Next Games, the company behind The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, recently announced an AR game based on the Walking Dead IP.
What’s interesting is that unlike Pokemon Go, the Walking Dead’s AR seems to be a key feature of gameplay, not an add-on, and it’s being marketed as such. Players will need to follow AR clues to find survivors and physically move around to find and combat zombies which may surround them. While that does seem highly engaging, I know I’ll have to worry about non-gamers reacting to AR weirdness in meat space, sort of like in Pokemon GO raiding situations in high-traffic areas.
In addition, comparing the demographics of The Walking Dead TV series to Pokemon GO player demographics reveals quite the overlap in terms of gender and age. Both have nearly equal appeal between the genders and primarily seem to attract people in their 20s and 30s. This means Niantic might actually have competition from another AR game based on a strong IP. It’ll be interesting to see how the community responds once The Walking Dead: Our World arrives.
Meanwhile, Disruptor Beam, creators of the Game of Thrones: Ascent game we covered long ago on Massively-of-old, just released strategy game The Walking Dead: March to War today, based more on the comic than the show, or so it seems from the art direction. It’s not so much an MMO as a mobile strategy game with asynchronous multiplayer, though to what extent, I wasn’t able to experience before realizing it’s perhaps far too similar to GoT:A’s “game of timers” playstyle.
Jason Booth of Asheron’s Call fame had previously noted that he’d not only been working on March to War but had been trying to get AC’s allegiance system worked in. We’ve reached out to Booth to see if he’d be willing to drop any hints on how successful he was at that, but the team’s blog post on communities doesn’t inspire any confidence that he was successful.
