14 DAY TRIAL // Undead Labs, as the developer, and Microsoft Game Studios, as the publisher, have announced that they are working on a new zombie-based Xbox Live Arcade game, which has the codename Class3 and will start off as a sort of open-world adventure with a lot of action elements, whose ultimate aim is to get enough players to get the MMO experience going.
Class3 will cast each player as one of the humans that have managed to survive the early stages of a world wide zombie uprising, looking for other humans to band with and work together in order to get the resources to survive and fight off increasing numbers of undead.
Jeff Strain, who is best known as being one of the people to have originally worked on the MMO World of Warcraft, says that the Class3 experience will be more about working together to survive than about only battling waves of zombies, like players can do in Left 4 Dead from Valve or in Dead Rising from Capcom.
As survivor groups get together and create actual bases in the world Undead Labs aims to shift the experience towards an online collaborative game, with the word MMO actually absent from their initial announcement.
The initial open-world action adventure release for Class3, which will presumably get a more attractive name as development progresses, is not planned for 2011 and much of the development process will be aimed at creating the infrastructure that will allow for the game to quickly go into the online game phase when needed.
Strain talked to Eurogamer about his new project, saying, “This is not going to be a game about running through the streets shooting zombies in the head. There's going to plenty of that, just because that's fun, but that's not enough for us. The key for us is to capture that zombie survival aspect of the world and really answer that question 'What would I do?'”