Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Yesterday, Undead Labs re-announced its long-awaited zombie sandbox survivor Class3 as 1) State of Decay and 2) a game that’ll be launching on PC as well as Xbox. Good news all around, basically. But these zombies emerged still partially obscured by a thick fog of mystery. Among other things, Microsoft’s on publishing duties, and other recent titles to share that distinction on PC have come with some rather worrisome strings attached. Also, I spied many things in the new trailer, but another player wasn’t one of them. So, is co-op out? And, at one point, Undead was also working on an MMO based in this universe. What ever happened to that? Happily, Undead got back to me with some very helpful answers.

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OK, before overly jerked knees and seismic facepalms leave RPS liable for one of the most puzzling injury outbreaks in medical history, know that State of Decay – while arising from the ashes of a zombie MMO project once called Class3 – doesn’t look like a Day Z clone or anything along those lines in the slightest. For better or worse, it appears to be a fairly over-the-top (I saw body slams) undead shoot-’em-up/beat-’em-down – but with an “open, sandbox world” that “dynamically generates content based on your choices and the ever-increasing zombie threat.” To be perfectly honest, I can’t actually find any info on whether or not it even has a multiplayer component anymore. But, somewhat shockingly, Grand-Theft-Auto-meets-zombies hasn’t really been done before, so there’s potential here.

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Robot Entertainment seem to realise that if they’re going to tell us that Orcs Must Die, they damn well better give us plenty of ways to make that happen. They could have gone a different route and cast the player as the orcs pipe-smoking bowler-hatted defendant. Press the left mouse button to say, “Must they though, gentlemen of the court? Must they really?” Instead, they’ve just laden their tower defence type game with all manner of traps and have decided to show some of the various ways that orcs will die in this enjoyable interactive trailer. It’s like playing Heavy Rain but with green humanoids instead of red herrings.

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Microsoft have been saying that they’re getting back on track with the PC, after years of letting things slide in favour of their TV-box. Evidence of this is to be seen – apparently – in GFWL, but also in the arrival of Fable 3 on PC, and the relaunch of Age Of Empires as an online game. VG247 report that there’s even more going on behind the scenes, too. They spoke to Microsoft Game Studios GM Dave Luehmann while at GamesCom, and he had this to say about MS bringing out games that would support the traditional PC gamer habit of buying hefty hardware: “There are other products, and I can think of one in particular, that will really encourage that type of behaviour,” he later went on to say: “Think of it as a barrier to entry. So, there’s a cost barrier to entry, there’s a hardware requirement barrier to entry. Using web games as an example, think about that funnel, from very, very casual to core MMO players. How do you bring your customers into a funnel, into a relationship with a company and then give them lots of different product offerings?”

I’ve no idea, but did he say “core MMO”? Hmm. Speculating cap on, folks. What core MMO could MS possibly be developing?