Microsoft Is Aggressive About Online Games on the Xbox 360

We recently found out that one of the original creators of World of Warcraft was working on a zombie-based title, which would start as an action adventure experience only to then morph into a cooperative online game, and a lot of gamers were surprised to see that it would only be delivered on the Xbox Live Arcade service for the Xbox 360.

Jeff Strain, the ex World of Warcraft designer that now leads developer Undead Labs, says that the choice to go exclusive with Microsoft has not been made lightly.

Talking to Eurogamer about his project, Jeff Strain said that, “This was not a religious decision for us. We love the PlayStation 3, we love the Wii, we love the PC. What it came down to was that we found that Microsoft, as a publisher and custodians of the Xbox, are very excited and aggressive about the online future of the platform.”

He added that, “there's the very real aspect that we're here in Seattle, and they're over in Redmond. It's a 15 minute drive. When you're dealing with a publisher-developer relationship, you can't really discount how nice that makes things in terms of being able to get together and work through issues.”

Class3 is an enticing proposition even so early in the development process because of the two genres that it bounds together and because it is a video game that aims to evolve based on how players respond to its mechanics.

Initially players will inhabit the character of a survivor of a zombie apocalypse that needs to explore the world around him to find resources and other survivors, all while battling undead hordes that are after his juicy brain.

At some point, probably after a number of gamers form groups, the game will turn into something similar to an MMO, with groups scavenging resources and working together to gain supremacy over other survivors, exclusively on Xbox Live.