Xbox Gaming in South Africa

Undead Labs recently revealed a new title for Xbox LIVE Arcade, codenamed Class3, which takes the tried and tested zombie-survival shooter genre and adds in a new dynamic with stealth, evasion, resource collecting, and home bases coming together to form the basis of an open world action game. Founder of Undead Labs, Jeff Strain, said in a recent interview with Joystiq that what makes Class3 different to the many other zombie games out there is that "the focus not on combat with zombies, but surviving the zombie threat."

So what does this all have to do with massively multiplayer online games? Well, Class3 is just the foundation for Undead Labs primary goal: an online, open world zombie-survival shooter, unimaginatively codenamed Class4. Of course, the question that comes to mind is, why not just create the MMO from the start? And Strain has provided the answer in a Q&A posted up on the developer's website.

"A big part of determining whether a game is fun is asking gamers to play it and listening to what they like and don’t like," said Strain in the Q&A. "As a full online world game, Class4 is a massive undertaking, so we want to get the core gameplay mechanics in place and deliver a tight, fun game experience with Class3 and let our player community guide our efforts as we move forward into the full online world experience."

Undead Labs are no strangers to the MMO genre, with Strain credited as a previous lead programmer on Blizzard's World of Warcraft, as well as working on NCSoft's Guild Wars, so it seems we're in good hands here. But a MMO for the Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE does bring up a prickly subject: Will Class4 be a subscription game or perhaps free-to-play with micro-transactions forming the basis of its revenue? And the answer so far unclear, with Undead Labs only saying that they're working hard on finding a solution that will avoid the pitfalls of other MMOs in the market.

Currently there's no scheduled release dates for either titles, or whether Class4 will be a XBLA game or retail game, but with Class3 making up the core of the game, it should mean less development time, and less waitnig to find out what Undead Labs can come up with.