Alpha gameplay for The War Z
By Frank Hartnett on August 31st, 2012 (9 comments)
Here we have a portion of the War Z Alpha. This clip features a player trying to reunite with his pal (possibly scripted) while gathering supplies and taking out a few zombies.
So, lets talk about what we can see from the trailer. The environments do look pretty good and seem to be nice and open. Just from a few glances it also seemed like there were quite a few buildings that players could enter into and, possibly, find supplies. From the UI we can see a hunger/thirst meter, a figure of a person that I'm guessing represents your character's health, and an indicator at the top right to show how loud/visible the player is to zombies. The buttons at the bottom show that a player can have up to 6 items tied to a hotkey while all the rest must be accessed through the inventory.
The inventory screen also appears to be a lot simpler in design from Day Z and it's nice to know that picking up items just involves holding down a key for a few seconds. That being said, there is an issue I can see from this trailer: the zombies. They seem to be taken down way to easily for my liking; just 4 or 5 bullets sprayed into their gut and down they go. This wouldn't be too big of an issue if it wasn't for the face these aren't running zombies. No, the zombies in War Z are the typical shambling and groaning hordes of undeath which makes the design choice to have them be taken out so easily rather baffling.
Now, those who have played War Z will know that the players are, usually, a bigger concern than the zombies themselves, but that doesn't mean the zombies don't present any real threat. Granted, the player in the trailer was using an automatic weapon that had a silencer, but I'll keep my wariness until I know what the spawn rates for ammo and those types of guns are going to be. I'll still be keeping my eye on The War Z and keep hopeful that this can deliver the War Z experience without the god awful controls and UI.
Frank Hartnett
Frank (Seisan) is a blog contributor and chat moderator over at 4Player. He specializes in analyzing the story telling, immersion, and consistency aspects of video games and also enjoys writing Fiction in his spare time. His favorite genres are RPGs, MMOs, and RTS'. Frank also specializes in having a chat name no one can pronounce correctly; nicknamed Seesaw as a result.
https://twitter.com/Seisan9
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Good read Frank, however in response to the "They seem to be taken down way to easily for my liking; just 4 or 5 bullets sprayed into their gut and down they go" comment, according to the lead dev on their forums zombies can be knocked down from the ballistics of being, shot but will not die unless shot in the head. They will get back up after some time if the brain is not destroyed.
Link / ReplyOh really? Im kinda surprised that this footage didn't really display that then. The first zombie got taken out with one shot to the head, but all the others seemed to drop just from torso shots. So either that part of the zombies wasn't programmed in yet or the zombies just take about 30+ seconds to recover.
Link / ReplyYour guess is as good as mine, but here's a direct quote from Sergey(executive producer) "btw I don't think guy who played killed all of them - I didn't saw much of headshots - so he'll face reanimating zombies at his back". Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?9221-The-War-Z-PAX-Gameplay-Video/page6
Link / ReplyBut you can still incapacitate zombie with 2-3 shots and then just finish it off with a head shot while target is not moving. It's in early development, I'm sure there be lots of changed by the time the game is balanced.
Link / ReplyLooks like a lot less clunky version of Day Z, which is good, but I'm not sure if I'm really interested in one more zombie game.
Link / ReplyActually it looks a lot like Left 4 Dead. A LOT. Even from the blue shade around the weapons.
Link / ReplyThat flashlight was bright, but it didn't seem to do anything except let him see.
Link / ReplyI had always been picturing this game in third person.
Link / ReplyLook pretty bad. Is it using the chrome engine (The dead island engine)? Looks similar.
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