You may be tired of the zombie craze, but developers Arktos Entertainment Group and Hammerpoint Interactive are throwing another Z-based game your way. A little less than a week ago, the duo released screenshots and an official announcement for their breakout title The War Z. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, this PC MMO will pit players with the ultimate goal of survival – not just from the undead, but from other players as well. Taking on the normal traits of a massive multiplayer game – such as character leveling and the inclusion of PvE (player vs. environment) / PvP (player vs. player) – The War Z shows promise of being a successful title; but how will it fair against zombie powerhouse titles like Left 4 Dead and Dead Island, and what separates it from other MMO’s?
In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Sergey Titov, Executive Producer at Arktos Entertainment, divulged details about the eye-catching newcomer to the world of PC gaming, ensuring to touch on what’s new in this zombie MMO. “There are no quests or missions in the traditional gaming industry sense of the word,” Titov explains. “We’re not building an objective based game, but instead building a sandbox with lots of tools that will allow players to create their own experiences. We took a basic theme that we love—the zombie apocalypse/survival genre-and asked ourselves what the world would look like in this scenario? What means of interacting with the world or other players would be available? What would the world economy look like? We built the game design around that.”
Unlike current MMO’s, The War Z will be straying away from quest-based storylines, trading in a definitive plot (outside of the usual viral outbreak and its aftermath) for a game with no end in sight. “Ultimately we hope that there won’t be an endgame. What we’re making is a sandbox service for our players. We create the toolset and set the theme for players to use and build their own individual game experiences,” Sergey explained. “We don’t have a goal like ‘okay unlock all achievements’ or ‘find all guns.’ We’re saying, here’s a world that just survived a viral outbreak that took the lives of most of the population and left a world full of brain-hungry zombies.”
With no end or set path to follow, some may question just how long the game can be played without may seem to be relying solely on the joy gamers get out of bashing in a zombie skull to drive the games popularity, but it does open the possibility of gamer created quests. With a completely open world, clans can take down bustling civilizations and loot necessary supplies or band together to keep their lands safe. How this all will play out in practice is unknown, but the developer is currently taking registrations for the closed beta.
The MMO marks Hammerpoint Interactive’s first title and represents a hefty level of ambition behind the Los Angeles-based developer.
