What would you want to see in a Zombie MMO?

Jeff Strain announces the creation of Undead Labs and his intention to develop a zombie-themed MMO. MM-arvellous, just what we need – another MMO company. Any zombie game announcement catches the zeitgeist with the release of L4D2, but will a zombie MMO really work? Well, the concept has certainly crossed our minds at PCF towers as we’ve tried vainly to beat each other to death with latex arms and legs.

The first thing they need to do is drop the achingly stretching acronym MMOZ - Massively Multiplayer Online Zombie Game. That’s MMOZG surely? Maybe they thought that sounded too derogatory, too much like MMORPG shorthand for 'I’m abusing you, but you’re such a nOOb you don’t understand me', parlance?

Personally, I’ve played enough bad MMOs to recognise that laying waste to shambling hordes of zombies because they want to eat you, makes a heck of a lot more sense than killing, say 50 gnarly gnolls* because some bloke you’ve never met before – with a exclamation mark above his head – needs you to do it. It doesn't even matter that you’re wearing battle-etched platemail, have the title Lord of the Known (and Unknown) Planes and can play ‘can I blend it’ with his head using your trusty blade, which is the length of a plank of wood.

I’d like to think that we should expect something more than a standard MMORPG, where all the mobs are just zombies from some one like Jeff Strain, though. After all, this is the Jeff Strain, former lead programmer of the World of Warcraft (PC) – before anyone expected it to pull in enough cash to buy a country and turn it into WoWland– who worked on StarCraft (PC), Diablo (PC) and Warcraft III (PC). And, the same Jeff, one of the trinity that founded ArenaNet, who programmed and exec produced Guild Wars (PC).

So, If I had five minutes to speculate about what could make a great zombie MMO, I'd probably want a few of these and a few others besides:

One vs Many – One thing Tabula Rasa did well was the sense of being able to take on many opponents at once and have a proper ruck. Too many MMOs force the practice of skirting the invisible trigger line around groups of mobs, pulling strays away to pummel – so,so dull. Why not have players wading in with household items? Using the zombies against each other with throws or lassos?

Survival as the objective - The game’s biggest rewards should be for survival, not just for how many hundreds of zombies that have been dispatched. “Every time I see a good zombie movie with friends, we spend days debating our strategies for surviving the zombie apocalypse,” said Strain in the announcement. Yes, that sounds more like it! Even if it was instanced grouping, being able to intelligently figure out the possible routes out would be far more rewarding than, hey you killed a lot of zombies have flamethrower… okay, that’d be nice too.

Monster play – LotRO and L4D have exposed how much fresh gameplay can be had from being able to control fugly beasts. There should, at least, be the chance for players to take on the mantle of zombiness and hinder the progress of players through defined areas. It’d be like sanctioned griefing, but adding that touch of challenge, which is often missing from the limited mob AI in MMORPGs.

The bad news is that right now this game is "for consoles". You’d think this was a project that ought to be, at least, on the PC with this man's wealth of MMO/RPG heritage and PC development experience. Here’s hoping a smart port appears for the PC. Undead Labs will be developing the Xbox 360 version on PC anyway, so why not?

Okay, so what would you want to see in a Zombie MMO?

*(Note: They always have to have an adjective. It’s never 'gnoll', 'dog', 'cat' or 'elf'. It has to be 'gnarly, wizened gnoll', 'frolicking dog, 'sarcastic cat' or, of course, 'dead, but still very smug elf').