When it was announced that Activision was working on a first-person action game based on hit TV show The Walking Dead, many assumed it would be an all-out zombie slaying FPS. That's not the case, but developer Terminal Reality understands why people jumped to the wrong conclusion.
"I can understand how that happened," Glenn Gamble, the studios art and systems designer, told VG247. "You have Activision who is well known for Call of Duty, and then you hear 'Oh my God, a first-person Walking Dead game'." It turns out that the game will be a more methodical and terrifying experience. "We really do want to challenge the traditional undead game," Gamble said. "If you notice a lot of undead games throw a lot of zombies at you."
That won't happen in Survival Instinct, which has used the TV show to balance how difficult the undead "Walkers" will be to defeat. Just three of the shambling flesh-munchers will challenge novice players, while even the developers admit to struggling to handle six or more at a time.
So what of that FPS viewpoint? "One of the reasons we went first-person with this game is with a first-person camera you can't look around the next corner in front of you," Gamble explained. "So that helped create that tension you see in classic movies and in The Walking Dead show, especially in the prison when they're running through the hallways, and they don't know if there's no Walkers, one Walker or twenty down the next hallway until they actually get there."
Terminal Reality has good form where video game adaptations are concerned, as the studio developed the official Ghostbusters game which reunited Bill Murray with his former co-stars.
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is out on March 29th for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U and PC.