How I Would do Zombies

[Iceglow]

A zombie MMO would not work, in that it would be a victim of its own popularity. The zombie is to be feared, not because zombies are frightening - one zombie is inferior to one human - but because of the sheer weight of numbers. That is where their strength lies. The problem is, if you have lots of human players, all of which capable of taking down hundreds of zombies, the zombies are no longer a threat.

Yes, alright, you can have people playing as zombies - except most people will not want to. It's the ultimate nerd survival fantasy - the lone Tallahassee style badass, cracking one-liners as zombies get chainsawed. Hundreds, thousands of these characters, and what kind of a threat do zombies pose? They don't. In zombie movies, there's always a bunch of unlikable whiny characters who get eaten quickly. If there was a real zombie apocalypse, the vast majority of the people who indulge in the zombie fandom would fall into this category. Probably all of you reading this thread! I don't give a smurf about your special zombie plan, you'd be eaten. I'm a huge fan of the genre and I have no delusions - I'd be zombie chow. And for a real zombie apocalypse, that's what you need - hundreds of chumps being god damn massacred, otherwise it's not an apocalypse. Nobody wants to play as the chump, they want to play as Tallahasee.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. There's a browser-based zombie MMO called Urban Dead. (Link) All the zombies and humans are player controlled. Humans go from building to building, scavenging supplies, building barricades and whatnot, and the zombies eat. There's also a mechanic where zombies can be revived into humans using a NecroTech (read: Umbrella) syringe, so death is never permanent. The simple fact is, the overwhelming majority of the player base did not want to play as zombies. This led to pretty much the entire city being a fortress for humans, completely powered and safe. Humans feared other humans more than they did the actual zombies. They sat around in their castles, roleplaying and acting like badasses. This carried on for years - the zombie apocalypse was a zombie mild inconvienience.

Only recently due to a flood of people from the usual sites (Something Awful, Shacknews, LUE etc) playing as zombies led to their nice suburban existence being destroyed. Of course they all got smurfing slaughtered like the chumps (see above!) that they are... and they are not happy. Do they play as zombies? Do they smurf. They sit around doing nothing for weeks waiting for someone to revive them as a human. They whine and complain to the creator of the game that zombies are overpowered (they're not; quite the opposite due to previous complaints!) because they got killed by a zombie in a zombie apocalypse game. And it all goes back to what I said - Nobody wants to play as the chump, they want to play as Tallahasee. And thousands of Tallahasees vs zombies is not an apocalypse, it's not about survival, it's a turkey shoot.

So yeah, zombie MMO? Wouldn't work. Now, a zombie game in a GTA-style free roaming city, with up to 16 players? That would work a whole lot better, imho.

I'm quoting for the truth here, it's sad but true that an online zombie apocalypse would be a failure. I never played the zombie game in the post by Psy but I can relate. A couple of years ago I played and worked on a game loosely based upon a plethora of sources including LOTR, WoT, Warcraft (this game was around for about 4 years longer than WoW so stfu plz), Warhammer, Dungeons and Dragons, Dragon Lance (subset of D&D I know but I differentiate same as I do the forgotten realms), Forgotten Realms you get the picture. Well originally it was based heavily on LOTR but with the threat of a lawsuit by the Tolkein Estate and my introduction as the main writing element of the game I managed to bring enough diversity in to the world to keep the players and the various "watchers" happy.

In a LOTR style game, players do not want to be the Goblin or Orc what gets slapped up with Gimli's Axe. They want to play as Aragorn, Elrond, Legolas etc. (Though even from the start there were some D&D references with Dark Elves, Imps, Trolls, Ogres all being playable races) Now originally during the earliest phase of development there was only the "light" or "blessed races" these were: Hobbits (later to become Halflings under threat of a lawsuit), Trolls, Dwarves, Imps, Humans and Elves. as playable characters, after some initial play testing occurred the "dark" or "damned races" were introduced there wasn't balance in terms of numbers which was a mistake imho (Damned races being: Ogres, Orcs, Goblins Darkelves) not to mention Humans and Elves had a major advantage of being able to cast healing spells which broke the balance of the early game. A second major mistake was made by the original head developer in that he didn't say "hey it's only an alpha lets reset the game world entirely and start anew" he instead gave everyone 3 character slots. Some players took the opportunity to play as Damned Races, as this was meant to be for. Though most of them played as Dark Elf because it was perceived early on that Elves and Dark Elves enjoyed an unhealthy bonus in combat and were by far the two strongest races. Other players took the route of creating 3 light characters, all tied in to different groups but groups what traded with each other. It was dodgy by the rule book and yet players got away with it for years. In fact I remember some players getting away with one of their characters dying in a raid only to be avenged 5 minutes later by their multi-character who would via a couple of other characters (possibly from multi-accounts) return the gear to the original character so as to look "legit" when it wasn't. Like I said the original developer made many mistakes. When eventually the number of characters per account was dropped to 2 a good number of "darks" were deleted because they were severely disadvantaged compared to the light characters who were better supplied, more numerous and had better support. (The main supplier of equipment in the Light races side turned out to be the games worst cheater, he got away with it for a long time but was caught by myself and another admin who joined the team at the same time as myself, he was designated as purely focusing on server security and anti-cheat protocols, he was very good at his role) Eventually we ended up switching to 1 character per account, again a lot of darks were deleted and many turned in to NPC masters including my own dark (who yes was a dark elf, not because of their "power" bonus but because I didn't feel capable of role playing a convincing goblin (which in reality due to the way combat powers were worked out was the best combat race of them all, though it had some of the worst movement in the game) I didn't keep her because players accused even writers of cheating if they had a powerful character who actively fought in the war between the two factions. The in-balance brought the game to it's knees, the fact that some of the top dark players became admins (in part to help dissuade dark players that there was an in-balance in the team based on our in game characters, all developers on the final team were found from within the player base) meant even more trouble for the balance because these players would invariably declare themselves neutral and no longer take part in PvP action on allegations of cheating.

However I digress a little here the short of it is that there was a way discovered to balance the sides but it was never implemented on the server due to the "free will of players" and the refusal of the rest of the development team to reset the servers completely even though the game was in Beta phase still. Essentially you would have to set code up to determine the "balance" now in a light versus dark game where races were balanced out (personally I would have added a barbaric human race to the game I worked on for the extra damned race, the direct opposite of the human "blessed" race in the example of the game I worked on) you need to have it really say that if the difference between the two sides was greater than 5% of the total number of characters then character creation on the side which had more characters is disabled until the numbers are back within balance. Now 5% sounds harsh but when you think of thousands of players this could be 500 characters more on one side than the other. Gotta think big and plan small. 5% is generous, I would have had it set at 2% personally. Now in a game where the sides aren't balanced (guns vs melee - survivors vs zombies) you want an overwhelming number of zombies because a fair few of them will die in the attempt to take down players. This means setting the balancement code to something like if number of survivors = >40% of the number of Zombies in the game then survivor creation is disabled until the number of survivors in the game is =<20% of the number of Zombies (this helps create desperation amongst survivors) Brutual numbers on the scale of thousands, this means for every 100 survivors there should be in the scale of 400 - 800 zombie players.

And there you hit the problem Psy eloquently points out, nobody wants to play as the bad guy, they want to be the badass good guy. They want to be the Tallahassee type character or the Legolas and Aragorn.

On a side note, Psy I think what you're referring to is a cross between Left 4 Dead and the Dead Rising games, personally Dead Rising with 16 players could be too many, maybe 8 players with objectives which require the survivors to break off in to smaller groups to achieve for example "party A must get to the power room here and restore the power so that Party B can open the gate from the control room for Party C to access the objective area" This leaves players determining their strengths and weaknesses and the number of people required to do a job. Considering that the Zombies will be attacking all the parties as they attempt to achieve their goals, be it hold out in the control room, fight your way to the power room or make your way to the objective and secure it so that the players from party A and B can reach it too. Or is it possible for party A to go for the power room and objective and party B to hold out? Will their ammo last? Do they have the appropriate tools for the job?

Edit: The whole players being vulnerable offline can work, but it needs a lot of thought and balancement. The game I worked on did have this feature, if you want more details on it, send me a mognet or something