Urban Strife - Interview

TurnBasedLovers have interviewed the developers of Urban Strife, which is a turn based RPG set during a zombie apocalypse.

7) Looking at the screenshots, it's almost impossible not to notice a resemblance to some cornerstone of the past like Jagged Alliance and the X-Com series. Besides these ones, are there other sources of inspiration?

We are die-hard fans of Jagged Alliance, Fallout, Wasteland, X-Com (and XCOM) with hundreds of hours sunk into these games. Some of us have been involved with these communities, as regular users, for years and years and it is normal that you would see these games being reflected in USG. But we're equally enjoying a lot of other flavors of gaming, from Dead State Reanimated to State of Decay, from Commandos Behind Enemy Lines to Shadow Tactics and from This War of Mine to The Long Dark to mention just a few. We're suckers for strategy, apocalypse, and survival and we're proud to admit it. On the other hand, our professional background has been built working on Ubisoft AAA games such as Assassin's Creed and Tom Clancy titles and thus, willing or not, there's bound to be an influence from there too.



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More information.

Did the article mention a steam release ETA?

Not completely:

Episode 1 should be ready later this year

Nice to see that the game isn't dead.

I spent too many hours on Dead State and Jagged Alliance over the years this looks like it ticks the fun factor boxes of those games so I will keep an eye out for this on release.

Yep to me It looks like Dead State crossed with Jagged Alliance. To bad they are going with the episodic formula. So that means the complete game is years off.

I'm another one that might likely check this one out once the entire product is available. The episode model doesn't work for me.

Do developers think that making yet another zombie apocalypse game will help their sales, or do they just lack the imagination to come up with a different scenario?

Nope I never get tired of zombie apocalypse games. The problem is there aren't to many good zombie apocalypse RPG/Hybrid games. Most are open world action games.

Originally Posted by rjshae
Do developers think that making yet another zombie apocalypse game will help their sales, or do they just lack the imagination to come up with a different scenario?

Yeah, I do find a dearth of imagination and personality in many games, as they get churned out these days. Generic scenario #23 - that'll do.

I could suffer through the zombies, if they actually deliver on ballistics for every pellet of your buckshot. I'm such a sucker for crap like that. But I can't abide the episodes. I hope they cross the finish line of a finished game.

Originally Posted by rjshae
Do developers think that making yet another zombie apocalypse game will help their sales, or do they just lack the imagination to come up with a different scenario?

Well, no one's done it right yet (at least in tb form), so there's that.

Originally Posted by screeg
Well, no one's done it right yet (at least in tb form), so there's that.

Yub, there was Dead State which even in it's final form is very rough and has lots of mechanics which don't work with each other.
But other than that…

Is it to much to ask for a big budget zombie RPG like Witcher III or Odyssey.? Instead we get open world action games. I would literally fund that game if I had the money.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Nope I never get tired of zombie apocalypse games. The problem is there aren't to many good zombie apocalypse RPG/Hybrid games. Most are open world action games.

Same. There're more magic-fantasy games than there are zombie games and I still love those. I just ignore the ones that don't do it well enough.

I am following them on twitter.
https://twitter.com/UrbanStrifeGame

Just to clear a bit of misconception here about the "episodes" naming convention.

When we came up with the Urban Strife story, we imagined it as an entire saga, each following the main character from a different perspective and in a whole new setting. Like XCOM 1, XCOM 2 and future XCOM 3 are still XCOM, but 3 different games, our episodes are different from each other. What is maybe different from a mainstream game is that we can't afford to make "episode 1" bad, cause then there will be no 2 or 3.

Bottom line, the "episode 1-2-3" thing is a naming convention. If it becomes too much of an issue we might even scrap the thing and make an effort to come up with a cool title like "USG Boyz & Girlz With Gunz Kill Zombiez". Catchy, eh?