Hey, all, I’ve seen a lot of chatter about what everyone is hoping to see with a map. We’re finally far enough along that I can safely tell you: We are launching with THREE maps. Each roughly the size of the original. You should expect to see slightly different environments, definitely different landmarks and locations, different layouts lending themselves to different strategies, unique home sites, and even different mission types.
Why’d we do it that way? Well, primarily, because it makes the game more fun. It really feels like you’re moving from one small town to another, and creates a tremendous sense of immersion. And perhaps counter-intuitively, it makes the world feel even bigger. You know how on one map (even one three times the size as the original game’s) the longer you play, the more you start feeling deju vu with every mission? That’s less of an issue with separate maps. And see above about strategies and missions. Oh, and one more detail – the multiple map set up makes it easy to expand the world down the line, if you know what I mean.
Speaking of specifics, I KNOW you all are going to ask “but what can we take with us between maps?” About half of you skipped the previous paragraph just to see if I was going to tell you. Foge (for new survivors, that’s Richard Foge, the Design Director here at the Lab) says that the intent is for us to be able to take all of our people, and everything in our supply lockers and rucks. We’ll have all the vehicles parked in our home site parking spaces, along with whatever’s stored in the trunks. We’re also going to get at least a partial refund on what we sunk into building our facilities. That’s the intention, anyway. As always, specifics may change a bit as we get deeper into testing, so cover me later if I’ve got to make edits, will you?
Everything here is straight from the designer’s mouth, and if I could say more, I would have – but feel free to hit the Undead Lab forum to throw in questions for later on when we can talk more freely. We now return to our fantasy planning fun.
-Sanya Weathers
Undead Labs Community Director
