After a year of Open Beta, the decision has been made to close browser-based zombie survival strategy game World of the Living Dead this afternoon. They are also proud to announce that a completely rebuilt version of the game, WotLD: Resurrection, will launch later this summer.
After over two years of development, the developers came to the conclusion that the game in its current shape, form and infrastructure needed a drastic redesign. Positive early press from the games media revealed that WotLD - and its Google Maps-based gameplay - was unable to cope with large influxes of players generated by the coverage. This led to a realisation by the developers that they would have to go back to the drawing board, if they were ever to bring their vision of a zombie survival strategy game to life.
Speaking of the shutdown, co-Founder Dave Barton said, "We ripped out its guts but not its brains. World of the Living Dead is still a challenging, hardcore game for the smart zombie game strategist." The other co-Founder, Kulpreet Singh said, "We've made substantial design changes - restructuring the universe into grids, extracting information from a rich real-world data set and making these grids and data work together to provide a much more scalable game."
With the new game ready to launch later this summer, the developers want to say a big thank you to the core community who have been playing the game for the past year and inform them that they will be receiving special in-game gifts when the new game launches. Any unspent NECRA Credits will also be transferred across to their new accounts and a Closed Beta test for a limited number of existing users will begin in July.
During the downtime, the developers will be releasing information about their reasoning behind closing the server on the official blog, as well as details about all-new and improved features for the new game. This will include information about the migration from Google Maps to Open Street Maps, the new grid-based movement system and big changes to z-density movement. The series of blog posts will also look in detail at topics such as Scavenging, Survivors, Hunger and Thirst, Safehouses, Repairs and Modifications, and Research.
