Undead Labs

This Will Never Work

Jeff — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:24:55 +0000

Welcome to the year ~~2000~~ 2010. As you know, our Big Plan is to bring the best elements of the ~~first-person shooter~~ massively multiplayer online game genre to the console platform.

I know, you’ve heard this before. I know you are not impressed, because every time you hear this it either never happens, or you get a weak port of an otherwise excellent PC title that does not feel at all like a true console game, and then the publisher expresses amazement that it was not successful and blames the console platform. It happens every time, and now “they” are saying that ~~FPS~~ MMO games are just simply better suited to the PC, and that console developers should just give up and go build more Tomb Raider and Madden sequels.

We hear you, console fans. But this time it’s going to be different, because we are willing to chart a bold course and develop an ~~FPS~~ MMO specifically for consoles, which will allow us to take advantage of the unique features of the platform and give you a true console experience. The pundits still say we’re crazy, and that it will never work. I guess we’ll be able to look back in ten years and know who was right.

So, let’s talk about some of these “unique features” of a console ~~FPS~~ MMO…

Okay, that was a bit snarky, but the parallels are striking. I can’t tell you how many industry insiders “just know” that MMOs won’t work on consoles. They also “just knew” that FPS games would not work on console *cough* Halo *cough*, and they “just knew” that any game that required an accessory would fail *cough* Guitar Hero *cough*.

The problem, of course, is that they are looking at it through the lens of the games they can see today, rather than the games that might be designed differently tomorrow. Does anyone really believe you can take a game like World of Warcraft, polished though it may be, and port it to the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 and have a great game experience? Of course not. A great console MMO will require rethinking the fundamentals, starting with the user interface and all the way through the core combat mechanics, social infrastructure, avatar control, world interaction, and sense of pacing and scale.

More importantly, it’s not just about solving problems; it’s about taking advantage of opportunities.

Here are some opportunities we see for MMOs on consoles. These aren’t necessarily things you can only do on consoles (although many of them are), but they are instead things that are expected by console gamers and naturally supported by the platform hardware. We’ll be exploring these in greater depth in future articles. Take a look, ponder, and feel free to share your own thoughts on the best ways to leverage the console gaming experience into the world of MMOs.

Social Gaming (No Really)

Everyone knows that MMOs are social games, right? So why do so many people associate MMOs with the stereotype of the loner 30-something guy who spends all day in his mom’s basement surrounded by old pizza boxes? (C’mon man, that’s not us. It’s our roommate’s house, and we throw the pizza boxes out every day.) In some respects MMOs can actually be antisocial, because the PC is usually in an isolated room of the house, and because you can’t easily share the experience with your roommates, friends, or family unless they bring their gaming PCs into the same room.

By contrast, game consoles are often connected to large-screen TVs in the family room, which makes it easier and more fun to invite friends and family to jump into a game and play with you. A well designed multiplayer console game, such as Lego Star Wars or Lego Indiana Jones, provides a contextual split-screen view and makes it easy for friends to join you with easy drop-in/drop-out play.

Imagine if we could bring that to the MMO world. Imagine tossing a controller to a friend so she can quickly login with her character and join you wherever you are, right on the same screen. Or perhaps she logs in with one of your characters so you can show her around the game. Either way, it adds a new dimension to the “social” aspect of MMOs.

Freedom of Movement

Remember your first few hours with Super Mario Bros., and how the controller seemed to disappear from your hand? You became one with Mario; you stopped thinking about controlling him; he was simply an extension of your will. That’s some beautiful console mojo, and something we hope to achieve in our MMOZ. Leaving behind the mouse and keyboard for the console controller gives us an opportunity to make it fun to just move through the world.

Okay, we’re not going to achieve Super Mario Bros. perfection, but we can get damn close.

Visceral Hand-to-Hand Combat

Click target. Click attack skill. Wait. Click heal skill. Click area-of-effect skill. Click new target. Click ranged attack skill. Power players: Click target. Press ’2′. Wait. Press ’5′. Press ’6′. Wait. Click new target.

Okay, it’s not that bad, but it would never fly in a console game, so it won’t fly in a console MMO. We want to get in there and mix it up with the zombie hordes. We want to fight with crowbars, chains, spoons, and, well, banjos. We want the action to be in our face, hot, and bloody.

This is tough to pull off in an MMO, because you have to consider latency when designing your combat system. Having said that, we have to do it. This will be part design magic, and part technical magic, but rest assured that making a combat system that feels more like a console than an MMO is one of our top priorities.

Vehicle Combat

You’ll be fighting for survival surrounded by the abandoned products of 21st century civilization. Will there be cars, motorcycles, and trucks? Of course. Should you be able to drive them, crash them, and splatter zombies with them? Yes, please.

Destructible Environments

Would you accept anything less? Neither would we.

Fun With Physics

You may have noticed that zombies are kind of stupid. Sure, they can rip out your beating heart and eat it in front of you if you let them get you cornered. Or if they sneak up on you at night. Or if there are just too many of them… But they still behave according to known, or at least discoverable, rules, and you should be able to have fun exploiting those rules.

Building traps from objects you find in the world (yes, including crates, but probably not pressure plates), or channeling the shambling hordes through your murder holes and across your cleverly (or even poorly) concealed pits is part of the fun. By integrating physics not only for combat and vehicles, but also for the way the zombies interact with the environment, we can give you the power to use the environment to your advantage when fending off an attack.

Invisible Interface

I’m sure you’ve seen worst-case-scenario examples of MMO user interfaces that are cluttered with countless rows of buttons, status bars, notification windows, chat messages, and icon docks. (I wish I could post an image here, but our lawyers would probably shoot me.) This is one of the main reasons that hybrid games attempting to play well on both PC and console often fail. In general, console gamers expect interfaces to be more transparent and to “get out of the way” of the game world. Moving into the console world allows us to rethink the MMO user interface and design something that is leaner, lighter, and less intrusive.

Voice Chat

We often hear that the biggest design challenge to MMOs on console is the lack of a keyboard. It’s true that people are accustomed to chatting by text, and that there is a certain comfort in the anonymity that a text communication interface provides. However, we view the fact that real-time voice chat is both ubiquitous and expected on the console platform to be a huge opportunity to bring new community and teamwork dynamics into the MMO genre. A challenging opportunity, to be sure — do you really want the badass ex-Marine in your party to sound like a 13-year-old? — but we have some good ideas about how to solve those challenges. In any case, voice chat is the gold standard in the console world, so you can bet we’ll make good use of it.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of console-speicific features, but it’s a good start. We are excited to have the opportunity to rethink the MMO from the ground up so that it is, before any other consideration, an excellent console game.

We’d love to hear your ideas as well. Tell us what you’d love to see in a console MMO!

Next up: Zombies.

Jeff

Any games mentioned in this article not owned by Undead Labs are trademarks of their respective owners. No endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation between those companies and Undead Labs is intended. Please don’t sue us kthx.

Building a new kind of MMO aint like dustin’ crops

Jeff — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:00:30 +0000

I don’t know. Dusting crops sounds kind of like hard work to me. I mean, what is the “dust” anyway? Is it okay to breathe it? Or maybe crop dust can be a source of zombie plague…

In any case, we’d sure rather be making games than dusting crops, differences in difficulty notwithstanding.

We’ve been very busy this spring getting the financing for our studio lined up and refining the core game design. The good news is that we are almost across the finish line, and we’ll soon be able to announce our partner and start giving you more details on the design and development of the world’s first MMOZ.

It’s going to be an exciting summer at Undead Labs. Thanks for your patience, and stay tuned.

Jeff

Kill Ten Zombies

Jeff — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:34:04 +0000

Kill Ten Rats’ Ravious sent Jeff a list of questions about Undead Labs, zombies, MMOs, sunshine, and a hardball question about the imminent threat of velociraptors. Head over to the Kill Ten Rats blog and read the full interview.

You can watch an excellent movie like Land of the Lost and leave the theater thinking, “Man, that could really happen!” whereas with mediocre, unrealistic movies like 28 Days Later you leave thinking, “Bioengineered viruses that don’t work exactly as planned. What a complete joke.”

Zed Faire

Jeff — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:44:36 +0000

After we watched Zombieland for the fifth time (yeah, I’m serious), we had to add a new question to our post-movie-beer table discussion. Standing questions include, “If the zombie apocalypse started right now, where would you go first?” and, “What part of the world would be the best place to wait it all out?” After seeing the final battle at Pacific Playland, the new question is, “What is the most epic place you can think of for a final zombie showdown?”

I’ve got my answer.

During the Thanksgiving holiday I had the opportunity to go to the Texas Renaissance Festival, which, according to Wikipedia, is the “largest renaissance fair in the world.” I was a regular attendee at renfaires when I was a kid, because it was the closest I was going to get to living out my D&D fantasies (some of which I still harbor, by the way, but I can’t get my wife to wear the elf ears…).

As I walked through the fair, eating a turkey leg and wondering if I could convince the face-paint lady to make me look like I had blood dripping out of my mouth, I naturally started wondering what a renfaire would look like in a zombie apocalypse. Think about it: zombies in costumes with fairy wings, elf ears, and chainmail. Tons of weapons everywhere. Crossbows. Axes. Maces. Ball-and-chains. Swords.

Turkey legs one minute. Human legs the next.

Where’s that design doc?

Jeff

G4 Interview with Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:29:30 +0000

G4′s Stephen Johnson gave Undead Labs’ Jeff Strain a call this week to talk about the new studio, and more importantly, how an MMOZ might actually play.

Check out the full interview on the G4 website.

G4: I hope there’s no actual zombie apocalypse between now and [release].
Strain: Well, it would be good source material wouldn’t it?

腦漿遍地！Undead Labs開發控制台喪屍MMO遊戲

Jeff — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:54:56 +0000

遊戲業翹楚Jeff Strain在華盛頓州西雅圖開設電子遊戲開發工作室

2009年11月18日 — 華盛頓州西雅圖 — 當嗜食肉、腳步蹣跚的活死人侵襲西雅圖之時，Undead Labs肯定是始作俑者。今天，電子遊戲業翹楚Jeff Strain宣佈成立 Undead Labs，這是一間位於華盛頓州西雅圖的遊戲開發工作室，旨在把線上遊戲引領至大膽的新路向。 Undead Labs的唯一目標是為遊戲玩家製作最佳的大型多人喪屍遊戲（MMOZ：massively multiplayer zombie game）。以草坪躺椅和一盒已削尖的2號鉛筆猛攻一群腐朽的喪屍，實在是刺激不過的事 — 無論是在線上還是安坐在沙發上與朋友一同進攻，均歡樂無比。Undead Labs致力製作具有多種行動、幽默感和大量喪屍的MMO遊戲，因為我們都已對殺龍厭倦了。

去年夏天，Strain離開了NCsoft，建立囊括業內最傑出且熱愛喪屍的開發者的創意工作室，並開創出新的開發模型，為遊戲玩家徹底地製作新型MMO遊戲。

「每次與友人看到出色的喪屍電影時，我們總會不停討論在喪屍動亂世界內的求生策略。」Strain說。「應該去警局還是超級市場？應使用園林耙還是釘槍？應播放巴赫還是白線條樂團的音樂？我是個遊戲開發者，充其量只能當食屍鬼誘餌，但能夠製作MMOZ遊戲、試驗那些策略並查看其是否有效，實在令我感到很興奮。」

Strain作為遊戲開發者和商界領袖的經驗和專業知識有助開創遊戲業內最成功且最有影響力的MMO遊戲。90年代中，Strain就職於Blizzard Entertainment時，是《星際爭霸（StarCraft）》和《暗黑破壞神（Diablo）》的開發者，並製作了《星際爭霸》戰役編輯器。於1999年，Strain成立了初期團隊，並開始開發空前成功的MMO《魔獸世界（World of Warcraft）》，其時他身為團隊隊長及該項目的主程式員。

於2000年4月，Strain與Blizzard要員Mike O’Brien和Patrick Wyatt創辦了ArenaNet。他擔任了非常受歡迎的MMO《激戰（Guild Wars）》的程式員及執行製作人，該遊戲賣出了六百多萬套。韓國MMO出版商NCsoft於2002年收購ArenaNet。於2008年，Strain獲晉升為該公司Western營運部門的產品開發總裁，為此他一整年都穿著襯衫和深色襪子，後來才回歸開發本位成立Undead Labs。

有關Undead Labs的詳情可閱覽http://UndeadLabs.com。

# # #

聯絡方式（僅限媒體）：
Steve Cherrier
公關
steve@relatepr.com

脑浆遍地！Undead Labs开发控制台殭尸MMO游戏

Jeff — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:47:02 +0000

游戏业翘楚Jeff Strain在华盛顿州西雅图开设电子游戏开发工作室

2009年11月18日 — 华盛顿州西雅图 — 当嗜食肉、脚步蹒跚的活死人侵袭西雅图之时，Undead Labs肯定是始作俑者。今天，电子游戏业翘楚Jeff Strain宣布成立 Undead Labs，这是一间位于华盛顿州西雅图的游戏开发工作室，旨在把在线游戏引领至大胆的新路向。 Undead Labs的唯一目标是为游戏玩家制作最佳的大型多人殭尸游戏（MMOZ：massively multiplayer zombie game）。以草坪躺椅和一盒削尖了的2号铅笔猛攻一群腐朽的殭尸，实在是刺激不过的事 — 无论是在线还是安坐在沙发上与朋友一同进攻，均欢乐无比。Undead Labs致力制作具有多种行动、幽默感和大量殭尸的MMO游戏，因为我们都已对杀龙厌倦了。

去年夏天，Strain离开了NCsoft，建立了囊括业内最杰出且热爱殭尸的开发者的创意工作室，并开创出新的开发模型，为游戏玩家彻底地制作新型MMO游戏。

“每次与友人看到出色的殭尸电影时，我们总会不停讨论在殭尸动乱世界内的求生策略。”Strain说。“应该去警局还是超级市场？应使用园林耙还是钉枪？应播放巴赫还是白线条乐团的音乐？我是个游戏开发者，充其量只能当食尸鬼诱饵，但能够制作MMOZ游戏、试验那些策略并查看其是否有效，实在令我感到很兴奋。”

Strain作为游戏开发者和商界领袖的经验和专业知识有助开创游戏业内最成功且最有影响力的MMO游戏。90年代中，Strain就职于Blizzard Entertainment时，是《星际争霸（StarCraft）》和《暗黑破坏神（Diablo）》的开发者，并制作了《星际争霸》战役编辑器。于1999年，Strain成立了初期团队，并开始开发空前成功的MMO《魔兽世界（World of Warcraft）》，其时他身为团队队长及该项目的主程序员。

2000年4月，Strain与Blizzard要员Mike O’Brien和Patrick Wyatt创办了ArenaNet。他担任了非常受欢迎的MMO《激战（Guild Wars）》的程序员及执行制作人，该游戏卖出了六百多万套。韩国MMO出版商NCsoft于2002年收购ArenaNet。2008年，Strain晋升为该公司Western营运部门的产品开发总裁，为此他一整年都穿着衬衫和深色袜子，后来才回归开发本位成立Undead Labs。

有关Undead Labs的详情可阅览http://UndeadLabs.com。

# # #

联络方式（仅限媒体）：
Steve Cherrier
公关
steve@relatepr.com

An Interview with Develop Magazine

Jeff — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:55:10 +0000

In addition to their coverage of today’s announcement, Develop Magazine’s Rob Crossley spent some time with Jeff this weekend to get more details on the formation of Undead Labs. Since Develop Magazine is aimed at game industry types, the questions covered some new territory. Check out the interview with Rob.

Eurogamer Talks Zombie

Jeff — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:50:52 +0000

Eurogamer weighs in with a pair of articles. The first is their coverage of the Undead Labs announcement this morning. The second is an interview with Jeff.

Destructoid Interview

Jeff — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:43:55 +0000

Destructoid’s Matthew Razak was gracious enough to interview Jeff about the formation of Undead Labs. Check it out!