A new development video for The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners highlights a big new part of the game that I really didn’t expect to see, survival. I thought that this game would be a PSVR arcade outing in the world of The Walking Dead, giving players a world to explore and weapons to find, but once they died they had to start over. This isn’t the case, in fact it looks like Saints & Sinners is going to be much more involved that I first thought, and I couldn’t be happier to be wrong about it. Check out the video below, and read on for more details.
Survival VR
In the world of The Walking Dead you have zombies, but they’re the traditional kind. This means that they’re pretty slow, and not a real threat unless they take you by surprise, or there are a lot of them. With that said, if they get to you, they can injure you, and that sort of thing needs looking at quickly. In Saints & Sinners players will be using bandages to heal themselves, keeping on top of their health, but they also need to manage their stamina.
Stamina depletes over time, and needs to be recovered by resting between fighting, running, and exploring. If your hunger and water levels drop too low though, your stamina won’t recover, which might be the difference between you surviving an encounter, or not. Players need to find food and keep on top of these needs the character has, otherwise they’re going to find themselves caught out by a herd of walkers.
Surviving The World
There are other survivors for players to interact with in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. These people are just like the player, driven to the edge, trying to survive on whatever they can find, wherever they can. From what we can see in the video, it’s possible to trade with the survivors in the world for items that you might need, but there’s also the hint that if you don’t then things could turn ugly. I like the ambiguity surrounding this, and look forward to seeing what these survivors end up doing in the final game.
The final point I want to touch on from this video is that there is obviously a game clock that has specific events at certain times. I say this, because the developers talk about a bell that is going to ring and draw in a lot of walkers. Whether the bell was rung by another survivor, or it happens everyday, isn’t clear, but I’d wager that it is an automatic daily occurrence. If there are more events like this, then the world will be a dangerous place to explore if you’re not paying attention to the time.