By Chris Kavan - 12/27/12 at 04:47 PM CT
I have a bit of an obsession when it comes to the living dead. Books, games, movies - you name it, if it's zombie related, chances are I've either played, read, watched or at least heard of it. And I'm not the only one - I mean, you could name 2012 the Year of the Zombie - but has the saturation point finally been reached?
Game often add zombie themes to them - Red Dead Redemption had a whole separate disc release of just its zombie theme. The latest rendition of Call of Duty - Black Ops II - has an extensive zombies mode. The Walking Dead recently won Game of the Year honors at the Spike 2012 Video Game Awards (amongst others). And I have to say, the third season of the TV show is the best yet.
So it's obvious the next logical step is a zombie-themed MMO - I mean, it just makes sense? Right? Lucky for us, Dean Hall came along and created a highly successful mod for ARMA 2, DayZ. This is a mod that actually puts "survival" into a survival horror situation - you have to worry about things like getting injured, sustenance, exposure - actual real-world situations amidst zombies and fellow players. But this is still a mod of an existing game - what about an honest-to-goodness built from the ground-up zombio MMO?
That's where The War Z comes in - and quickly devolves. A quick glance right here shows you the absolute debacle this game has caused in a literally a week. Put up on Steam, taken down. Accounts erased for no reason, some re-established, some not. Mysterious micro transactions. Outright lies about maps and content and, most damning, the utter failure of the game to work as a compelling MMO. It doesn't help that things are being run by Sergey Titov a man whose previous game to fame was Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. I mean, really, who thought this was a good idea and did they even look at the product before rushing to release it?
The whole thing has created a massive uprising of complete hate. I don't think this can be fixed - no matter how many times he apologizes or promises to fix things, this game is broken and shall remain that way. Does that mean all potential future zombie MMOs are going to be seen as failures as well? It's too soon to tell, but I'm happy enough to stick with trusted names (The Last of Us still looks like it's going to be great). Zombies are great - but apparently you can't just stick the living dead wherever you want and expect gold.
