Lately I’ve been getting a bit of traffic on the site, mostly because of the Urban Dead post I made over 3 years ago. Â So, I decided to take another look at the game… which lasted about ten minutes before I remembered exactly why I left.
The main crux of that old post, and the reason I quit the game, and the reason my return was so brief is that I have no desire to play a zombie. Â On the whole, I tend to find stories about zombies to be boring. Â Stories about survivors in a world of zombies on the other hand are awesome. Â Even when the survivors don’t win and they all die, because a good zombie story is about humans, and what we will do to and for each other to survive.
Imagine this: you are playing a game where you are a cop hunting down rapists. Â You find clues, perform interviews, gather evidence and eventually, if you are lucky, you get to shoot them. Â Now imagine if in this game, when you fail to catch a rapist you are forced to be a rapist until you can be turned back into a cop. Â Totally unappealing, right? Â I mean, I hope that is unappealing, because if you want to play a rapist in a video game you need to stop reading and seek help. Â Now.
I don’t want to be a zombie. Â I don’t want to eat people. That game just isn’t fun for me at all to play.
What would make Urban Dead worth playing for me?
First, a simple “reset” button. Â When I die, rather than be a zombie, I’d like to be able to just start over without having to create a new account. Â I don’t mind losing experience and skills or having to wait a period of days, I just don’t want to be undead.
Second, a world reset event. Â If all the world is undead, if no survivors remain, wipe the slate clean and start over. Â If you let people pick zombie or survivor from the start, had levels and skills with the personal reset button causing some skill loss and a waiting period (24 to 72 hours), then you create a true “us versus them” style of PvP, and at that point you can define a win condition. Â If all the survivors are dead or all the zombies are dead, the server declares that side the winner and the entire game resets. Â When the world resets, everyone starts off human, but people who pick the zombie side start infected and in X days they’ll all die and be able to stand up as zombies.
I think that would be a great game.