Urban Dead
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| Urban Dead | |
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| Developer(s) | Kevan Davis |
| Designer(s) | Kevan Davis |
| Release date(s) | July 3, 2005 |
| Genre(s) | Survival horror MMORPG |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
| Platform(s) | Web browser |
Urban Dead is an HTML/text-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game created by Kevan Davis. Set in a quarantined region of the fictional city of Malton, it deals with the immediate aftermath of a zombie outbreak. Players enter the game either as a human survivor or a zombie, each with different abilities and limitations. Humans become zombies when they are killed, while zombies can be "revivified" with appropriate technology, becoming human. There are no non-player characters in the game: all humans and zombies are controlled by players.
The game has become popular with casual gamers due to its "action point" mechanic (limiting the amount of actions a character can take in a single day of real time), straightforward gameplay, the innovative lack of NPCs, and the fact that it is free.
Urban Dead went live in July 2005, and had over 800,000 registered players by March 2007, of which over 40,000 remain active. The game is in open beta, with new features being added every few weeks.
For other examples of this type of game, see the list of browser games.
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[edit] Character classes
New players begin the game as one of three human classes (Military, Science, and Civilian) or as a Zombie, an animated corpse of indeterminate provenance. Each side in the human-zombie struggle has its own advantages. Humans move twice as fast as low-level zombies. They are also able to employ various weapons and tools, communicate with each other in-game via speech, radio broadcasting, and text messaging, and barricade building entrances, which help keep the swarms of zombies out. Zombies, while initially slow-moving and able to inflict less damage per attack upon their victims, are able to easily spring back to action when killed, making them effectively immortal.
It is possible to switch sides in the conflict: a human character that is killed will rise up as a zombie, and zombie characters may be re-animated as living humans by a survivor who has the relevant skill and item. It is not uncommon for a human player to be a "zombie spy," and report human whereabouts and fortifications to zombie players, or to injure or kill other human players or sabotage other humans efforts by destroying generators or needlessly attacking barricades. Humans who attack other humans are known as PKers, those who destroy generators are referred to as GKers and those who attack Radios are known as RKers.
The most recent update was added on the second of February, giving zombies the ability to gain EXP from attacking barricades and machines and ransacking buildings.
[edit] Gameplay
Characters receive a steady trickle of "Action Points" (APs), which are used up any time they move, fight, or undertake any other sort of activity. They receive one AP every half-hour, up to a maximum of fifty points. When a character's AP total drops to or below zero, that character is unable to do anything until their total AP is positive again. A further limit on character activity is the IP limit. A single IP is only permitted 160 server hits in a day before all character activity is suspended until the once-daily rollover. Players are notified when they have only 10 IP hits remaining, so that they can get their character to a safe location. Should a human be so unlucky as to run out of AP or IP hits while in an unsecured area, he or she is at great risk of attack by zombies while vulnerable. This has a major impact on gameplay, as players must make sure that their human characters are in a safe place before logging out, encouraging quick raids from fortified safe houses. The use of Action Points as a realtime limit on character actions is similar to the systems of several other freeware MMORPGs, including Kingdom of Loathing and Shartak, the latter being designed after Urban Dead.
As players damage their opponents or perform certain other actions, their experience points increase. While humans can also gain experience from healing other players and from certain other specific actions, zombies can only gain experience from attacking humans, other zombies, or barricades. Experience points can be exchanged at any time for new skills. Only humans can buy human skills, and only zombies can buy zombie skills; although skills of one type are not lost if the character dies or is revived, most human skills cannot be used by zombies, and vice versa. Human characters can effectively learn the skills of all human classes, not just the class they begin with, though scientist characters must pay more to learn military skills, and vice versa.
Gameplay tends to revolve around human characters making raids on the zombies from various safe houses, while the zombies scour the streets looking for victims, occasionally mobbing together in "hordes" to attack a safe house. These safe houses tend to be located in or near buildings where useful items are easily searched for, such as shopping malls, police stations, hospitals, and the laboratories of the zombie-related NecroTech corporation (similar to the Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil franchise). Organized human groups will sometimes try to take over key suburbs and buildings, in a few cases even defending them from other human characters via player killing. A number of human bounty hunters spend the majority of their time in the game hunting down reported player-killers. Support characters tend to spend their time barricading safe houses and searching for and using first aid kits and the revivification syringes that can return most zombie characters to life.
Zombie characters have very limited powers of speech, and, until mastering a certain skill, move more slowly than human characters. While zombies tend to form hordes spontaneously by following one another's feeding groans (a skill which enables zombie players to emit a noise audible to other players within up to six blocks when there are humans present), several large groups are coordinated through out-of-game forums. An example of this is the "Mall Tour '06," in which several hundred zombies converged upon the malls of Malton, overrunning most of them quickly.
Some players and groups on both sides have also set their own distinct goals, many of which are set for purely role-playing purposes.
Unlike many MMORPGs, Urban Dead effectively has no economy. Human characters can loot abandoned buildings for supplies, but cannot trade, sell, or give them to other players.
[edit] Related sites
The site includes the extensive and well-populated Urban Dead Wiki, containing information on all the game's items, skills and areas, as well as pages for player groups, historic game events, and an extensive suggestions system. The wiki also includes browser expansions and a fan-written backstory of the game.
In 2006, several browser games emerged attempting to emulate the success of Urban Dead, duplicating its grid exploration and text interface, and copying a large number of game elements. Notable examples are Shartak and Nexus War.
