[mathboy]

Will the game have deathclaws or similar monsters? I keep wanting to replay Fallout, Arcanum and Bloodlines, but the deathclaws, wererats and scary sewer monsters stop me.

[Annie]

No Deathclaws   No vampires or werewolves either.  Or even chupacabras.

Juuuuuuuuust zombies.  A lot.  A LOT.  OF ZOMBIES.

Which is really sort of what happens when you get the genre going.  They're like chips.  Can't have just one.

[inhuman]

Contains spoilers for those who hasn't seen Night of The Living Dead '69

No variations to the zombies whatsoever, even within the canon? Romero had a few jogging/running zombies here and there; people who have only recently been bitten and have just become zombies, very early stages of decay so they sill retain basic manual dexterity and agility, and even some mental facilities, showing signs of hesitation or confusion. Remember the first ever zombie in the Night 69, right after "They're coming to get you Barbara!" The damn thing gave quite a wrestling challenge, tried the door handles to reach Barbara, broke a car window with a brick he went back to find and take and even jogged after the car for a while.

I've concerns, some questions, and suggestions, which I voiced at the Codex thread:

Really, zombies and turn-based? A suspecting combination. They better have lots of skills/perks dealing with close encounters, eg. dodging, escaping, grappling zombies/people, carrying/pulling/pushing for barricading etc. This reminds me of the almost excellent TB zombie survival game, named Zombie Night, if I remember correctly.

Anything detailed like that? Grappling and almost impossible escapes are a must for a non-shooter zombie game. Also, have you played Zombie Nightmare (the one I misremembered to be "Zombie Night" in my quoted post)? It's the best party based zombie game I've ever played (other than the fact that it's the only one). Having to barricade yourself in places from time to time could be most excellent.

I'm assuming the player will have absolute control over party NPCs during combat. Is that the case? In case that isn't the case, here is some food for thought:

A game could roll some kind composure test each turn of combat, to see if the character gets to act rationally (player control) or instinctively (ai control). Instinctive behavior could vary from character to character. A trained soldier would be likely to hit the ground and start shooting at the most obvious enemy target, while a green recruit or civilian would be more likely to run away or huddle behind cover. Such a test should apply to the PC too, not just NPCs.

Hey, this is an excellent idea.

Acting rational = player control is pretty bad in my opinion. It should rather be a test of player character's leading abilities and trustiness. If you're able to make people feel safe and give the impression that you know what you're doing, they fall into player control. In line with what Shannow has written:

Personally I'd go with a system that allows me to command/coordinate the party but depends on npc personalities/experience/skill checks (saves). With situations deteriorating with the amount of pressure/stress the characters are under. Add to this roleplaying elements like triggerhappy mercs that have great stats/equipment but are extremely difficult to control making charisma a non-dump stat. Add showdowns where you put them back in line after they went against your orders leading to a more tractable npc or an inner-party shootout depending on your speech skills...

Also, your own actions in any situation should have a certain goal. If you waste turns walking here, then there and here again, trying to decide what to do, you may receive negative modifiers to associated rolls for NPC control.

Then this brings the problem of the game not being a mind-reader, or even if the game could read your mind, what you had in your mind and your character's options may not be the same. So, such penalties or bonuses would either occur at the end of an encounter, based on how well you handled the situation and whether anyone got hurt/killed etc., progressively affecting your standing with the NPCs.

Another, rather experimental, approach might (pre)planning stage right there during an encounter and turn. You bring up the relevant tactical interface to decide what your actions may be for the next several turns. You select NPCs, you point destinations, add simple "if/or" variations, all doable in mere seconds from a use-of-ease POV (not that how long it takes matters for the game, but it should be easy and fast and not too deep so it won't be a distraction/burden to the player). This is so that NPCs will have certain expectations from you regarding what to do. If you have none, you will lose credibility and you will lose control over them. If the things you've planned and how things turn out after several turns are wildly different, you will lose credibility.

Cassandra raised what I think to be an important concern, regarding what kind of motivations may a player have in a PA setting over morality and NPCs. With some suggestions. If there are any points there you agree or disagree, and giving an answer might be relevant to the game, please do so.

I think there's a fundamental problem with survival style games that I'm hoping Brian addresses. That is, how the player deals with human NPCs. In real life, if you came upon someone's house and saw they had supplies but the person was still home this would present a sickening dilemma. Do you potentially murder this person for their supplies? In a game, this is not a sickening dilemma. Who gives a crap about murdering a virtual character in a video game?

Because there aren't any implications on your conscience for doing murder, the player needs to be punished for it in other ways. The most obvious solution is to make combat extremely difficult. But then this is a PC game and it's probably fair to assume you can save and reload. So that entirely ruins that.

Karma meters and such are shit. Having your party members bitch and moan like in BG adds some flavor but it's not the actual solution. The game is not fantasy so it's difficult to add a game mechanic that changes depending on how murderous you become.

Honestly, I think there's a reason the better survival games are on consoles.. think about Resident Evil: there are designated save points and, not only that, but the number of times you're allowed to save are actually an in-game resource. If all else fails, I think a save system with its heart in the same place might be necessary. That or make the whole game ironman.

I've thought about the same thing. Don't disregard strong reactions from NPCs though. In a game with a functional society and order, NPCs can ideally work as spread mills ie. your actions gaining certain types of reputation in certain circles if you kick a NPC or if an NPC leaves the party on his/her own. Maybe that NPC that left the party because you're such a lying scum and she told everyone about it in your favourite bar, so now you won't be able to pick up girls if you go there. But what about a post-apoc, right?

Ideally, party NPCs in post-apoc are like hard-find commodities. It's hard to find any that's worth his or her shit, and if you have any, you better do your best to stick together, keep him/her. There, strong reactions from NPCs can be defining moments for you on how to play the game.

Other than that, I've thought of building a character through the game through your choices? Every choice of dialogue line, every decision over your actions define or limit the next batch of options in any situation that will be available to you, ideally supported by traits or perks in character creation that define how flexible your character is. If you like being a sicko, then the option to be a good-guy all of a sudden shouldn't even be possible after a point. Even if at that moment, you as the player, think that a certain choice that isn't really something your character would do, is well worth for its meta-worth, not being able to have that due to your past choices would be mighty good.

[Jeff Graw]

Game is open-ended. There are characters and events that could happen, but the story depends on where you go, what you do, and who you meet.

You forgot to mention the how and the when  

The how is obviously implied, I know, but the when is a different story. If a game like this simply waits for player action before moving the game world forward, it will fail -- and fail hard. To make a convincing survival game the world needs to be able to advance on it's own terms. Obvioudly, the player can still change the course of events through his actions, but cannot stop the normal course of events from happening through his innaction. Think Star Control 2.

[inhuman]

3. Speaking of food, you mention resources are important. Does that mean consumption of food, or even clothes and/or medicine, a la Realms of Arkania?

As a matter of fact, food is important. It's somewhat like a form of currency. It's one of several important resources in our game. The player will never have to worry about feeding themselves in the normal mode of the game, though it will be a factor in the survivor mode (the hardcore/iron man mode).

The need to eat - I'm hoping this will be an automated process based on your predetermined choices and your current food supply. Manual management of food consumption has gotta be one of the most boring stuff in games that have it. If it isn't automated, well, elaborate?

Also -players not worrying about feeding in normal mode- don't you think this significantly reduces the significance of food? If, in normal mode, food is nothing more than a currency, then stocking food without the worry of needing to consume it, to reduce your currency, I don't know, boring and banal? (I spared the 3rd).

Is food expiration in, depending on food types and condition? It better be!

If the player has allies, they will need to eat or conflicts may arise.

I hope it's more than this:

NPC - If we're to stick together, you should consider sharing some of your food, and I'm getting hungry.
Olayer -Get your own food, bitch!
player receives -1 to karma

[Plalito]

I'm glad to hear it's a Zombie RPG, it's one of those ideas which you wonder why it's never been done before. A great setting for examining different aspects of human behavior.

[Gilliatt]

Everytime I think about zombies, I think about those in Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. The animation was so slow that fighting them was like looking at the same cinematics over and over.  (If you have played the game, you know what I'm talking about.)

So my first hope is that you will avoid this mistake. Please tell us that you don't plan to have them move one by one at a pace even a turtle would fine too slow. (Even if we wont be fighting them all the time, this could be extremely frustrating.)

Looking forward to your game by the way. 

[Brian]

Contains spoilers for those who hasn't seen Night of The Living Dead '69

No variations to the zombies whatsoever, even within the canon? Romero had a few jogging/running zombies here and there; people who have only recently been bitten and have just become zombies, very early stages of decay so they sill retain basic manual dexterity and agility, and even some mental facilities, showing signs of hesitation or confusion. Remember the first ever zombie in the Night 69, right after "They're coming to get you Barbara!" The damn thing gave quite a wrestling challenge, tried the door handles to reach Barbara, broke a car window with a brick he went back to find and take and even jogged after the car for a while.

To be fair, we're not doing Romero zombies. Romero's zombies were also able to learn and in Land of the Dead, they became smart and organized enough to destroy my ability to watch the movie.

Our zombies aren't that bright, nor are they that that much of a threat when they're alone. But they are persistent. Attract the attention of too many and things get nasty very quickly. And yes, they can lunge and they can grapple if they get close enough.

Personally I'd go with a system that allows me to command/coordinate the party but depends on npc personalities/experience/skill checks (saves). With situations deteriorating with the amount of pressure/stress the characters are under. Add to this roleplaying elements like triggerhappy mercs that have great stats/equipment but are extremely difficult to control making charisma a non-dump stat. Add showdowns where you put them back in line after they went against your orders leading to a more tractable npc or an inner-party shootout depending on your speech skills...

Dealing with allies and their personality quirks is definitely a big part of managing them. They have a wide range of behaviors. Depending on how your character manages them, you can change their default behavior and curb some of their less desirable traits - or encourage them, if you find that more helpful.

Cassandra raised what I think to be an important concern, regarding what kind of motivations may a player have in a PA setting over morality and NPCs. With some suggestions. If there are any points there you agree or disagree, and giving an answer might be relevant to the game, please do so.

I think there's a fundamental problem with survival style games that I'm hoping Brian addresses. That is, how the player deals with human NPCs. In real life, if you came upon someone's house and saw they had supplies but the person was still home this would present a sickening dilemma. Do you potentially murder this person for their supplies? In a game, this is not a sickening dilemma. Who gives a crap about murdering a virtual character in a video game?

Because there aren't any implications on your conscience for doing murder, the player needs to be punished for it in other ways. The most obvious solution is to make combat extremely difficult. But then this is a PC game and it's probably fair to assume you can save and reload. So that entirely ruins that.

Karma meters and such are shit. Having your party members bitch and moan like in BG adds some flavor but it's not the actual solution. The game is not fantasy so it's difficult to add a game mechanic that changes depending on how murderous you become.

No karma meters here. I'm not a fan. However, depending on your actions, certain NPCs are going to approve/disapprove of your management. Over time, there are consequences and rewards. I'm going to go into detail about this system at another time, but essentially as a leader, you have to make decisions that keep your group functioning as a whole. Lose support and people start losing faith in your ability or the group's ability to survive. There's bit of a political aspect to it.

[Silellak]

Sounds great, that Zombie RPG thread we had a couple of weeks ago is full of ideas, too

Did you two read the Zombie Survival Guide?

I'm reading World War Z right now, I thirst for more zombies!

I'm curious about this too; especially World War Z.  There's a lot of fun political stuff in there, though I doubt much of it would actually fit in the game.

Also, are we dealing with a Romero-style epidemic, where anyone who dies in any way comes back to life?  Or a Brooks-style, where only people who are directly infected come back?

Finally, can we expect Bethesda to make the third game in your zombie trilogy, in which we discover through a piece of DLC that aliens were responsible for the outbreak of the zombie epidemic?

[Brian]

The need to eat - I'm hoping this will be an automated process based on your predetermined choices and your current food supply. Manual management of food consumption has gotta be one of the most boring stuff in games that have it. If it isn't automated, well, elaborate?

Yes, automated.

Is food expiration in, depending on food types and condition? It better be!

Yes.

[Mortmal]

 How will the game work? will it be free roaming in vast wastelands fallout like  or more like ,xcom?
  i know xcom is  not a  exactly a rpg, but you said you had to build a shelter . So i figure you could launch vital missions from there and improve it over time, defend it  eventually resisting waves of zombies, or humans gangswich i agree in such settings could be far more dangerous than mindles zombies. Missions could be looting food  from a supermarket, recovering weapons from military camp,recovering technology etc,  one area at a time encountering new npcs to join you and new factions.
 Will it be a setting like in that stephen king book with 99% of the population decimated by the plague(repalce plague by zombiification) ?or something a little more "soft"?

[puppyonastik]

Can you tell what caused the zombie outbreak? Or is that supposed to be a secret (in the gameworld)?

I've found that the best zombie media are those that leave the cause unidentified, such as the Night of the Living Dead series (all though the radio in the movie hints of radioactive contamination as the cause, the viewer is still left to speculation) or the comic "The Walking Dead" (so far at least). Keeping it all a mystery and unknown allows space for the possibility in my mind. It could be just me, but once as talk of viruses and other bio-mechanics get described in the media they loose believability and thus my fascination, due to the inherent conflicts the "living dead" have with modern science. The process of decay happens so quick and is to destructive to allow for real living dead to occur even with viral agents as we know them.

If you are determined to go the viral route, the regular biological processes within the body would have to continue in full, so that the victim, is in fact, live. This is the basis for the "zombies" in 28 Weeks Later. The virus, "Rage", inspired by the real life Rabies virus; which only effects certain areas of the nervous system, allowing the body to perform up until the late stages when eventually the neurons managing breathing are destroyed. These "zombies" would essentially not be the "living dead" zombies we all know and love, however this would open up options such as as anti-virals to cure people, killing that little girl trying to eat you would be morally reprehensible as you would be killing a real little girl rather than some "zombie" child, and so on. On the other hand these infected human beings are much less scary, especially if they are slow and shambling, thus why in 28 Weeks Later they had the ability to run.

Another route I would like to suggest that would be scientifically compatible as well as very unique would be a corrupted nanorobotics experiment (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_nanotechnology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobot). The only issue with this is that you are are designing this game-world according to the present and the technology needed to create nanoscale programmable matter is probably at least 10 years off (would be great if I were wrong and it came sooner). If you are willing to look that over, here's a possible plot you could copy&paste from (you can thank me in the credits ):

"After extensive successful animal testing, people looking to preserve their health and bodies, apply for clinical trails involving experimental nanobots to repair damage brought on by terminal disease or serious physical trauma. Next thing you know, whether it was due to human error, or some kind of conspiracy; those patients in the experiment died hours later after injection, only to be reanimated as heavily flawed husks of what they were. Slow, primal, contagious. Provided enough protein, although not very efficiently due to the errors in their programming, the nanobots can manage to keep the corpse functioning for years until the level of decay becomes too great. Thankfully for us, transmission is through direct contact with fluids rather than airborne. Nanobot self-replication is slow, inefficient, and highly resource consuming (another reason for progressive long term decay) giving us at least some time to say our goodbyes to those who manage to survive contact with a mob."

I guess If those ideas don't work for you, you could always go with the magical or spiritual route, although that might be kind of lame ("I dunno man, God works in mysterious ways you know?").

If you agree with leaving the cause unidentified, I highly recommend you watch "Day of the Dead" to observe how you can delve into the study of zombies in your game-world with out getting into territory which might make the player question the possibility of zombies (although it only discussed psychology and large scale physiology, Romero stuck to knowledge from science to explain things). In a way, zombies are a fantasy, using pseudoscience to hold up a fantasy ruins it for me, using logic and rational explanations keeps me intrigued.

Thank you for your time, I hope these suggestions help.

[Sleel]

I am really looking forward to seeing where you go, and eventually end up, with this concept.  If you are looking for, non-zombie, end-of-society, literature, for inspiration, I would recommend the following:

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

Dies the Fire, S. M. Stirling

Wolf and Iron, Gordon Dickson

I find books a far richer source for ideas than movies.  Best of luck.

[Gragt]

Any possible romance option with a zombie of same or different sex?

[Vince]

You registered just to ask this very important question? Let's keep this forum free of lulz, shall we?