#starbreeze

So our story starts during Payday 2's first anniversary, the Fall of 2014. Players had to attain certain community goals to get new things to play with during their first annual Crimefest event, and the last two prizes were secret. They wound up being John Wick as a playable character, and the trailer for a new game Overkill was working on, based in the world of The Walking Dead comics. The premise was simple: it was set in the same part of the world as Payday 2, Washington DC, and would involve players trying to keep themselves and their camp alive during the zombie apocalypse made popular in Robert Kirkman's graphic novels and the AMC TV show. Given the fact that Payday 2 had proven to be a tremendous cultural hit around this time, getting the likes of Giancarlo Esposito and making cameos in the Wick movies at the height of their popularity, and given how at the moment it is very possible to argue that Payday 2 might have sold more copies than Super Mario Brothers 3, it would seem that OTWD was in good hands.

The problem, though, was their CEO. Bo Andersson used pressure he conjured up in Varvtre AB, a holdings company he was on the board of directors for, to become the CEO of Starbreeze when they acquired Overkill Software, the makers of Payday: The Heist and Payday 2. This also moved Bo from a role within the games industry alongside his brother to being his brother's superior and putting him in a firmly business role. This was good for Bo, because it would allow him to scrape capital from Overkill on their pursuit into superstardom to fund his own dream project: Storm.

Storm was a concept that Bo had been working on since 2008, the idea of bringing virtual reality back from being a curious novelty we played with in the 1990s into a mainstream competitive eSport. Players would wear tactical vests with computers built into them and a 5K resolution HMD that Acer would develop with the aid of Starbreeze in a massive bespoke arena, and using a combination of LIDAR scanning, realtime texture mapping, and the Valhalla game engine Starbreeze paid $8 million for, their physical arena would turn into a sci-fi deathmatch where players would cooperate to eliminate the enemy team and seek victory.

Bo Andersson was paying tens of millions of dollars to invent Laser Tag.

But how does this tie into The Walking Dead? Well, as a proof of concept, the work that Overkill had done in their in-house game engine, Diesel 2.0, would be ported into Valhalla to bring Overkill's The Walking Dead to life. Overkill's employees had long complained that Diesel could not compete visually, and even incorporating proper normal maps and bumping up the texture quality could not shake the appearance of a Source Engine or early Unreal 3 title. Despite releasing in 2013 and with the game now moving into 2016, onto the 8th generation of consoles, Payday 2 was not a looker and Overkill's The Walking Dead faced the same fate.

The problem, though, is that Bo Andersson bought the Valhalla Engine, which was being designed for VR first and foremost, much too early. The engine was literally incomplete, and the programmers had to write tools for the engine before they could write any code for the game itself. After nearly a year of work, they did bring Valhalla into a usable state, and used its VR prowess to power Payday 2's VR version. Bo also proposed a VR demo of Overkill's The Walking Dead to be hosted in Dubai, at VR Park (now titled PlayDXB), to demonstrate the game, the headset, and the VR technology to Middle Eastern investors who could free Bo from the shackles of Scandinavian game development and make him the worldwide name in VR. This delayed their actual non-VR Walking Dead game, which had serious funding from Skybound Entertainment and Robert Kirkman, past its intended 2016 street date. The game was nowhere near finished as Overkill staff were pulled back and forth to so many different projects within the studio. They received an extension to their deadline, Fall 2017, and work continued on the Valhalla Engine and the VR demo.

Fast forward another year. Starbreeze puts out Raid: World War II, a Diesel 2.0 title in which four players steal from the Nazis in almost exactly same manner as in Payday 2, starring John Cleese as the handler for the crew, and some trailers commissioned for their Walking Dead game using virtually zero actual in-game assets, and Skybound makes them an ultimatum: if the game is not out by November 2018, then they lose the rights to the license. They have wasted the rights holder's time and money for too long, and the project is dragging its heels with a CEO seeing it as a low priority to get their contractually-obligated co-op FPS for PCs and consoles out versus his ambitions of filling an entire space in Dubai with his name, his brand. Overkill developers, who had been clamoring for years to use an actual engine that makes sense for FPSes, finally get their wish, and Bo Andersson invests in commercial licenses for Unreal Engine 4. The problem now, though, is that the staff have a year to make the game in Unreal, with the caveat that they have zero experience in the engine. If they had made this move two years ago, they'd have the time to commit to learning the ins and outs, but they don't.

Overkill goes into crunch, with staff sleeping in the offices and working 100-hour weeks to learn Unreal and take what the documentation and tutorials offer them and implement it into their Walking Dead title, reverse-engineering the concepts they had implemented into the Diesel and Valhalla versions of the game and dropping them into Unreal. Bo Andersson, all the while, is going on vacations and not coming in on the regular, spending his time playing zombie games for inspiration and coming to the staff with his own ideas for the game based on them. Glory Kills, Special Infected, robust base maintenance mechanics and the ability to command teams of non-player survivors on missions all wound up in the game with little actual regard for how these pieces fit together. By the time that he realized he should be more actively hands-on, he only had a scant few months to spend with the staff at the final mad dash to make a playable product. The game was playable at E3, with two demo levels, and one of them playtested so poorly that the staff had to pull it from the rotation, but when Bo heard this feedback he would not tell his staff. He told them the game was testing great at E3, that people loved it.

Overkill's The Walking Dead released on the 7th of November, 2018, a week after Payday 2 ended support by letting players kill fallen angels and solve a giant puzzle wheel about the in-game lore in order to turn Bain, the player's main contact, into the US President via a body-swapping artifact used by the ancient kings of Kataru, who were gifted immortality at the same time common man was gifted the knowledge of good and evil at the Garden of Eden. While the clown-themed robbery game ended on a confusing note, Overkill's The Walking Dead was getting started to a whole heap of roughness. The game's combat was frustrating, with hordes of walkers that had to be put down one clumsy charged melee swing at a time and human enemies who fired off AKMs and MP5s with reckless abandon. Their noise would draw hordes, which would need to be contended with via your own noise, as dealing with a few dozen enemies with melee combat was awkward and difficult.

Being grappled by a zombie cost a health bar and a half in a game where your starting character had on average four healthbars to their name, and the underlying gameplay, despite being completely linear missions in level and objective design, were just Payday heists at the end of the day. Hell or High Water involved you raiding a camp owned by The Family, an antagonistic gang your camp is at war with, and stealing their supplies. In turn, they arrive at your camp and you kill five waves of them in Worse Than Walkers, in a move no different than Payday 2's Safe House Raid mission, with no zombies in sight. The camp-building mechanics, which were tied to player level and their ability to tend to the needs of their workers, were a confusing mess of UI elements that did not mesh together, and all weapons were earned in a gachapon-style case system and would degrade over time, requiring the player unjam them, fix them with the supplies they need to keep camp morale up, or watch them fall into disrepair. There was also no tutorial mission, with the game opening with The First Shot, the E3 demo mission that tested so poorly they stopped running it.

Overkill's The Walking Dead performed poorly, both critically and commercially, and Starbreeze went right into damage control. The game's high price tag to low gameplay ratio was combatted with a $30 version that required paying for the missions $60 players got for free. Season 2 went into production very quickly, with fixes to the base game, new weapons, and new survivors being promised within the coming months. Unfortunately, this was too little, too late, as Skybound issued a cease and desist to their business partner after just three months of sale, and by February 2019, Overkill's The Walking Dead was just as much a corpse as the undead shamblers present in the video games.

Perhaps what sealed the fate of the game wasn't its overall quality, as The Walking Dead is home to a large number of subpar games, but its tone and gameplay. Overkill's The Walking Dead is a very staunchly libertarian take on the franchise, pitting the player with the idea that they are to be a colonizing force, destroying an antagonistic camp and treating the other people just trying to survive as cannon fodder not unlike if they were just walkers with guns. This is no surprise given another face at Overkill, executive producer Almir Listo, having a robust fascination with libertarianism and the cult of personality that surrounded fringe Right-wing groups. Almir himself is not a conservative, but he has proven time and time again that he thinks the way Donald Trump talks is funny and has an interest in American conservative viewpoints and conspiracies as an outsider looking in, likely not helped by an unnamed comics writer taking over Payday 2 in its final year to turn the game about robbing banks into one with an ancient conspiracy and Nephilim to mow down with your MG42 or M16.

The Walking Dead is a story about its people and how they're shaped by the conflict, by the apocalypse that surrounds them, and while Kirkman expressed early interest in the sound-based horde gameplay encouraging quiet takedowns and swift, accurate gunplay, it is very possible that the idea of not just a bad Walking Dead game, but a bad Walking Dead game from a popular studio that fundamentally misunderstands the world of The Walking Dead and needs to fall back on generic bandits and raiders to fill its spaces a la Bethesda's open world titles was a bad look. We'll never know for certain, though, as the game has been pulled from sale for ages.

But this brings us to sometime last week. September 21st marked the launch of Starbreeze Studios' (formerly Overkill Software's) Payday 3. The game features a lot of the stuff they had worked on for The Walking Dead (weapon models, a rework to the Shield enemy, armor working exactly like health in OTWD) but also a ton of its own ideas, and in general the gameplay is very solid. The issue, though, is the progression and a number of bugs that hamper the experience, alongside requiring a Starbreeze Nebula account and online connection to play, with no offline mode to speak of, which caused problems when the servers for the game were down for its first three days after launch. Starbreeze promised a patch was coming shortly thereafter, but on October 21st, a month after the game released, someone with ties to Starbreeze, fed up with the Starbreeze Nebula account requirement and persistent Internet connection to play a game with obvious issues and no Patch 1 release date in sight, released the final build of Overkill's The Walking Dead. This featured a proper tutorial, made the original The First Shot into an optional random encounter a player could take on for additional resources, a slew of new weapons, a wandering trader who could sell you blueprints to the DLC's guns, and the rest of Season 2's missions. The leaked build is not playable online but is DRM-free, running just fine completely offline and preserving the game for future generations to point and laugh at, albeit without any help to ease the difficulty for a game that expected four human players at a time.