The apocalypse is coming, and it’s just about the right size to fit snuggly in your pocket. The popular TV series, The Walking Dead, is creating an augmented reality game similar to Pokemon Go, but you won’t be chasing after Charmanders and Pikachus. The Walking Dead: Our World will bring zombies into our everyday environment, viewing the apocalypse through smart phones and battling walkers.
The new augmented reality game is being created by the Finnish studio Next Games, the same developers for the popular turn-based strategy, mobile game, The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, which has been downloaded more than 16 million times.
Next Games offers a “first-of-its-kind location based augmented reality mobile game… [that will allow you to] fight walkers on the streets, in the park, on your sofa; wherever and whenever you feel like it.”
“The fans love how the show encourages you to ask, ‘What would I do in a zombie apocalypse?’ and in this game we aim to let players explore this hypothetical in a way they’ve never experienced before,” said Next CEO Teemu Huuhtanen. “AR enables players to live through the fight for survival in a whole new way in their familiar surroundings.”
A teaser trailer was released on August 29th which previews how the game would work: gamers walk around with their phones in hand, accumulating weapons they stumble upon, such as guns, grenades, and even Michonne’s katana, to fight off walkers. Players encounter the walkers in everyday locations, such as retirement homes, convenience stores, and hospitals.
However, the odd thing about the trailer is that it did not feature any depiction of gameplay, leaving it a bit of a mystery how players will actually kill any of the walkers they find. The trailer itself acted more as a preview of the experience of the game instead of sharing specific details.
AMC states that the game “will enable players to fully immerse themselves into the action of the hit TV show by blending digital objects, such as characters and other game elements, with the players’ own environment.” Some of the characters that will be present in the game include Rick, Daryl, and Michonne, who will help fight off the undead alongside gamers.
Apple also shared the AR game with the website The Verge, to showcase its new lineup of AR apps and games. The Verge reported that Next Games will be using Apple’s ARKit, which has a feature called ARPointCloud “that lets developers hide objects in an AR environment and reveal them at a certain point in the experience.” With this new feature, the objects left to be found by players, mainly weapons used for fighting off walkers, would be stowed within the world rather than simply floating in the space.
Since The Walking Dead: Our World will be modeled off of Pokemon Go, players are hoping that by the time of release that the game will have corrected some of the flaws that plagued Pokemon Go. While Pokemon Go was a huge success within the first year of its release, it never ended up spurring any copycat AR games as was expected. The Walking Dead: Our World is the only AR game similar to Pokemon Go that already appears to be a more captivating experience than Pokemon Go, which had many technical problems and had trouble with the expansion of the main game loop.
The Walking Dead: Our World currently does not have a release date, but Next Games stated that the app is coming “soon.” The mobile game will be available for iOS and Android after its launch. Updates and news about the upcoming video game can be found on the Next Games blog.
Sources:
https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/08/the-walking-dead-to-get-augmented-reality-videogame/
