Free Reign Entertainment has re-branded and tried their hand at the open-world, zombie survival genre once more. The name may not immediately sound familiar but they were responsible for The WarZ and Infestation: Survival Stories. They’ve returned to the free-to-play, zombie-survival space with a little help from filmmaker George C. Romero, and the game is called Romero’s Aftermath.

It’s easy to take a look at the user reviews and comment sections and see that something is amiss. Why all the negativity? Well, there’s a history behind Free Reign Entertainment and their open-world zombie survival games that many gamers felt were anti-consumer. The series of games have garnered a somewhat poor reputation across social media and various hardcore gaming circles.

Well, the developers wanted to try to recoup their reputation with a new game and address some of the concerns that the community has raised in response to Romero’s Aftermath launching. A couple of the actual big complaints about the game surrounded microtransactions, the zombie AI and hackers.

Lead designer Adam Skidmore was gracious enough to step forward and answer some direct questions about the reputation surrounding Romero’s Aftermath, the game’s more “rugged” approach to PvP combat, quick-scoping, modifying the concept of permadeath, as well as how the team is utilizing some very interesting new methods for dealing with hackers and how they’re approaching in-app purchases for casual and hardcore players. There’s also talk about how involved George C. Romero is in the actual design of the game.

You can check out the full interview below.

---

 

One Angry Gamer: It’s a hard thing to ignore but there are a lot of negative reviews for Romero’s Aftermath. How does that affect the morale of the team? Does the team take in the criticisms and attempt to fix the game according to those user reviews, or does the team focus on what’s already in the pipeline for the game and deliver that content instead?

Adam Skidmore: When we launched Closed Alpha of Aftermath back in March 2015, we had a really supportive community of hardcore fans who provided some great feedback on what they wanted to see in the game. They also understood that the game was in an early stage of development and as a result there would be some issues. As we progressed forward to closed beta, and then open beta, we realized that we were opening the game up to a larger audience that was less invested in the game and might be more critical rather than trying to help us make a better game.

The negative reviews on Steam were to be expected given our past association with ISS formerly WarZ. We read the feedback and, while much of it was valid, a lot of it was lacking in actual information and came from players that had not invested any play time and were just being excessively critical in order to grief us. We definitely take into account user input on the direction of the game, but we also have our own timeline, as you suggested, for content we are wanting to deliver and the time frame that we have available to do it.

We surpassed 500,000 users in the first week of launch (Steam being about 60% of that) and after the initial negative reviews our Steam rating has risen dramatically and is continuing to grow at a steady pace. We’ve also fixed a number of issues and we will continue to work with the community as we move forward.

Romero’s Aftermath – Part 3: “Office Gunfight!”

Welcome to Romero’s Aftermath! Romero’s Aftermath puts the focus back on FUN and doesn’t try to be a real-life simulation (c’mon, there are zombies in the game). Players can explore, scavenge craft and fight instead of worrying about twisting an ankle stepping out a window or breaking a leg jumping over a fence.

One Angry Gamer: After the recent update there were some complaints about the game’s microtransactions and cash shop pricing. How do you measure, plan and balance the drop rate of some cash shop items and how do you determine what to put in the cash shop so that players don’t feel as if the game is “pay to win”?

Adam: I think there’s some misunderstanding about the economy in the game. There is an actual “cash shop” that we call the “Package Store.” It sells things like Account Upgrades (not stat altering) as well as booster packs. Booster packs are items you can easily find in the game, for example blueprints for item crafting. They’re not rare items by any measure, yet they require players to explore extensively in order to find them all. It takes time and, even though exploring is a fun part of the game there are players, who just can’t spend an hour or two per day playing. These packs also help players to keep up with their clan mates and friends who spend way more time playing the game.

The second part of our economy is what we call “Survivors Exchange” – and this is actually where players sometimes have complaints, not realizing how the system works. In Aftermath, Survivors Exchange is a place where each player can sell almost anything they find in the game world and receive in-game currency for that item or items. They don’t need to rely on looting money from zombie corpses (yet it is still an option). The primary source for in-game currency is the game world itself, you find loot and you either sell it as is or you use it to craft more valuable items and sell them at a higher price. How much you’ll get for your items is dictated by a system that monitors how many of those items other users have sold to the store and what the demand is for those items from players wanting to buy them.

Ideally our goal is to allow every single item in the world to be sold and bought through this system – including weapons. We realize that many players are not yet used to this system and many are either coming from games that don’t have any kind of economy – like Dayz or H1Z1, or are coming from WarZ/ISS where the Marketplace was completely different. So for now we’re regulating what’s being sold to players, and putting some weapons, rare items, etc to “no sale” list. Sometimes it takes a day or two for us to find a certain high powered item that went “on sale” and remove it from there, so some players who play all the time, may catch a glimpse of a high end item shown up for sale for very brief period of time. We always monitor the system and forums and correct this situation to adjust to current expectations of our players.

One Angry Gamer: One of the other issues about the game that has been in discussion frequently amongst users is the issue about hackers. From the outside looking in it’s impossible to know just how rampant the hackers are when you may see 20 posters making comments about it, even though maybe 20,000 people have already played the game. For the people on the outside looking in, what safeguards can you talk about that are being applied or is applicable to curb the hackers?

Adam: Cheating is a never-ending cat and mouse game and as proven by even the largest AAA companies they still cannot stop the cheats themselves, only curb them. I think we have learned a lot from the past and we are taking a much more aggressive approach to dealing with publicly available cheats now. We have chosen to curb a lot of gameplay that we felt encouraged cheating such as unlimited durability on items that encouraged players to sweep a server with aimbots for gear. There are gameplay tweaks that affect the amount of data we send to the client from the server now simply because clever cheaters take advantage of what we put in your client memory. There is no permanent solution to cheating and the age old “close a door open a window” mentality still applies. We feel we have a much better approach to dealing with possible cheats and exploits in our engine and have been patching the holes on a daily basis.

With Aftermath we’ve completely changed the way we’re dealing with cheaters. From day one when we started developing we basically threw away any anticheating methods we had and started from scratch asking ourselves “okay WHY are players cheating and how can we design the game to mitigate this.” So we’ve introduced design decisions that while not affecting fun and enjoyment of the game make it much harder to profit from using cheats in the game.

Adam: It’s no secret that basically for everything you store or do on the client side (aiming, displaying items around you, etc) those types of cheats cannot be effectively dealt with. So we designed the game to minimize the effect of those particular cheats. Our question was “okay where’s the threshold after which players who use cheats will have more inconvenience, compared to benefits they’re getting?”

Our second layer is a brand new detection method – something we’re very proud of. We’ve basically dedicated a team of cheat experts who are working on that layer utilizing their experience as cheat makers. We’ve been silently running the system for the last month while perfecting it and making sure that we don’t have an overabundance of false positives. This is an ongoing process, but so far the results are really promising.

Finally, we utilize a “punishment” or “karma” system. It’s been the industry standard to just ban people for cheating. While it works somewhat for paid games, it’s very easy to circumvent for F2P games. You can spoof your IP, your hardware id and other things like that. So most of the professionally created cheating engines do that for you. What we looked at doing was to create a system that was designed to degrade the experience for players who try to cheat. Our game systems are designed so they introduce negative feedback that is only “felt” if you do something you’re not suppose to do – like flying in the game, etc. So you don’t stop your activity, but instead you experience a negative effect that normal players will never encounter. For example, if you are using aimbot, the way the server processes data is it can actually “revert” and deal damage to yourself or corrupt memory that contains your inventory information. And it only occurs if you have a cheat program loaded in memory. So basically by running a cheat you get into a potential situation where you may profit from cheat (by using aimbot), but in the game your character will suffer.

We’ve just launched the first trial of the system on a widespread basis – but we already seeing lots of feedback from cheaters on cheating website forums complaining that their cheats are breaking the game for them.

One Angry Gamer: In Romero’s Aftermath permanent gear is present as opposed to permadeath where characters would die and lose everything. What prompted for the change with Romero’s Aftermath to make it where players get to keep their purchased items as opposed to the permadeath option where everything is lost once the player-character dies?

Adam: Well, there are some items that we chose for gameplay reasons to not drop on death. These items aren’t necessarily items that have been purchased as the majority of purchased items behave as if they were found in the world. If you bought a survival knife in the store, it will still drop on death. The permanent items you are referring could be any of the following: Gift boxes that contain a permanent cosmetic for your character or skins. We do not drop these on death simply because it is your cosmetic item and if you want to trade it with another player we feel that letting you die with it and making it griefable would be ridiculously unfair. The same goes for cosmetic crates and keys. Even if the key dropped off a zombie or from a Liberation mission and was not purchased, we won’t let you get griefed with that item. There are no un-droppable weapons, attachments, medical supplies, armor, barricades, ammo, etc. Everything drops on death unless it is noted on the item that it does not drop on death. It does not matter how it was obtained, items are classified in the game as either droppable or non-droppable regardless of acquisition method.

One Angry Gamer: I noticed on the Steam store page the game promises “More Fun, Less Broken Legs”. The description is that it’s more about fun as opposed to worrying about realism. How did the team determine how realistic Romero’s Aftermath needed to be and how much fantasy needed to be implemented to find a balance of something that’s both challenging and fun?

Adam: The engine we have makes for very smooth PVP gameplay and we felt that a lot of the survival games were becoming too much of a babysitting simulator and characters didn’t feel very rugged and hearty. Our characters can ‘take a punch’ so to speak. The way our combat is set up is so that you have a chance to react even if you are ambushed. There are plenty of items in the game such as barricades that can be placed instantly. We allow instant weapon swapping, instant barricade placement and instant medical supplies. This is because we want a skilled player to click the buttons at a speed they feel is acceptable instead of being hung up on clunky animations. We basically tried to find that fun gap where the character feels like it’s a video game. A more realistic world might have you getting tired from running too much, or fighting too many zombies. Your character is a trooper. His arms do not tire from endless swings of his axe. It’s a video game and it should be fun, not a chore where we force you to sit around and wait. Of course we will make balance changes if we find something to be too ‘out of place’ such as bunny hopping which we recently curbed to 10 jumps in a row before you must rest before jumping again and this was simply because players were using excessive jumping to avoid damage in PVP and we felt it was unfair.

A lot of our design decisions started with the question “is it fun, or is it replicating real work and mundane activities?” If the answer was “it’s too real and resembles what I do in my real life”, we went back to the drawing board.

Here’s two good examples of core design decisions we’ve made sacrificing realism to make the game more enjoyable to players. Weapons damage – in real life if you were shot in the chest at close range you would most likely die. Some games do just that. It’s not fun if you’re playing an MMO and you risk losing all of your valuable items in one death. In a game you do not have all the information about the world around you that you have in the real world, and more importantly people are way more ready to shoot you on sight than in the real world. So we’ve tuned down the per-shot weapon damage so when you get hit you still have time to react. It was also a HUGE thing for us to make sure that the outcome of a conflict between two players would depend not just on the guns/gear that they have, but on their tactical decisions and reaction time.

Another example related to weapons is how we tuned the sniper rifle, it doesn’t do much damage at closer distances, but it deals great damage at long distances. However an assault rifle will work much better on short and medium distances. Though this isn’t exactly realistic, it forces players to use weapons appropriately – nobody will be using a sniper rifle effectively to quickscope a player 5 meters away.

One Angry Gamer: Speaking of Romero, what exact role did George C. Romero play in the conceptual design or development of the game?

Adam: There’re very few people who have more “knowledge” about the subject of zombies than Cameron and his dad (the father of all modern zombies). So when we had chance to meet Cameron and discuss the whole idea of Aftermath, it was one of the most inspiring meetings we’ve had. He’s not only super passionate and knowledgeable about zombies but also a super hardcore player with a deep understanding of what motivates players and what makes a game fun.

Cameron has provided some great creative direction and ideas directly related to his personal vision of WHY and HOW zombies should behave. Some of these are already in the game (like Town Liberation raids) and others will continue to be rolled out in future content updates.

He really inspired the layout of the world and the rafter gameplay, which takes buildings and puts beds and entire lootable areas up in the rafters of many common buildings out of sight such that you would never think to climb up and look inside. He wanted to know how you could eliminate all zombies in a town and when we told him that was impossible because of the way respawn works he thought that it needed to be possible. How does one work to rebuild society if you cannot eliminate the threat? We felt it was a cool unique approach that had not been explored yet in the genre.

One Angry Gamer: One of the things that users pointed out was that the game lacks wildlife, compared to some other post-apocalyptic zombie survival games. Would Free Reign Entertainment consider adding in animals at any point or will the focus be more on the struggle between zombies and humans?

Adam: To be honest every single “survivor” or “zombie” game is more about the struggle between humans. Introducing additional gameplay NPC’s like wolves, bears, buzzards etc that wander the terrain will just be adding additional complexity to an already very complex system and could be categorized as “biting off more than we can chew.” Is it something that we would like to add to game play? Hell yea. Is it realistic at the current stage of development? Unfortunately, no. For now we are concentrating on that main course and when that is perfected we can add additional elements like wildlife, hunting, etc. That said, it really is up to the players, if we see a majority of players demanding fly fishing in the game then I guess that’s what we’ll concentrate on next. 😉

One Angry Gamer: In regards to the zombies, there have been some complaints about the AI not being up to par and not necessarily offering players the kind of reactive challenge they were hoping for. I understand that trying to balance enemy AI and decent network compatibility in an MMO-type environment can be very difficult with a fast-paced survival game. If the team were to focus more on the AI would increasing the AI count be more of a priority or increasing the threats that they pose to players?

Adam: I think this is a very good question. I don’t think increasing the AI count would be as fun as players think it would be. It’s already very trivial to fight a single zombie and keep it permanently stunned, but suddenly fighting 2+ zombies becomes quite a juggling act. If there were more zombies, I think there would need to be more bullets and more ‘wild wild west style zombie shootouts’ so to speak. I’d be most interested in adding different types of zombies as a kind of MMO tier experience. I dream of some zombies that are weak ‘entry level’ zombies, some that do a ranged attack, some that debuff, some that call friends etc.

When George C. Romero first got involved we spent quite some time probing his mind about overall zombie behavior. He was like a key to unlock the “mindset” of zombies and figure out why they behave like they do, how should they behave in the game and will it be fun.

So we’ve lined up a design on how zombies should behave and we’re implementing it right now.

When we decided to sever ties with OP Productions LLC – owner of warZ/ISS IP and publisher of the game, we had a choice – to negotiate the use of zombie assets – models, animations, sounds from WarZ/ISS as a temporary placeholder, or spend 6-7 months creating everything from scratch. After a long deliberation we decided to reuse the assets, assuming that the diehard ISS players would think of Aftermath as the next evolution anyway, and new players who haven’t played WarZ/ISS wouldn’t really care.

We all agree that the “old” zombie models need work, their animations and sounds are sub-par. While we have plans on replacing them, those plans are not super critical priorities and more like a mid-term goal, so for now the current zombies will have to stay.

One Angry Gamer: What sort of new content does the team have planned down the road to keep current players entertained and new players interested in Romero’s Aftermath?

Adam: Outside from the very obvious plan of smoothing out the rough edges in gameplay and adding new content like skins, cosmetics, new items, both just routine as well as specific for holidays and world events (we’re planning our Halloween content drop right now), we’re also working on expanding gameplay aspects.

For example one of the things we’re pretty excited about is the introduction of smaller scale more PVP oriented “PVP Zone” – small session/scenario based maps and servers, that will appeal to players who are in for shorter more action packed gameplay.

We also have completely redesigned and are waiting to implement an updated base building system, making it into one of the most robust game building systems.

These are just a couple of things we have planned down the road as we continue to develop and we’ll be listening to community feedback as well.

---

Huge thanks to Adam Skidmore from Free Reign Entertainment for answering the questions. You can learn more about Romero’s Aftermath by visiting the official website or the Steam page.