WHY SO MANY ZOMBIE GAMES?
, by 1, 4 min reading time
I have noticed a large number of zombie games being released over the past few years, some of them good, but most of them being awful pieces of trash that I regret buying due to my love of horror and zombies.
I have noticed a large number of zombie games being released over the past few years, some of them good, but most of them being awful pieces of trash that I regret buying due to my love of horror and zombies. Some examples of “Zombie Games” released these past four years include: Dead Rising 2, Dead Rising 3, Resident Evil 6, DayZ, State of Decay, Dead Island and many many more. These games still manage to be released because developers know that people (me) will pay money for a zombie game. The trend doesn’t seem like it’s over yet, as the upcoming release of “Dying Light” illustrates.
Most of these games are being released as broken disasters, to which I have a few examples.The original Steam release of Dead Island, was a developer copy which allowed the players to enter debug and third person view mode. A feature that ended up being patched after a day. The WarZ (Now known as Infestation Survivor Stories) has been widely known to be one of the worst games ever made, and has been boycotted by several major gaming publications due to copying the “Terms and Conditions” from the popular game “League of Legends”. DayZ Standalone, has also been regarded to be a broken mess, even after several patches, little has been done to help most of the community and to add insult to injury, Dean Hall, the creator of the original mod and head of the standalone’s design team has recently stepped down from his position and left the work to the rest of the team, leading many to believe that he released the standalone to simplly make a quick buck and retire.
Now personally, I like many others, hate the fact that games have turned to using “Zombies” as a way to make some cash in a short amount of time, such as Sniper Elite V2, originally a very good sniper game, which ended up having not one, but TWO zombie DLC episodes.
My idea of the perfect zombie game, is purely based on survival, Here’s 10 ideas for my perfect zombie game.
1. The game starts off in a player creation screen, from here you can choose ANYTHING based on your preferences, age, sex, career, hair colour, height, build.
2. Your career, gives you strength and weaknesses, a police officer can shoot with better accuracy and can handle recoil better, while a doctor can heal injured survivors to a better degree.
3. You will need to organise every aspect of your survivors, giving them individual jobs or leaving to their own devices and hope they don’t get killed.
4. Gun magazines need to be manually reloaded with bullets, so you will be spending a long time, loading pistol and rifle magazines with bullets for both you and survivors.
5. You and fellow survivors will need to secure your stronghold by locking doors, closing windows, barricading doors and nailing boards over windows.
6. Zombies, need to be killed by being shot or beaten about the head, as body shots will not work.
7. Supplies are limited and you may find survivors fighting over food, ammunition, fuel and medical kits.
8. Survivors have their own personalities, so one survivor maybe ok around a group of zombies, another survivor will run at the sight of one zombie.
9. A huge city with buildings such as, police stations, hospitals, fire stations, churches, schools and shopping centres, to explore.
10. An interactive world which changes based on your actions, do you hide with a few people in a house with very few supplies, or do you find a bus, load it up with survivors and take them to the local police station to hold out in, while you sneak around grabbing supplies as you go. No two games will be same, the survivors will change every time you play, the police maybe helpful during one game, but will change and turn to murder during another playthrough.
Unless a game designer reads this and thinks this is a good idea, I will just have to pray that a zombie game, comes around which will incorporate all of these ideas and more.