When you think zombie apocalypse the one thing that probably comes to mind is streets flooded with the walking dead. Every square inch of the city overrun with undead corpses and sidewalks, neighborhoods and parks pretty much blockaded with living, rotting flesh. Well, that's actually a possible scenario for the upcoming open-world survival game, The War Z.
Gaming Blend had the chance to toss a few questions at PR and marketing guru Alex Josef for Hammerpoint Interactive's upcoming survival-action game, The War Z, one of the many upcoming titles that adds a stark and grim measure of interactive to the somewhat overcrowded zombie-action genre.
Well, one of the things that was briefly discussed in the interview was the game's ability to handle zombie load, and zombie load is something the engine can handle very well. According to Josef...
We’re able to display around a couple hundred zombies on screen without significant slowdown, but, to be honest I don’t think that you’ll ever encounter a situation like this. Usually depending on the size of the town you can expect to encounter between 10 to 100 zombies per settlement, which still can be a pretty significant number.Mostly we’ll be limited by design and balancing needs, not technology.
For the most part this means that we can expect a sizable amount of zombies per area to be balanced around the design of the area itself and not necessarily expect to see something like 400 zombies in a tiny little turnpike or small settlement just because the developers can add that many.
This lends itself to the side of excitement for sure, because knowing that the technology is already capable spells good things for the game's future. As some of you know, there are engine limitations in DayZ which the team has to overcome in order to work around or work-in some functions that simply can't be added outright. Future-proofing is certainly something that benefits the developers regarding updates and patches as well as gamers who eagerly await new and exciting content arriving for the game. In short, lots of zombies in small or expansive areas won't be an issue for The War Z.
A confirmation for how many zombies can be on-screen at one time should be exciting news for gamers planning on playing with friends and building up guild-sized hunting parties. It also ensures that The War Z can stand toe-to-toe with DayZ when it comes to on-screen body counts.
We'll have up more exclusive info on The War Z in the rest of our interview with Alex shortly. In the meantime, you can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the Official Website.
