Undead Labs Interview

Our site has been graced with the honor of interviewing Undead Labs. Everybody who has been following their title knows exactly who they are, but those of you who are wondering “What does Undead Labs make?” your answer is on the way.

Currently the team is working hard on an arcade game codenamed ‘class3′. This will essentially be a taste of their other project that is codenamed ‘class4′ which is a Zombie MMO coming exclusively to the Xbox 360.

The team is filled with people who practically dream about our half-dead friends, and they are working hard to bring our dreams to life with a zombie survival title that allows you and your friends to put your zombie outbreak discussions to rest. The lovely Emily Diehl,a producer at UL, has been keeping all of the fans updated regularly and causing huge discussion outbreaks (+1 for the zombie joke) on their site,and she was nice enough to answer some questions and add inevitably more fire to discussions. She also said that I am awesome and we high-fived…that last part didn’t happen but I assure you the interview is legitimate.

Anyways, without further ado I bring you our interview with Undead Labs:

How important are the zombie movie moments in your game? Things like dragging a wounded friend, barricading doorways, taking risky adventures for supplies, et cetera?

We’re all huge horror fans, so we understand how important it is to preserve the iconic moments that fellow zombie lovers expect. While we have plenty of freedom to be creative and introduce new things into the genre, we know that there are certain things that people really want to see in their zombie games. For example, it’s canon to assume that you’ll need to remove a zed’s head or destroy their brain to take them out, so we’re not about to change that expectation.

Without going into too many details, I can say that we’re heavily influenced by how we think characters “should” react in certain situations. Zombie fans have all pictured a lot of the same scenarios and we think it’s important to capture those. If someone is out scavenging around a neighborhood, runs into a guy with a broken leg, and decides to rescue him, how would we expect them to get back to safety? We’re trying to use both our years of design experience and our love of horror movies, books, comics, and games to bring these moments to life.

Are you trying to offer zombie killing where players can mow through hundreds of zombies in one clip or is your team taking a more realistic approach?

The focus of our game is survival, so we do try to keep a certain level of realism in mind. If you can plow through an entire field of zombies without reloading, you’re not going to feel like you’re in any imminent danger, and that’s the opposite of what we’re going for. We want you to be scared and care about doing what you need to in order to survive. You’ll have to think about things like the scarcity of ammo and the dangers of attracting more zombies when you make a lot of noise.

Despite this realism angle, as Brant talks about in his recent article about guns, our primary goal is making sure that the game is fun to play. If we need to make adjustments to balance what feels real and what feels fun, we will. For example, if you’re using a high powered rifle and successfully line up three zombie skulls in your sights, you should be able to head shot them all with one bullet. We won’t worry about whether or not that’s 100% realistic.

You can always make up an excuse about flesh deterioration and cover your asses. ;)

Do you want players to congregate in a main city like most MMOs where trading, grouping, and social interaction occur? Or are you hoping players are more nomadic?

Zombies are generally attracted to noise and activity, so in a world where you’ve got hordes of them wandering around, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to hang out in unprotected open areas for long. However, there won’t be main cities in the traditional MMO sense. Our game is about creating order in a chaotic world — not about working within controlled kingdoms and civilizations. You will be able to set up your own base, and you’ll also occasionally run across NPC-run havens. We expect that trade will primarily occur in one of these locations.

Do you want players to congregate in a main city like most MMOs where trading, grouping, and social interaction occur? Or are you hoping players are more nomadic?

With members of your team being from Arenanet, I assume your team will try to break away from the typical MMO formula, so what will you try to do differently from other MMOs?

Well, we’ve actually stopped referring to Class3 and Class4 as MMOs — we feel that the term makes people think about titles with a very specific design style, and those aren’t the games we’re creating.

To get a good feel for what we’re doing with Class3, picture an open world console game with visceral action and a big environment that not only has a life of its own, but also changes based on your actions. For our later release, Class4, we’re taking what we accomplished with Class3 and building onto that to make an online world. It’s the same kind of game at its core, but with thousands of players sharing the same persistent zombie-survival setting.

This setting and the survival aspects are a huge part of what makes our games unique. We’re trying to let players explore life in a realistic world in the throes of the zombie apocalypse. How are you going to stay alive? Where are you going to set up your base? How are you going to handle facing hordes of zombies in order to scavenge for supplies? When you run across survivors in desperate need of rescue, are you going to risk your own ass to save theirs?

I think that these things are what really set us apart from mainstream MMOs and other persistent world games.

Jeff Strain was misquoted as saying a “Monthly fee wouldn’t work.” With the decision still unknown, what factors are going into your pay model decision?

As Jeff mentions in his Rude Q&A, there are currently two dominant types of business models for online world games: subscriptions and microtransactions. While a subscription model is generally more clear-cut (each month the game either earns a player’s business or it doesn’t), paying a monthly fee is about as much fun as paying the water bill. On the other hand, a microtransaction model offers a pay-as-you-go experience, but can put a larger strain on the design team. Instead of spending all their time working on making the game fun to play, they’ll also be tasked with figuring out ways to generate sources of revenue.

There are a lot of angles we need to consider. Since Microsoft is our publisher, we’ll clearly need to work closely with them to find the best solution.

Obviously unlike most MMOs your setting isn’t in the Middle Ages, will you consider product placement/in-game advertising?

While we haven’t completely ruled out the possibility of featuring real-world products and using that revenue to help cover some of our operation costs, we don’t see it as a core part of what we’re doing. It’s definitely not our goal to make a game supported by or filled with ads. That’s not to say we’ll never have in-game advertising — there are billboards in the world, and they need to say something. Whether that winds up being something familiar or something envisioned by the art team remains to be seen. Regardless of the route we take, we’ll never let in-game ads become a distraction for us or for you.

Ah yes, spoken like a true politician after our hearts and support. We can’t thank you enough for giving us more information on a game we still know so little about. I, personally have high hopes for your games if the Zombie MMO works not only will it help break the monotonous medieval times MMO formula, it could also be the first real console MMO that causes a wildfire on the idea. We look forward to future announcements on the game and wish everybody at Undead Labs the best of luck.