Doublebear Reveals Details About Dead State

Brian Mitsoda speaks about the new zombie RPG.

Brian Mitsoda, head of Doublebear, just released a cascade of information about the project that has until now been codenamed ZRPG. In an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, he revealed that the game would be called Dead State and would take place in Texas during a zombie apocalypse. As the leader of a shelter in the middle of nowhere, you must convince survivors to follow you, work together, and stay in line.

Mitsoda explained that Dead State will give players a lot of freedom. You can choose which survivors to recruit, but it's not possible to recruit them all. There will be a lot of survivors to choose from, each with a unique personality. This will give the game a feeling of randomness.

While you recruit, you also have to maintain the morale and loyalty of your followers. You can do this by convincing them to work with you or convincing them to fear you. There will also be a number of crisis events that will severely affect how the survivors view you.

Combat will be turn-based. During a fight, the player will give orders to the team, and their compliance will based on each character's loyalty and personality. "If your ally is scared of zombies and you tell him to run into a pack of zombies, he's most likely going to ignore the order or do it and possibly start panicking as the zombies start to mob him," says Mitsoda. Sometimes players will even have to let some followers die to save others.

The zombies of Dead State will be the standard dumb, slow, shambling corpses. Although some will be on fire.

A release date has not been confirmed, but Mitsoda said that it will not be in 2010. So far the only confirmed platform is the PC.