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The majority of you guys are Brits, so I figged you may have at least heard of it… I’m getting laughed at by friends because I’m giving this game the time of day…
It’s a slow-moving browser-and-text-based MMORPG (it’s more akin to a MUD, actually) set in a city where zombies have overrun the city. It’s almost like Gaia-Online… but has more purpose and is more game-based than getting cool anime-epaulettes for your avatar.
As a Survivor (human), you have to stave off being killed, or worse yet: bitten and infected, eventually becoming a zombie and switching sides. During your fight for survival and scavenging of items, certain classes have the ability to take the power back and revert zombies back to humans.
As a Zombie, you basically attack/kill stragglers and attempt to mass attacks against barricaded buildings filled with yummy humans. The amount and range of skills that you can buy to help in your evil cause are really awesome and fun.
You get about 50 clicks a day (Action Points – APs), at which your dude is stopped where he is, even if it’s in the middle of a street, alone and ready to get eaten by a lone zombie (or if you’re a Zombie – a Zombie Hunter, or swarmed mass of vengful Survivors). Just to warn, progress is slow. I chose one of the slowest-developing skill trees available (Medic); from the fan documentation, I’ll need to play for about a month (50 APs/day) to get enough XP to reach level 2 and buy a new skill.
Still, it has a certain impressive quiet subtlety in it’s implementation. While the game mechanics are simplistic, it has a lot of great open-ended optimization for characters, and is a departure from fast graphic-based real-time MMORPGs. When you sit down to play your half-hour/day of UD, you have to think before you act – is it time to scavenge for more medkits, should you try to XP on the city streets, are you close enough to a barricaded building filled with survivors to be able to make it before you get caught outdoors?
And of course, it has spawned an entire in-game politics, with rival factions, bounties on known PKers (Player Killers – Survivor players who cause havoc and kill other Survivors, for the Zombie team), and ZKers (same, but for Zombies), history of monumental battles in certain landmarked areas of the city, and active public/private-guild forums where attacks can be massed and communication can occur, since talking within the game isn’t real-time, and wastes precious APs.
It started in July, and now has over 100,000 users, the majority being from the UK. The city is made up of 100 (10×10) squares of neighbourhoods, each with 100 play areas (firestations, military complexes, hospitals, etc).
It’s good for someone like me, who has a short-attention span, likes cerebral games, and doesn’t have enough free time to sink into a real MMORPG. And I can play at work. 🙂 When I’m at home, I play real games. Ha.
Right now I’m holed up in St Eusebius’s Hospital in KetchlBank with about 20-30 other Survivors, occasionally making a foray into the streets to patch up lone Survivors caught outside.
There’s also a Wiki write-up (with noob strategy guides and a majority of stuff the site proper is missing) available at http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Main_Page
And finally, a map of the board here: http://www.jonathanfletcher.f2s.com/urb … apping.php
In fact, the mighty Bedlam made a thread for Urban Dead about a month back. Glad to see other people are playing it, though; I’m ordering around a firefighter (McKinney) and a necrotech feller (Soft Evans). Lessee if I can’t make the slow march in your direction. ^_^
I got round 2 making a character this time it was posted! 🙂
So far, Mr. Wibbler the fireman has chopped at a Zombie (hurrah!), run away , then failed to get into the building he was planning on hiding in. So I’m now in a Churchm staying very, very quiet… 😮
It seems good fun though. And at least I’m not grinding 2 a halt like I am in Phantasm…
I’ve got two characters running around with axes. They manage to ko a zombie a day. Makes for great xp.
However,, their servers have been seriously sucking for the past few days.
How is that medic working out for you, Shug? Beginning the game with First Aid seems like a singularly difficult path to take (as you suggest in your post). Kudos for bein’ a hardcore bastard. ^_^
Yeah, it’s slow… I may make it even slower by getting Diagnosis first, instead of Pistol skills.
Once I’m that far though, I figure I’ll tech up pretty fast… and once I do get Pistol skills, I’ll be laughing.
Still in KetchelBank’s hospital, healing on request. I may make a foray out into the streets to heal stragglers tonight.
im playing a zombie,
zombie hunters are too good, headshots cripple us, it means we cant get the xp we need to buy things like brain rot, ankle grab and lurching gate
also revivication is too good, (dispite brain rot) takes us ages to turn one of you into one of us but a moment the other way round, although to be fair if i do get revivified i beat fellow surviviors with a crowbar until im a zombie again.
must have choice for zombies = lurching gate, no more waisting those precious aps moving around.
neil aka grrh
Well, I think zombies are too good. The fact is, we can never kill you fully, so suck it up. You can kill us pretty easily in a round set of actions. I can get one zombie down in 40 aps, pretty easy, but then they can just stand back up again. There is harder to stay a human than it is to stay zombie.
[Two_Cents]
“Too good” nothin’. The game’d be a lot less fun if those zombies weren’t so incredibly dangerous. 😉
… Wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying to knock ’em flat, either.
[/Two_Cents]
As for Revivification, those syringes are hard to find; we have to waste an arseload of AP to get ’em. All a zombie’s got to do to get over the effects is find the nearest building and jump out a window — particularly undaunting now with Ankle Grab reducing the AP cost of standing up to 1. Hell, zombies can even heal themselves simply by attacking, them’s pretty sexy skills.
mchvlichldprdgy wrote:Well, I think zombies are too good. The fact is, we can never kill you fully, so suck it up. You can kill us pretty easily in a round set of actions. I can get one zombie down in 40 aps, pretty easy, but then they can just stand back up again. There is harder to stay a human than it is to stay zombie.On average it takes 44 Aps for me to take down a human.
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