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Undead Labs answers questions about Class3's open world
Undead Labs has been putting out a steady stream of information for potential players of Class3, the company's upcoming single-player prelude to the massively multiplayer Class4. The last major update in January showed some previews of the game under development, something that prompted a great deal of discussion about how the game will play. As a result, this month's session of questions and answers focuses on player speculation and the game's open-world environment. According to this set of answers, players will be able to explore the game through a variety of means, including taking shelter inside the houses across the landscape, jumping over fences, and making careful use of vehicles found through the world. There's also discussion about making use of the environment as a weapon via ragdoll physics plus a tantalizing hint that more information will be forthcoming about the game in the spring. Fans of the upcoming zombie apocalypse will want to take a look at the full set of answers, which will hopefully serve as a precursor to an epic MMO in the same vein.
Undead Labs' Jeff Strain takes players behind-the-scenes of Class3
If you're as big of a zombie fan as we are, we're sure you're anxiously awaiting Undead Labs' Class3 project as well as its massively multiplayer counterpart, Class4. The studio's founder, Jeff Strain, stopped by the official Undead Labs site today to post the first dev blog entry of 2012, and in celebration of the new year, he's offering fans a behind-the-scenes glimpse at Class3 in action. Strain notes that the team is "not quite ready to post official trailers" of Class3 at this juncture, but that didn't stop him from prowling the offices with his iPhone in order to catch some footage of the in-development title. The spy-cam footage gives players a look at various facets of the game's development, including. but not necessarily limited to, zombies (duh), a guy running alongside a giant rolling buzzsaw blade, concept art, the studio's wall-o'-fan-love, and two players defending their encampment from a zombie siege. Strain closes on a high note, stating that "Class3 is on-schedule and looking great. We're excited to show it to you and the rest of the world officially." For the full, zed-tastic video, just click on past the cut.
The Perfect Ten: The upcoming long-shots
In coming up with a follow-up list to my previous Upcoming MMO Contenders list, I found myself almost paralyzed by more choices than I could shake a wireless mouse at. Pointing at the sure bets is one thing, but narrowing down a field of dozens and dozens of interesting -- yet more far-flung -- prospects is far more difficult. It's one thing to have a good idea; it's another to say whether or not this game will actually make it to launch, and if it does, that it'll pull the idea off well. That said, I've lost some hair and two pounds sweating out this list, and I feel sleeker for it. Today's Perfect Ten is all about the long-shots, the titles that may not have the huge budget, big name studios, or anything solid to show for it, but could still become contenders in their own right if everything is played just right. Deep breath -- let's give it a go!
Undead Labs' writer talks story in zombie MMOs
Don't look now, but there's another MMO jumping on the story bandwagon. This time it's Undead Labs' Class3 console game, and there's a new dev blog up on the title's official site that outlines writer Travis Stout's modus operandi. Stout is a huge fan of the zombie genre, and that's a good thing given Class3's focus on the walking dead and the creeptastic atmosphere surrounding them. So what does Stout see as a writer's main mission when it comes to the upcoming MMO? "Take the zombies out of the equation and be damn sure you've got a rock-solid story full of interesting, well-developed characters and exciting action," he explains. "Then put the zombies back in so those characters can smash their heads in with tire irons."
Undead Labs Q&A touches on health bars, death mechanics
Undead Labs has posted another question-and-answer session with fans of its upcoming Class 3 zombie MMO. The firm fielded a bunch of queries relating to healing, death, health bars, and assorted other topics. "You'll have a health bar so you won't have to guess how much health you have, but zombies won't. While we could have opted to have no health bar for you too, we wanted to emphasize the survival aspect of the game by having the damage you take stick with you until you can heal up," the dev team says. The Q&A also features some interesting tidbits about weight, fatigue and stamina, and the fact that zombies will respond to the noise generated by building survival structures (translation: Bring your duct tape). Read all about it at the official Undead Labs blog.
Undead Labs moving right along with Class3
The end of September marked a graduation of sorts for members of the Undead Labs development team. The company's untitled maiden voyage has officially crossed the threshold from pre-production to in production, and a blog post on the firm's web site celebrates the milestone with something of a rah-rah speech from founder Jeff Strain. "I'm blown away by how far we've come in such a short amount of time. Our task now as we move headlong into the production phase is to take this fun little gem and turn it into something we're proud to show the world," Strain wrote. The gem he's referring to is currently known only by its Class3 codename. We do know that it's about zombies and that it's only for consoles. Aside from that, the title is shrouded in a fair bit of mystery. Strain's post also features a time-lapse video that shows off the game's CryEngine 3-powered time-of-day effects, and you can check that out after the cut.
Class3 runs on CryEngine 3, has some lazy zombies
The above video of Undead Labs' Class3 isn't exactly what we'd call gameplay per se, but it is our first glimpse at what the survival simulator will roughly look like once it eventually shambles its way onto XBLA. The game will run on CryEngine 3, and despite still being in the earliest of development stages, things are looking pretty solid for an XBLA game. Don't these zombies have anything better to do than to stand around all day, though? Get a job, zombies!%Gallery-131241%
Undead Labs brings Class3 to (un)life with CryENGINE 3
Following last week's dev diary featuring Undead Labs' art director Doug Williams and his talk on the "heart of horror," the most recent dev diary from the studio shifts in a more technical direction. In particular, executive producer Jeff Strain focuses on the game's engine. Even more particularly, he announces that the tentatively named Class3 will be running on the powerful CryENGINE 3. Of course, the devs over at Undead Labs are quite familiar with the traditions of the internet and anticipate shouts of "pics or it didn't happen" with a lovely screenshot from an early version of the game. But wait, there's more! Call now and you'll receive not just a single screenshot, but an entire video! Just click past the break and check out an early version of Undead Labs' Class3 in action, then skip on over to the dev blog to read the full entry.
Undead Labs art director talks about the heart of horror
So what is art direction and why is it important to video games in general and MMORPGs in particular? That's a good question, and sadly one that can't be answered in a brief news post. What we can do, though, is point you to some worthwhile reading on the subject. Today's lesson comes courtesy of Undead Labs and Doug Williams. Williams serves as the art director on the firm's upcoming zombie apocalype Xbox Live Arcade MMO (currently codenamed Class3), and while you might expect him to spend time talking about gory effects or the best way to render blood and brains in a dark environment, Williams actually spends a good portion of the latest Undead Labs blog post talking about something called "Faded Americana." "Faded Americana really resonates with me because there are many analogies between the style and a zombie apocalypse. In both cases, you see society hanging onto the ghosts of its past," Williams explains. The concept goes a long way towards explaining Undead Labs' decision to set the game primarily in a small town environment, and Williams has quite a few interesting anecdotes relating to influential games as well as the challenges inherent in separating the new game from the stack of zombie-themed entertainment products that have swarmed over the popular consciousness in recent years.
New interview with Undead Labs' Jeff Strain covers technology and fun
Console MMO fans, rejoice. We have a new interview with Undead Labs' Jeff Strain on the studio's upcoming Xbox 360 titles. The two titles, code-named Class3 and Class4, are an Xbox Live Arcade title (which will allow the studio to test their technology and give players a taste of what's to come) and an open-world MMORPG, respectively. Throughout the interview, Strain touches on a few important subjects, such as Class3 and how it is helping the team develop and prepare for Class4. He also mentions that the team's concern with Class4 is not with the fact that it's a server-hosted online world, but ensuring that said server-hosted online world is fun to play. Although it's a somewhat short interview, it's certainly worth the read for any zombie fan anticipating Undead Labs' upcoming titles.
Jeff Strain shares his vision for Class3, a different kind of zombie game
Judging by the comments section of most articles we write about new games and DLC that feature zombies, we'd say that Jeff Strain and his band of merry reanimated corpse enthusiasts (collectively and appropriately called Undead Labs) are at an immediate disadvantage with the announcement of their zombified XBLA title, Class3. We can't help but sympathize with their worries -- in the past three years, we've crushed, shot, sliced, exploded and generally obliterated more virtual zombies than we could ever possibly hope to count throughout the fullness of time. That's exactly where Class3 -- a temporary codename, mind you, and a direct reference to Max Brooks' seminal Zombie Survival Guide -- sets itself apart. We recently spoke with Strain about how the team's first onus (which recently found a publishing partner in Microsoft Game Studios) stands out among a veritable field of undead offerings, and he explained succinctly, "In a real zombie apocalypse, you wouldn't just gather up the guns and go hunting zombies. You'd be trying to avoid them. You'd be trying to survive." All zombie-centric games run a balance between providing the player with impetus to destroy zombies, and tasking the player with not being destroyed by zombies. Based on Strain's vision for the title, Class3 sounds like it leans decidedly towards the latter. %Gallery-115645%
Undead Labs' Class3 to serve as precursor for MMO-focused 'Class4'
While going down the fact sheet for Undead Labs' Microsoft-published XBLA title (codenamed) Class3, a certain something seems to be missing: Any mention of the "MMO" classification. Considering the gaming lineage of studio founder Jeff Strain, ArenaNet co-founder and former World of Warcraft lead programmer -- not to mention Undead Labs' late 2009 mission statement to create an "MMOZ" -- an absence of the genre's mention seems a bit odd. Strain recently explained to us the avoidance of the subject: Class3 will not play host to the "online world" features envisioned by the developer -- but Class4 will. "What we've decided to do is take that first step," Strain explained. "We're going place a marker along the path, and release this game we're calling Class3, that has all of the fundamental points in terms of the way you interact with the world, the way your character progresses, the way you establish outposts, the way define your goals in the game, the way you fight zombies and the way they fight you -- the minute by minute core of the game will all be there in Class3. The only thing it won't have is the massive player participation the sequel will have."
Undead Labs reveals 'Class3,' an open world zombie XBLA game published by Microsoft Game Studios
When ArenaNet co-founder Jeff Strain and a handful of his cohorts announced Undead Labs in late 2009 with the intention of creating "the definitive massively multiplayer online zombie game (MMOZ) for console gamers," we don't know what we expected, but it probably wasn't an Xbox Live Arcade game. Some fourteen months after that announcement, Undead Labs is ready to start talking about its "inaugural" title, currently codenamed "Class3," an XBLA game being published by none other than the MMO-wary Microsoft Game Studios and billed as "an open world zombie-survival game." If that Xbox Live Arcade setting sounds anticlimactic, you'll be happy to hear that it's just step one for Strain and friends. "We plan to create an ambitious open world XBLA game and use its gameplay, setting, and technology as the foundation for a full online world game," Strain said. The press release continues, "The open world develops in real-time, shaped by player actions, with content determined by their choices and the ever-increasing zombie threat." It's worth pointing out that Undead has backed away from the term "MMO" entirely; it never appears in today's press release, and while that followup project – codenamed "Class4" – will contain many MMO elements, even that won't be branded with those three little letters. For more on Class4, check out our interview with Jeff Strain later today. %Gallery-115645%
Nokia Siemens, LG hit LTE speed record
What, 43Mbps not good enough for you? Well, clean room testing doesn't really say much about what kinds of data speeds we'll be seeing in the real world -- but for what it's worth, LG and infrastructure joint venture Nokia Siemens have announced that they've hit a new speed record for an LTE Class 3 device: 100Mbps. The tests were performed at Nokia Siemens' facilities in Germany and Finland using pre-production USB modems from LG operating in the 2100 and 2600MHz frequencies, but they're not stopping to celebrate -- work is now turning to tests in other bands that'll be used for LTE around the world and to upping performance even further. That's a good thing, we'd say, because past experience tells us that transfer rates in actual use are a mere fraction of what we read on the spec sheet.
Undead Labs' Jeff Strain is totally into zombies
We've already told you about Blizzard/NCsoft vet Jeff Strain's startup, Undead Labs, which is creating a zombie-centric, console-based MMO (sorry, marketing dept., we're not going to call it an MMOZ), but we haven't told you much about the game itself. Though this Eurogamer interview still provides next to no perspective on that topic, it does offer a considerable amount of insight into how much Strain thinks about zombies. Take this gem for instance: "People are passionate about zombies ... the reason I'm talking about it is because I want zombie fans. I want the best developers in the industry that love zombies to want to work here." Or perhaps this: "The reason zombies are so powerful and transcend fantasy is because right now they are the modern, societal guilt-free meat-puppet. We've been through the Nazi phase, we've been through the communist phase, we've been through the terrorist phase. Those were all at various times in history fair game in the gaming culture. Right now zombies are fulfilling that need for us. That no-rules, no-guilt mentality is something that people really resonate with." So, what Strain is saying is that we used to be really angry at terrorists, but now, instead of that, we hate zombies. Will history remember how close Strain just came to inventing the zombie terrorist, the video game enemy that will someday unite the world, Wyld Stallyns-style? We suspect it will not.
Undead Labs creating zombie MMO for consoles
Poor zombies. By hungering for nothing so much as our brain matter, they've turned themselves into the most widely-slaughtered video game villains after Nazis and spiders. Now a start-up developer called Undead Labs is taking the zombie genre to the next logical step with a currently untitled zombie-based MMO made specifically for consoles. In the announcement, company boss Jeff Strain said "Every time I see a good zombie movie with friends, we spend days debating our strategies for surviving the zombie apocalypse. The police station, or the supermarket? Garden rake, or staple gun? Bach, or the White Stripes? I'm a game developer, so I'd probably be useless for anything other than ghoul bait, but I'm excited to have the opportunity to build an MMOZ that lets us put those strategies to the test and find out for sure." Strain, who helped found ArenaNet and was the executive producer for NCsoft's Guild Wars, certainly has the right pedigree for a project like this. But it's hard to say if this will be the ultimate zombie experience, or the title that finally (re)buries zombies for good. Here's hoping it's the former.
