Shadow Covenant

As most forms of entertainment, the game industry (and I include indies in this) are driven by fads and moods… And apparently, there’s two huge forces in this regard at the moment: zombies and RPGs…

Let’s start with zombies: there’s hundreds of games and mods with zombies in it… for some strange reason, zombies are the monster du-jour everywhere… The reason for this eludes me, but it is probably because I like more cerebral monsters (like vampires, demons or robots) than the mindless concept of zombies…

Anyway, zombies are here, and apparently they’re here to stay!

I’m guessing that what makes zombies terrifying is the fact that they can’t be stopped except in very specific methods (usually, blowing their heads off), they can’t be reasoned with, and they always outnumber the player… This makes them perfect for games, specially action-packed titles.

To be honest, I’m tired of zombies… every week, a slew of titles come out that either are zombie-based, or have some zombie-like DLC. There are interesting titles in this arena, though… Day-Z is a great example, since the concept of it is amazing. It captures the essence of zombie-movies: survival… I found the execution a bit lacking, but it still has its merits! But for each good zombie-game, there’s one million of just mediocre titles that jump onto the zombie bandwagon… I find amazing the connection: “I love zombie-stuff, so I’ll buy anything that has to do with zombies”, but it seems to be the current trend! At least, I don’t see people ranting against zombie-stuff as much as I do…

Another fad that’s rising is RPGs… It seems that every indie is making a rogue-like, every big company is doing a RPG or adding RPG elements to their games…

Since I’m a big fan of RPG, I should be thrilled by this, but the feeling I have is that we’re ending up with mediocre games – most roguelikes don’t bring anything new to the table, most RPGs have the same tired tropes over and over again, some games have RPG elements cooked into them for bullet-point value only, not adding anything to the game itself (in some cases, actually detracting)…

Don’t get me wrong, there’s amazing work being done (and on the horizon) by indies (Legend of Grimrock, Frayed Knights), medium companies (Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2), and big companies (Mass Effect, Skyrim, Project Eternity, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2)… But again, for every one of these, there’s loads of mediocre and pointless titles…

What it sounds amazing to me is that I haven’t seen (doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist) a zombie RPG!

“Play as the ZOMBIES or as the SURVIVORS, in this fantasy/sci-fi world in which the evil technomancer Darklordius unleashed a magical virus that infects live people. When a survivor die with the virus in them, they become zombies… But redemption is available for the scientists of the White Citadel, led by Doctor Maximumgoodguy… A zombie can be put through a painful process to become human again, with little loss of ability!”

I’d say it would be interesting… Survivors had to survive (so no silly war machine kind of gameplay where a single person kills hundreds of zombies), get food, water, fortify their houses, etc… To keep things balanced, Doctor Maximumgoodguy could only unzombify a certain number of people per day… And maybe each time a survivor died, it gained a stacking debuff… when it reached a certain value, then it would become a zombie, with some incentive to “switch side” again, but to play as well as he could as a zombie to be able to gain that possibility…

So, this idea is free, Internet… Make it happen… If my calculations are correct, if you launch this within then next couple of years, you’re sitting on a money pile!