Bristol Council Zombie Preparedness Plan
Following the dismal response from Leicester City Council on how a zombie attack would be dealt with, Bristol released a top secret document which contains a detailed “Contingency Plan For Handling Zombie Outbreaks in Bristol”.
The alert states are:
Ambient zombie level – business as usual, but be on the lookout fortell-tale signsHigh-risk areas are designated and “correct zombie killing procedures are outlined:
Enhanced activity level – confirmed zombie attacks on the populus
Major outbreak – zombie infection level in excess of 1%, multiplesightings across the city
Zombie pandemic level – concentrated outbreak, with infection levelsover 30%
1 – Fully disconnect the brain-stem from the body through either blunt force or full head removalThe standard-issue equipment for staff of “cuffs, stun guns, protection suits” does seem under-powered when compared to the huge range of firearms and weapons available to survivors in World of the Living Dead but strict firearms laws in the United Kingdom may have something to do with this.
2 – Avoid all unprotected contact.
3 – Zombies are extremely aggressive. Do not approach unless adequately armed.
It’s encouraging to see that at least some parts of Britain would be prepared for the zombocalypse.
July 8 Update
Expansion
We’re making a change to how registration works today. We’ve consistently seen problems with new players supplying invalid email addresses, adding spaces to the end of the beta key or just losing interest when it takes time to receive the key.
WotLD is still in closed beta but we’re removing the beta key requirement so that, at the moment, anyone can sign up and start playing immediately. We need more players to test the world and this seems like the best way to do it. As most of you will confirm, the zombocalypse is currently a lonely place.
Getting more players will help us troubleshoot and improve areas which aren’t getting much attention at the moment, such as PvP and faction features.
The beta key invitation system has been changed to a straightforward invite a friend system, and I’m archiving the beta key invitation thread on the forum. Feel free to get your friends involved.
You can now log in by clicking the green login button on the top right.
Item deterioration
Thanks for all your help with testing items over the last few weeks. We finally tracked down a rounding error which was having a massive effect on how rapidly items would get damaged. It was a tough one to find. In itself it was a tiny thing but when applied to thousands of steps, you would have seen a noticeable effect.
Firearms, weapons and armor should now correctly see damage based on the surrounding z-density. The condition of the item also has a significant effect, so be careful when relying on fair or poor items. Armor will continue to be damaged if an injury gets through to your survivor, which means that you still need to consider fear and fatigue, along with all other factors, when pushing squads beyond their limits.
July 6 Update
This update took a while to get out as it includes a big new feature which we wanted to get right. Armor!
Armor
Armor provides protection from bites, general injuries and also against PvP combat. Survivors can now be protected in four areas: head, torso, legs and arms.
Each type of armor has different strengths against different types of attack. A football helmet might be great at stopping a zed from biting off your face, but won’t do much to stop a round to the back of the head. A kevlar combat helmet will do the opposite, exposing the face but giving better protection in combat versus armed survivors.
You can scavenge armor at various locations around the city. To incorporate the new items, we’ve also changed the balance of the existing items, so you may see some changes in what you find.
Armor takes damage as your characters move through z-density, and also if your survivor is injured from PvZ or PvP, as this reflects the fact that the damage was absorbed by the armor but failed to protect the character. The protection offered decreases as it becomes damaged. We will be adding a skill soon to prevent damage to armor.
You can equip armor from the inventory management page, where you can drag and drop specific types of armor to slots for each character. A helmet can only be placed in “Head Armor”, a vest in “Torso Armor”, while the arms and legs also have their own slots. Armor items show up as dark blue.
Good luck with the new armor and we look forward to hearing your stories from the field!
Item damage
Damage to items has been significantly changed so as to take into account z-density. Your items should now last much longer if you only expose them to lower z-d areas.
Easter Egg Prizes
We delayed the egg rewards partly because we wanted to give out armor as prizes, so Easter Egg rewards are finally being delivered around Los Angeles County.
Each type of egg will create a named cache (e.g. Blood Egg Cache) which will contain the items awarded for the threshold of eggs you collected. The thresholds are 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, 150, and so on. If you have eggs over a threshold, you will receive the items from the that and all previous thresholds, so some people will be collecting a lot of items! Eggs will disappear from the game.
Premium membership
Based on some extensive and appreciated feedback from players, we have made some changes to the way the 30 day premium membership works.
Premium membership has been divided into three levels: NECRA Task Force, SCUGS Elite, and SCUGS Lite.
Everyone currently with active SCUGS Elite membership will receive all the great new benefits of SCUGS Elite, including free NC, a discount on buying NC, boost to earning SP and even a special bug-out bag, character mission and free meds!
Each level is discounted to half price for closed beta and we will continue to add features to all three levels as we develop the game.
NC item catalog
Firearms, melee weapons, armor and ammo can now be bought for NC. Items will use the new NECRA delivery system. Bug-out bags and items can be delivered directly to a selected character. The new range of bug-out bags are filled with items at a massive discount and aimed at rapidly getting a survivor equipped for the zombocalypse.
Bugfixes
- The message flashes when your survivors are too fatigued to scavenge.
- Grave Digger changed from 50 items looted to 50 bodies looted.
- Bookmarked locations do not disappear on moving squads.
- Cancel button on create marker infowindow works now.
- Survivor info in safehouses fixed.
- Changes to achievement categories
- Fix for errors with Halligan Bars
NECRA operative comms active
Our recent newsletter highlighted the new operative comms feature, along with silenced weapons (crossbows!) and SCUGS Elite (which will keep improving). The chat interface has been especially useful for new players trying to get into the game. WotLD can be complex, unforgiving and brutal but, hey, it is the zombocalypse! Communicate with your fellow operatives to get the hang of things, but watch out, some of them may be hunting you…
Beta testing has begun!
We’ve finally started beta testing World of the Living Dead. It’s taken us a bit longer than we hoped, but the game is coming close to our original vision and focuses on survival against a backdrop of the ever-present zombie threat.
Over 2000 people signed up for the beta test so we’re slowly inviting players in batches. We want to test the core gameplay and make sure that it works before opening up the beta.
We’ll post screenshots and other details over time, but if you’re interested in the game you can check out our new forum. The beta forum is closed unless you’ve received a beta key, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the public forum.
Hope to see you all in the World of the Living Dead soon!
“ZOMBIES FOR THE REST OF TIME”
Great to see such a quick response from the Zombie Research Society to the LA Weekly piece on the zombie zeitgeist. Andrew Morisson’s advice on considering a zombie escape plan:
One thing that has really become clear through the Zombie Research Society’s work is that any plan should be very flexible. Declaring that you’re going to run to the nearest gun store and stock up when the Zombies come is all fine and good, but in reality there is no telling when the outbreak will happen, and where you’ll be when it does. So my plan is general, and involves a path to accomplish very clear objectives: Clean Water, Safe Shelter, and Sustainable Food.The question of how “interest in zombies seems to be cyclical” came up, which was also under discussion this week over on the Giant Bombcast with Treyarch developer Josh Olin. The concern there was whether “zombie saturation” had been attained, at least in the world of games. Kotaku quotes his response:
Out of fear of showing my zombie nerd-ism I will contend that zombies aren’t saturated at all. I could play zombies for the rest of time.io9 had a chart last year which mapped a “connection between zombie movies and social unrest”. Their thesis was that:
… even correcting for the fact that there are more movies being made today, you can see that there are distinctive spikes in zombie popularity - and they always seem to fall slightly after a huge political or social event has caused mass fear, chaos, or suffering.The ZRS feels the same way as Olin:
It does seem to be somewhat cyclical, but I think only from an entertainment / pop culture perspective. There is also a surprisingly large group of people out there who have a dedicated interest in Zombies that doesn’t change with the trends.Sounds good to us, but… if we have zombies in our future, does that mean we will live in interesting times?
Blog moved
Blog is at http://worldofthelivingdead.com/blog now. Old posts getting moved.
World of the Living Dead blog
Decided that a blog would be a good idea. Could take some time before World of the Living Dead becomes anything real, so for now I’ll just use this blog to post about anything apocalyptic or zombie-related that comes to mind.
