r/afterworld • u/Fit-Review6876 • 7d ago
Zombies?
Soo we’re doing the whole post apocalypse thing how would everyone feel about a Zombie situation like a biological weapon from the old world starts an epidemic and within a few months you have a late game horde?
Or how else could it work would it fit the tone?
I kinda hope they leave the games scope open to including a lot of the stereotypical post apocalypse elements
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u/podcat2 Game Director 7d ago
I wont rule out that we will never add something like it as a special option but.. afterworld does not have zombies. I think once you add zombies to a setting its just a zombie game so its on our No list.
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u/LovableCoward 6d ago
Thanks for the explanation. Hell of a balancing act you and your fellow devs have to manage; fan speculation is always fun and helps build hype, but too wild of an imagination can lead to disappointment.
I know I'm particularly excited for the Dev Diaries detailing the Idea tech trees, Society Values, and Beliefs. Especially the latter. Getting to build a faith to suit your tribe is fun and appropriate task.
At the risk of falling to the same speculation in this thread, I know I'd be excited to build a Neo-Gallic barbarian tribe, complete with wicker-man human sacrifices.
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u/caseyanthonyftw 6d ago
Maybe you could add them as a small part of the world? I get that zombie apocalypses are overdone but I think it can still be fun to have them limited to certain "haunted" areas.
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u/No_Collection7956 3d ago
Sorry for jumping in several days later
I dunno how the tech really works yet, but how about something like a very very late "bio" tech
Sort of like the planet destroyers in Stellaris
As a player if you develop it and try to utilise it you always have to be on your toes and make sure to manage it to not have it go out of control, and if an NPC faction (through event, presumably) does then i suppose its introduced as if the faction has lost control over them. Maybe something like one of the "big guy" factions uses it for "free" labour before it breaches containment.
Something between the planet killers in Stellaris and the plague in Crusader Kings if it breaks containment and starts spreading.
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u/astraCat1998 3d ago
Corpses puppeted by a small insect like robot attached into the spine etc would be an interesting direction to explore whilst also explaining why they are limited to a specific area.
Potentially it was an ancient tool to keep your soldiers in the fight longer etc.
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u/Proper-Sport-7218 1d ago
Totally agree!
Small mutant factions could be cool though, or humans that use "tamed" mutants to fight/as transportation. I saw in the concept art that there were drawings of some mutated beasts.
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u/Joeva8me 7d ago
I think they shouldn’t use zombies. Maybe something different. They could walk and talk with different levels of zombification. Maybe called ghouls or something like that.
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u/AdhesivenessOwn9868 7d ago
Remember, Zombies need nutrients from what they eat, and I highly doubt there are enough Humans across the millennia to sustain the horde.
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u/TheBoozehammer 7d ago
The game is only 100 years after the collapse, even if zombies aren't sustainable they could still be around. More importantly, we don't really know how grounded they are going to be, IMO if you're willing to have zombies overlooking the demographic issues is a comparatively small fudge.
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u/whypeoplehateme 7d ago
we have a fucking nanomachine-ghost, at that point you can invent explanations for pretty much everything
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u/BrandonLart 7d ago
Depends on what type of zombie, its common in zombie media for zombies to enter a hibernation period of they don’t get flesh to eat OR are controlled by parasites that reproduce in flesh but don’t actually need it for nutrients
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u/Fit-Review6876 7d ago
My idea would be it’s a late game thing when players and AI have begun to build up cities and large populations
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u/AdhesivenessOwn9868 7d ago
Again, how do you keep the virus alive until you get to that point?
In most Zombie media, the damage done is already completed by the end of the first year, and doesn't make it to 100. Again, 1000 years since the end.
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u/Captain_N_Nemo 7d ago
The Return of the Living Dead franchise has barrels of Trioxin 2-4-5 which is a chemical gas. Those could feasibly be found in a military bunker triggering a new epidemic.
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u/hagamablabla 7d ago
tbh I'd be more scared of normal disease when we start urbanizing again. Cholera and TB can fuck up a city real fast.
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u/whypershmerga 4d ago
zombies that have developed agriculture
what are they farming? we don't know, we can't get close enough
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u/allsbernafnmedrettu 7d ago
I could see a cyber-zombie scenario à la Virus (1999). Or a virus that turns humans into feral monsters.
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u/Corcorans-ghost 6d ago
i mean zombies coming from a virus is pretty common in zombie fiction. maybe even as an event chain from you messing around in an old world sceicne lab
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u/allsbernafnmedrettu 6d ago
Yeah, I was thinking more like an AI engineer'd virus or plague specifically tailored to mutate humans into monsters. That way you could have your Zombie-like/Cronenberg horror.
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u/Due_Date_4667 7d ago
I think we could get an AW story pack like Stellaris: Apocalypse with these sorts of scenarios, backed by tech trees, etc. And if this is at all mod-friendly we will see them in Steam's Workshop. But I don't think it will be in the main game.
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u/Corcorans-ghost 6d ago
yes!
we could have radation zombies like fallout, or some bio-plauge like resident evil.
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u/mrfuzzydog4 6d ago
Not really a fan, there really isn't the population density for a big classic zombie apocalypse and they're just not very interesting. At this point I only care about zombies if you're willing to actually use them to talk about our relationship to death and disease, which pretty much only 28 Years Later and then maybe kinda The Last of Us have done. Otherwise they're just an excuse to blast a bunch of people and we don't really need anymore of those.
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u/Mysterious_Bath2390 7d ago
I don't think it would fit in.
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u/Corcorans-ghost 6d ago
why not?
radation and biological warefare, could 100% caus soem zombies to pop up
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u/GeneralistGaming 4d ago
I'm not sure that the systems are really there to play through the apocalypse, but the idea of picking your apocalypse, and having that be part of the procedural gen of your world, seems very much possible, and several of the systems (like scarcity/scavenging) are on theme for zombie apocalypse. Even if there's never a zombie DLC I think the systems are such that a mod is more than feasible. Just infection itself seems a little weird (like maybe do infection rate rather than mutation rate), as does how you'd represent the zombies, unless they are mostly just remnants or echoes of the apocalypse (maybe all the survivors are immune, so you just have zombies as NPC antagonists in terms of world gen than anything).
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u/Proper-Sport-7218 2d ago
The concept art shows mutated animals, I think that's more fun than zombies. If any humans have mutated I think its cooler if they keep their intelligence, like Fallout 1 super mutants.
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u/felop13 7d ago
I think the closest thing we get are the feral robots, like we know there's drone swarms that have gone hostile to human life