I've got two projects I'm going to talk about, so I'll be splitting this post up into two different posts. I feel both of these projects are equally deserving some spotlight attention simply because of their innovative design and the gameplay that has been featured so far. Both of these are in early alpha phases so it's likely lots of gameplay changes will take place, but I think it speaks to the nature of a game when you can see an alpha build and get excited enough to want to pre-order immediately.
Project Zomboid
This one was brought to my attention by the excellent fellows at Rock, Paper, Shotgun and since then I've been following the blog updates for the game religiously. The premise for the game is almost yawn-inducing when you reduce it down to the genre of survival RPG featuring zombies, but some of the steps the development team are taking with the game are going to leave it wide open as a sandbox style RPG with multiple possibilities.
First things first, the development team has been extremely transparent with their end goal for the game. This is not a game with a happy ending. Your character will die. Just as all fortresses in Dwarf Fortress end in ruin, the founding and getting to that ruin are more important than the ending itself. The developers have added several factors that determine your survival, including hundreds of items to scavenge, modifiers that affect your health such as sanity, paranoia, addictions, and general well-being, as well as random events that can occur at any time.
Because the ultimate goal of the game is such that at some point, you're going to lose but lose in a spectacular way, the developers have been working on events that can drastically alter how you play the game. For example, after a month of play, the power plants may shut down, plunging the city into darkness. With no power, you can no longer scavenge food from refrigerators and suddenly a can opener is more valuable than your life for salvaging tin cans.
Shelter and protecting yourself are extremely important, but so is finding the materials you need to make it through day to day life. Items can be scavenged and crafted into other items, with the item interface itself being easy to interact with so there seems to be no need to pause the game as you craft your weapons of doom. As an example, watch this short video where one of the developers crafts a few molotovs to take out rogue zombies.
If you notice in the video, the point of view of your character comes into play as well. You cannot see what's behind you on the screen and if anything wanders out of your field of vision, it fades back into the fog of war. This enhances the realistic nature of the game, since you will need to guard yourself on all sides to make sure you're well protected.
One central aspect of the game that hasn't been detailed by the developers is the multiplayer. While the guys have mentioned they want to include it, I'm not sure in what capacity it will be included. That being said, here's what I would like to see from the game, though I realize these are probably largely high hopes. (Please don't take anything I mention here as verbatim from the devs, because it's not. It's my personal wishes.)
- Persistent dedicated servers: so up to 8 friends can play together with the need to fortify their logout location well so that the next time they login, zombies haven't completely run them through.
- Group-wide perks: if a person is playing a doctor, medical attention from that person to any of the survivor's group should be enhanced. Another take on this is the affect on morale. If someone in your party gets zombified, that's a pretty big hit to morale and should reflect upon other players.
- Stashes: obviously this is sort of counter-productive to group play, especially in an apocalyptic setting, but I still feel like you should be able to hoard food away from others just in case the whole operation goes south.
Once again, Project Zomboid is more about survival until the end, rather than being saved, which I think is an admirable notion. I've wanted a game like this for a very long time, and seeing it come to life in the hands of these indie developers really pleases me. They've recently had some troubles with PayPal and now Google Checkout over their wording for pre-orders, but if you like what you see, head on over to the Project Zomboid website and read the extensive devlogs and hopefully pre-order to help these guys out.
