this isn't really a rant or a full blown idea.there aren't any popular zombie MMOs on the go at the moment and I simply ask, why? what do you think? technical issues (lag?)? design issues? let me know what you think, and, if you're feeling nice,, offer ideas for what you would like to see in a zombie MMO.

There are some browser based zombie mmos, Urban dead off the top of my head.

http://undeadlabs.com/

Zombie games traditionally lack typical MMO aspects. No one has ever made a successful zombie game that is much more than "Lots of dumb AI to shoot!"

UO has zombies. Skeletons, liches, vampires too. You may say that a Liche is a glorified zombie.

And UO is the best MMO in the world... imo of course.

I think the answer to "why are there no ____ MMOs?" is generally that there isn't a big enough amount of people interested in one for it to be worthwhile to make one!

MMOs take a lot of time and money to make so companies go after the easy wins and the more guaranteed returns on investments :/

Yaknow... It's funny you should ask this. I wonder it so much I have started posting "Make a zombie MMO and I'll give you a cookie" in my signature.

Here's the problem, the way I see it:

Every single person I've talked to that wants a zombie MMO (and contrary to popular belief, there appears to be many of them) wants to play a zombie. Blowing up zombies is easy, but I wanna eat some brains... The challenge: actually playing a zombie is hard. Tradition has told us that zombies are dumb. Instinct, sure, but advanced thought? No way, you're dead!

Solve the stupid problem (In a believable way, none of the land of the dead crap) and you'll have a subscriber. And I'll browbeat all my friends to come along.

Left 4 Dead works for that. :) It's not persistent, but you can play as the zombies and screw with the survivors.

It would be strange to play a Zombie MMO, and have the survivors outnumber the undead! Survivors in zombie fiction usually are outnumbered and have to run for their life to find shelter.

In an MMO, it's the monsters that are outnumbered. You'd have people camping out for their turn to be chased. :)

There's also: Z-Day

I think that designing a zombie MMO is difficult because the post-apocalyptic world is not "massive". Usually the zombie movies get its feel from the survival aspect, the player being one of the few non-infected people left on earth.

Where does the "massive" part fit in? So you spread some thousands survivors over a large sandboxed world full of zombies. Then what? To make it interesting MP-wise, the survivors would need to form groups. To make it more interesting, survivors groups could form guilds, build cities and stuff. But what happens to the feeling of being "the last few people of earth" when your suddenly running around with 24 others slashing zombies?

It's difficult to pull it off imho.

What do zombies do that would be compatible with an MMO? They mill about, attack anyone who comes near, and every so often raid a city. Sounds like silithids in WoW or Guristas in EvE to me. Every mob in every MMO is a zombie, for all practical purposes.

If you want to make a game based on a zombie-infested world, and make it MMO, you'll run into some core contradictions. For one thing, players don't like permadeath. There's no sense of futility, no feeling of doom, no fear of being overwhelmed, because you can just keep relentlessly dashing yourself against them in human wave attacks with no sense of self-preservation until they're ground to dust under your inexorable onslaught. The ability to come back from the dead again and again makes player characters more zombielike than their enemies.

And what happens when you kill them all? If they just respawn and wander around while you decapitate them with shotguns and fire axes, you'll get bored in a hurry, and it'll be all, "Man, these zombies sure are annoying! They devoured my brains six times while I was trying to collect all the top-tier rifle upgrade components in the radioactive epicenter of the ruined Zombietech labs!"

If you want to do it right, you'll put in permadeath and make players reroll every time they die, and then you'll weight the world so that everyone dies with some frequency. Give them a persistent upgradeable gamepiece, like a settlement or a faction or just a tech tree of modular traits to put on characters they create, and use that as the foundation for achievement while keeping individual characters expendable. There will be scads of problems, like how to recognize buddies who have a different face every week, or how to avoid cheapening death by letting players whip up a cookie-cutter avatar every time, but I think it could work, and be cool.

Another option would be to make it straight-up PvP, letting dead players choose to respawn as either a zombie or as a new human. Obfuscate the interface so that zombies can't recognize individual people either by appearance or behavior ("Everyone in our clan jumps three times before shooting a zombie, and when we're in zombie mode we don't eat guys who do the jumps") and reward players for doing well in both modes, so even if you prefer to play as a human, it's in your best interest to perform well as a zombie.