take it from. You could be the evil chemical corproation, the demonic cult or maybe you're an undead yourself! Very fertile ground, I think.
That's because the average zombie problem usually kills the person who creates it, or it is a naturally occurring happening that no-one is responsible for. Typically it's not created by a super villain, it's a military bio-weapon or something that gets loose and kills it's masters.

That said, it would be nice to have story driven game where you are a soldier who has to help some scientists get to a lab so they can craft a zombie-killing virus. You'd start out escorting scientisits with other soldiers, then going on and having to capture some zombies to test it on. Then as tensions rise between the soldiers and the scientists, one of the test subjects bites someone, and all hell breaks loose. One of the infected scientist injects himself with the anti-zombie virus, which then interacts with the still foring zombie virus and saves him. Soon you have a cure, and you have to try to find the best deployment method.

You then go out and give the zombies the cure. Perhaps it's a bit more complex then the shambling grotesqueries and they need to drink water to live, so you put it in the water supply, or something.
 

DirkGently

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IndieRocker said:
Rocksa said:
They could play it as you actually being a survivor of a zombie apocalypse. What I mean here is that you have to barricade yourselves in safe houses, go out and try to find needed supplies, and basically just survive.

Could play out a bit like this. You're trapped in 'big arse city' which is currently overrun with the undead, curiously enough though, they're only really active during the night. So, with this game we have a set day/night cycle and a sandbox type of world going on already. Now then, you need to make it to the other side of the city to an evac point. The catch is that you won't be able to make it in just one day, and you're still going to need food and everything else to make it, so you'll scavenge during the day and try to find a safe place to hole up at night. During the course of the game you'll meet other survivors that you can more or less recruit, some have special abilities to be able to make things for you, some help scavenge, some will actually join you on hunts, etc. Throughout the whole thing you'll be given a choice of moving your base or to just fortify the hell out of your starting one, even if it does end up being very cramped. You'll also have the option to spread out your survivors to multiple bases, or clump them up, or if you're a jerk, clump them up and make them zombie bait while you sneak towards safety. There's safety in numbers, but then the larger the group of people, the more zombies you'll have heading for them.
Basically a game of I Am Legend
Not really, because that's a bit more complex than 'survive or flee'.
 

UsefulPlayer 1

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Add a camping out option.

The only thing I didn't like about Left 4 Dead in all its zombie awesomeness is that it neglected actually everyday survival like setting up for the night and barricading your doors and collecting any useful items.

It needed a more I Am Legend feel. Like soloing at first and then you discover other people and have a community, but at first stay apart for having fear of them betraying you and taking all your stuff. IDK it would be cool to me.
 

shadow skill

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Rocksa said:
axle 19 said:
The zombie idea in videogames has pretty much been beaten to death. As far as innovation goes, I agree mostly with some of the above. A zombie game in which you have to defend your self with whatever you can find in a big open world would most likely be the next step. Think an open ever changing destructible city and you are one of the survivors with an ever increasing number of zombies trying to kill you. You try to escape the city as best you can maybe save some people along the way or die trying.

Zombie games are always about shooting the zombies but in a true survival situation what's to say your going to have a gun handy. Fight the zombies with anything you can find from pieces of wood to chairs to appliances. The genre is by no means dead and can still be improved
Maybe toss in a nice crafting system there. Allow the player to do stuff like mix that bat with those nails to come up with a nasty spiked club, or let them weld that cardoor handle onto that stop sign to make an improvised shield. Let them barricade themselves into that auto garage with that ambulance and let them transform it into a mobile weapons platform capable of picking up survivors from crowds of zombies.

Also, if we go sandbox here, how about putting things like radio transmitters, radio towers, and power generators in there. Building have gas powered generators that will, of course, need gas, which means you give the player a reason to leave the safety of their base to go on supply runs, either that or give them a reason to abandon their base of operations. Likewise with the towers and transmitters. Maybe we make the zombies attracted to these somehow, pass it off as it being the heat and/or noise that makes them come close and subsequently destroy these things, which means that the player will be forced to either go out and repair these things (also forcing them to scavenge for parts here) or be faced with a communication blackout that can potentially leave them unable to find pockets of survivors to fill their own groups ranks with.

I also wouldn't mind seeing an army mechanic in place here, something like what we had in Kingdom Under Fire, or at the very least some squad based mechanics, like what we have in games like Rainbow Six.

The Kingdom Under Fire approach would lead to some pretty epic battles with the undead, maybe you have some riflemen take up posistions on rooftops while you have some machinegunners run down the alley with you, using yourselves as bait, you wait for the zombie horde to chase you into the alley before the riflemen open fire and the demolition men you had in hiding spring forward to blow up both ends of the alley, trapping the undead in a shooting gallery.

On the other hand the Rainbow Six approach leads to some less epic but more suspenseful encounters, it also opens up the possibility of showing off your fellow survivors as being actual people instead of just faces in a crowd...plus you can show the player that they also have to worry about the guy that's supposed to have their back, especially when Frank, the father of the missing girl your looking for suddenly finds her teddy bear and runs off screaming while you're trying to carefully sneak your way through a zombie infested hospital. You look to your right, Harvey, the grizzled vet that came along with you has already went running around the corner after Frank, you try to follow, and you quickly hear Frank's cries cut off with an 'Ooomph'. You round the corner to see Harvey holding Frank down on the ground with a hand over his mouth telling him to hush. Frank pulls away from Harvey's grip and screams out for Emily again, frantic this time. If only you'd been closer you could have seen the desperation and fear in his eyes, you would have known that there was no reasoning with him, and that he'd only keep screaming until you either found the girl or the undead found you. Only you're not close enough to see this, but Harvey is, and now you get to watch as he swiftly snaps Franks head to the side, a loud crack echoes the air as Frank goes silent. You stand in disbelief as Harvey looks at you as if to say "it had to be done, him or us". The silence is palpable, and then you hear it, weeping. You look behind you to see a small scared girl step out of the shadows, she rubs her tear stained eyes and simply whimpers "daddy?". Yeah, the small squad, 'Rainbow Six' approach would let you really see the drama's play out, and would also give you some pause to consider the people that you're picking to take along on your little scavenger missions. Harvey's a grizzled vet, trained soldier, crackshot, great in a fight, real survivalist, but he's also a cold blooded killer that won't hesitate to kill someone to protect himself. Frank's the guy next door, the do anything for a neighbor guy, the one that won't hesitate to throw himself in harms way to save you, but he's frantically looking for his kid, and will quickly go off the deep end if anything happens to her. Maybe you should have brought Jake instead of Harvey, after all he's the weekend warrior, trying to be all he can be, reservist, he's just as good in a fight, but he's stupid, he's seen too many action hero flicks and thinks of himself as the hero of this particular horror, and he thinks that makes him invincible.

So, yeah, we definitely need to make some good survivor characters here that the player will be able to become attached to, or, at the very least, come to depend on for their unique talents and special abilities. The player will also have to try to please and get along with these people, and anticipate which might be a hazard to a mission or to eachother. Also, while on the topic of survivors, give each one a special talent or ability, make them useful. I mean, Dead Rising had a ton of survivors for you to find and rescue, but once you rescued them that was it, they didn't do anything for you (except for a few rare exceptions) and ultimately they only mattered to you if you were going for an achievement. Give the survivors the player can find a real use and make the player actually want to find and rescue them all. Using the examples above. Frank was an emt, he can help heal you, and at your base he can help heal the rest of your psuedo army as well and keep everyone in fighting shape. Harvey knows a lot about war, and he definitely knows how to hold a posistion, if he's with you he's a great fighter, if he's at the base, then he benefits you by being able to help fortify it beyond what others normally could. Jake is the reservist, he's a great guy to have watching your back since he's all gung-ho soldier, but at your base he's able to help train and coordinate some of your less combat oriented survivors to be a lot more effective at defending your base of operations.
Many of the character driven suggestions remind me of a zombie manga I am reading called High School of the Dead. I would actually add one other suggestion to the scenario you outlined Rocksa: "Is it even worth the trouble to find your loved ones?" The main male character in HSotD Takashi remarks to himself that if his school is the way it is, what would his mother's elementary school be like? The girl he starts out with Miyamoto (Might not be her name its hard to remember and I don't actually use their real names when referring to them in my head.) has a father who is a detective so he has a much better chance than his mother or father of being alive.

Hirano the only other male character out of the main cast is the resident firearms expert and a good shot in fact he is the best shot out of the group since he is the only one with any training other than Miyamoto whose father is a detective as I said earlier. His problem if you will is that he is kind of crazy, he has what would normally be considered an unhealthy obsession with guns. In the first few panels he is your classic wimp but he changes as soon as he gets a gun into his hands. In short he probably secretly likes the new world because he is actually useful, his skills are highly valued. The problem is a bit deeper than that though, in this world he is able to freely indulge in his homicidal tendencies. He can freely shoot the undead since he does not have to concern himself with conventional morality, it's become rather easy to resort to violence or the threat of violence even with those still alive. This pretty much means that it is very easy for someone like Hirano to become particularly dangerous to the people around him over time.

Another topic to explore is what do you do with people with chronic diseases, the elderly, the physically/mentally infirmed, children who are not physically capable of holding let alone firing a gun? Anyone who suffers from chronic a chronic disease that requires the use of a clinic or a hospital is absolutely fucked, any kind of medical supplies that require refrigeration are out of the question as soon as the power fails as well so if you need specific types of blood transfusions on a regular basis unless you can find a living donor you are fucked completely.

Children who can't hold a gun are almost as fucked as those with chronic diseases that need sophisticated medical treatments all they can do is run, and hide. They are dead weight in a group really. A good argument could be made for either simply not rescuing them, or if you are feeling particularly merciful, killing them outright. (Leaving them to be eventually torn apart by the zombie horde is actually really, really, REALLY dirty. Saving them might be stupid but at least it's not dirty.)

One last thing hospitals are going to be the absolute last place you want to go under any circumstances during the zombie apocalypse especially in the early days is a hospital or a clinic. Where do you think people will go when they get bitten and manage to get away from the zombie before people figure out that getting bit means you are fucked? If you need medical supplies like bandages or splints, or antibiotics have fun clearing a hospital or clinic that is going to be absolutely infested.
 

Silver Patriot

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I am going to repeat what I have been saying since Call of Duty 4 came out.

Call of Duty: Zombie Warfare.

I am completly serious about this. It could be set in Russia. Admittedly it could be any country, I chose Russia, it's a big country and it would seem easy enough to hide the truth from other countries. Something could happen in Russia which puts the goverment on edge. "Riots" begain breaking out and another country (America, Britan) sends in a team to find out whats going on. That would be where it begins (unless you want to start as a scientist or a guard) but they don't know what their up against and are unprepared for such a threat. You could also play as a Russian trooper fighting the threat as it spreads. (of course once the other countries find out they will have to help them stop the spread of the virus) Of course anyone wounded would have to be executed with would make for some tense moments. (I am unsure if the main character should be bound to this rule or if they just "never get bit" like in Resident Evil)

I still don't know whether to use fast or slow Zombies though. I like slow Zombies better but you would think they could be easily stoped by a well armed military.

I know it sounds a lot like Left 4 Dead but the main difference here is your part of the military. Instead of trying to escape or going on a one man killing spree your working in a coordinated responce (Read: Not a one man killing machine) using the best equipment the military has to offer in a attempt to save civilions and remove the threat.

UsefulPlayer 1 said:
The only thing I didn't like about Left 4 Dead in all its zombie awesomeness is that it neglected actually everyday survival like setting up for the night and barricading your doors and collecting any useful items.
That is because there was an "American Safety Zone" close by. (About an hour away in most cases) There was no need for long term survival, just basic runing.