My RPG idea, revisited.

About a year ago, I spent a little time playing a browser based MMORPG called the Urban Dead. The premise was this: Something right out of a George Romero film happened in a big city, and most of the population was turned into zombies. The city was completely sealed off from the rest of the world by the government -- with zombies and survivors alike being trapped inside.

The gameplay was all text based, of course, given that it's all played within an internet browser.

"You shoot at the zombie and miss."
"The zombie bites you. You lose 10 health."

So while this game isn't exactly at the height of technology, the whole premise is what made me play it, and enjoy it for a while -- the idea of an MMORPG based on the premise of trying to survive in a city full of zombies. There are no MMORPG computer games out there with that premise.

Now, there *was* such a game in developement: City of the Dead, based on the George Romero universe. But, it's since been scrapped and the company developing it went out of business.

I'm hoping that the idea will be developed by someone else, however, because it's most definitely a game I would love to play. I can see two different ways of going about it:

The first would be to use the mechanics used in the Urban Dead: There are no NPC or computer controlled players. Every zombie and every survivor in the game is a real person playing that character.

The other would be that the undead was a completely computer controlled force, and all the survivors were real players. That's boring. I'd wanna play a zombie, at least for a while.

The one main idea in Urban Dead that I liked was how they handled death. You could be killed in the game, but then you came back as a zombie. Likewise, the "scientist" class in the game could cure zombies and turn them back into humans by injecting their brain with a serum. That added a very unique twist to the gameplay. This was further complicated by zombies who were "brain dead" and couldn't be cured, and you didn't know this until you tried to cure them and it failed (thus wasting a shot of your precious serum). You were uncurable if you decided to play a zombie from the start, rather than becoming one by dying in the game.

The possibilities for creating a full-fledged video game with this premise are actually really exciting. It really surprises me that nothing like this yet exists. But, when you look at the quality of MMORPG video games out there, two genres utterly dominate the market: Fantasy and Science-Fiction. Survival Horror is way under the radar.

There are a lot of things that I imagine would be very cool to experience in a game like this:

-- I picture walking down the streets of a deserted city, not knowing if a zombie player is waiting around the next corner. I think the game would always be suspenseful and interesting.

-- Sleep would be an interesting topic, and the idea of safety. Where would your character sleep? Could he be attacked while you're not in the game? Could you log-on and be dead because while you were at work a bunch of zombies broke into your hiding spot?

-- I think it would be quite easy to have unique skill sets for different classes. Things are typically broken in a zombie apocalypse, so there could be a Repair class. A Doctor class, of course, to heal the wounded. Soldier or Police for weapon handling. How about a class that excels at barricading buildings to keep out zombies, or build traps for them? How about a Looter, who excels and sneaking through the city to the nearest Ammunition or Hardware store for supplies? As for zombies, there could be classes that excel at finding ways into buildings, or ones that move very fast but have fewer hitpoints. You could even split up zombies that bite to kill, and ones that bite to turn others into zombies.

-- The image that stands out in my head most of all, however, is being a player in the game, trapped in a building, and hearing a zombie pounding on the door trying to get inside. And knowing that that zombie is a real player and all the things that typically fool a computer controlled monster aren't going to save you.