On April 29th 2012, Sandswept studios announced their KickStarter project, The Dead Linger was successfully funded and would go into full steam development. I personally was one of those kickstarters as I liked the idea they had.
Sandswept promised a planet size randomly generated world where all buildings could be explored. They claimed you could "Slay the undead hordes with WHATEVER you want." Crafting new weapons from trash around the town. Interact and explore EVERY item, weapon, object and building you see. It was to be the zombie survival game of all time. Their slogon was "We are bringing the zombie era back from the dead..." or something like that. Here's some of the concept art they provided.
Looks damn awesome right?
So finally the day came when they released a playable alpha. We were all so excited to play. My friends and I logged in for the first time and were greeted with a world with trees and houses. I could see zombies, I could pick up items. Ok there wasn't many but it's alpha lots more to come. After playing for a little while I came to the realise this was shit.
I could shoot a zombie in the distance from the hip and kill it. I didn't need to reload so I had unlimited ammo. Zombies were very predictable and the random house designs kept fucking up. So my conclusion was they released alpha too early. And I do still stand by that.
I watched development and logged in with each new build to check out the new stuff. The game started to get scary and started getting hard. Things were picking up. But things moved slow very slow. They promised new builds every fortnight, which they never kept to. They have reprogrammed every aspect of the game multiple times. They even moved the game engine from Orge to Unity. A process which took a long time and pissed off a lot of their follows. However their decision was right. Things picked up and got better quicker.
Recently they released a devblog announcing they are scrapping the planetsize random world to a set world. Ok the towns and buildings will change but its all contained in a small area. I do understand the change but they have taken away a MASSIVE part of why I was interested.
So it’s still randomized every time I play it?
Yes and no. This is a really important part, so read carefully.
In Pepper Valley, the terrain, interstates, roads, lakes, rivers, and some of the environment will be static, meaning it won’t change, but large segments of the world, such as a town, city, island, neighborhood, or even a specific building lot, will be swapped out for other layouts each time you generate a new world.
The other thing that annoyed me in their post is this...
We are switching The Dead Linger to the insanely fast and insanely powerful Unreal Engine 4 .
Yet another engine change. Will this game ever come to the completion it hoped to be.
I have recently heard of a game called 7 Days to Die. This game seems to support most of what The Dead Linger have promised and more. They have been in development for I believe a year and by the looks of things have passed The Dead Linger.
I do believe that one day The Dead Linger will finish their game and it will be a good game. But I also believe many games will come in that time and The Dead Linger will no longer be a new style of game. It will be seen as another zombie survival.
Don't get me wrong, I would not be able to make a game like it. Its just all the time taken in development, I would have expected them to be a lot further along.
The Dead Linger was my first experience of KickStarter and to be honest, I don't think I would be comfortable Kickstarting another project.
Linger On Survivors ;)
SighFye
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