Zombies slouching with arms outstretched in unrelenting determination towards the targets of their burning hunger... bullets being fired by desperate defenders who have abandoned their defenses in order to make a run for it... the creaking of boarded up passages sagging under the weight of undead...
If you couldn't tell... I LOVE THE ZOMBIE GENRE. Particularly the slow, shambling type zombies who require headshots and slowly overpower or outlast the defenders. You're probably wondering why I think that's freaking amazing story telling, but if you have read any of the more intelligent zombie books (I'm not kidding some are really well written and not just horror films on paper) you will find that the character development is phenomenal. How would you deal with the walking plague? Could you survive such a nightmare, watching your relatives and the rest of humanity save for a select few turn into monsters? It's fun to put yourself into the survivors' shoes and watch their minds unravel just as quickly as their hastily constructed defenses.
World of Warcraft pulled off one of the greatest MMORPG events of all time when they released the Zombie event during halloween. For the first time ever a game allowed its players to destroy the very foundation of its gameplay by spreading a "plague" to NPCs and players alike. The entire theme was very similiar to the zombie genre, watching the whole world fall into chaos while the walking dead filled the streets. By the end of the event every major city was filled with undead and even random towns throughout the world had undead breaking down barriers and overwhelming Azeroth's citizens. Everyone has stories from that event, even if you were just ganked while leveling by a hungry ghoul. Some have more entertaining stories to tell, like my paladin trying for hours to defend orgrimmar from dozens of outbreaks throughout the outskirts of the city or my hunter taking on hundreds of undead in shatrath.
For those who were unable to participate in the event, I hope for your sake that blizzard revisits the entire idea during halloween this year.
What did you think of the zombie event? Loved it? Hated it? Will it come back? Comment!
17 comments: on "Markco's Corner: Warcraft Zombie Event"
Anonymous said... September 17, 2010 at 8:06 AM
I thought the zombie event was for WotLK launch which just happened to fall during Halloween?
I vaguely remember collecting a brain and bringing one of the zombie brains to Grand Apothecary Putress when he was still "good".
Barrah said... September 17, 2010 at 8:22 AM
I loved it. It was a new and creative thing, it made some sense given what was going on in the world and it was an extremely interesting study in pandemics.
Here's hoping they push through the inane QQ and have something similar in the future!
Anonymous said... September 17, 2010 at 8:24 AM
I loved this event, running into the auctionhouse while infected, use bubble and poof: instant zombie, then explode to infect the auctioneers, guards and all nearby players. Then getting infected, run to a starting zone, turn zombie and start killing fresh lowbies (worked on PVE-servers too), big fun :-D they should totally bring it back (more haunted memento's too)
Anonymous said... September 17, 2010 at 8:41 AM
Wasn't the zombie event from the WOTLK King start event?
jimmyolsenblues said... September 17, 2010 at 8:41 AM
1) Night of the living dead 1968
2) Shaun of the Dead
3) Zombieland
Yes I do like a comedy over Dawn of the Dead Mall scene where a woman's calf gets bitten
What are your favorite Zombie movies?
Tyberiuss said... September 17, 2010 at 8:51 AM
I loved it, but it also kinda freaked me out. Here is an old blog post about how it messed me up:
http://tales-from-tyberiuss.blogspot.com/2008/11/theres-zombie-in-my-bedroom.html
JayTekStorm said... September 17, 2010 at 10:45 AM
I loved it! I am so hoping they bring it back. One of the best events blizzard has ever had in WoW.
Anonymous said... September 17, 2010 at 10:58 AM
Loved it. Was a great way to break up the grind factor of the game.
iceveiled said... September 17, 2010 at 11:03 AM
I enjoyed it and think it was the most fun world event blizz has ever done. I wish they would do stuff like that more often. I love Zombies too - so much that I secretly wish a zombie outbreak would happen in real life. Twisted, I know.
A good friend of mine kinda lives on the outskirts of a small town, in a big house with lots of guns and a big, tall, sturdy fence round his property. It's like a fortress. That's the first place i would go to hole up! Hopefully he wouldn't be a zombie already when I got there!
Oniahs said... September 17, 2010 at 11:33 AM
Blizzard cannot (at least in terms of the current lore) repeat this event. The WoW zombie apocalypse was directly the result of Arthas and the Scourge's attacks on the rest of Azeroth. This event also included necropoli floating above different zones across both Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. If you will remember, the zombie apocalypse started when players worked on a series of daily quests for Argent Dawn questgivers outside of major cities.
All of that having been said, this was one really cool event. I'm pretty sure that the whole thing was inspired by the in-game "hunters' plague" back during vanilla (in which a disease debuff was never properly purged from hunter pets and they ended up spreading it throughout major cities and decimating huge parts of the population), but taking it to its logical conclusion. At the time, I was leveling a lowbie toon and had to hide from various zombie invasions. Ahh, good times.
As much as I would love to see this event repeat, it would nececssarily mean that the Scourge was back, as well as the Lich King. I'm not exactly eager to see that happen, since I just KILLED that guy.
Mark Jindra said... September 17, 2010 at 1:17 PM
I would love to see this very event return. And it would be easy to bring it into the lore. There are plenty of rogue scourge in the world. Scholomance is still heavily infected with them. Why not a wannabe leader of the scourge unleashes a plague on the land in an attempt to complete the work of his fallen master? Retribution is always a great plot hook.
Paiger said... September 17, 2010 at 1:31 PM
I absolutely loved the event. Some of my guildmates and I completely locked down the IF portal room for an hour in the midst of the zombie invasion. At the height of it, we had to have at least 40-50 zombies total running around the room and out into the Mystic Ward.
Drogg said... September 17, 2010 at 3:56 PM
I seriously loved the event.... I'd only been playing WoW for around a year when it came in... I loved how it generally panicked the online community on my server (a PVE) one at the time, of people complaining about forced pvp etc. but it was the first thing in a game that got me so hooked... I figured if the developers are innovative enough to allow pure chaos to ensue, even for a small amount of time, to usher in the expansion was all i needed to fork over my money for the expac. I hope they do something as epic (or even more so) for cataclysm... and of course throw in some nice BoE items for us to flip on the AH lol ;-)
Tj said... September 17, 2010 at 4:55 PM
If you haven't read it Marcko, Day after Day Armageddon is an outstanding zombie apocalypse novel. It was hard to find for a while there but there's a new printing now (guess I should have sold my first edition for $150 while I had the chance), and a sequel as well. The author JL Bourne is also a pretty good guy
Anonymous said... September 17, 2010 at 7:55 PM
I guess I'm the only one that didn't like the event... ;-)
No, seriously, I liked the theory and the lore of the event, but in practice it was a horrible pain for a player without a single character above 45. I had not played very long and had planned to play WoW all weekend, but I ended up just logging out and not playing at all. Not fun just being ganked and getting your gear destroyed as the guards killed you... And since the auctionhouses were the center for zombie kamikazes, no chance to even play the gold game.
What was missing was a possibility for lower level players to participate in some way except dying... :-(
Unknown said... September 17, 2010 at 8:19 PM
I loveee everything zombie. zombie video games, zombie movies, zombie books, zombie EVERYTHING! I cannot express in words how much I LOVED the pre-wotlk event! It was awesome!
And for the sake of recommendations, it did not receive much publicity and it is not one that many people I have encountered have seen or even heard of, but my favorite zombie movie would have to be DEAD SET. It is actually a mini series that aired on British television but it is sold as a solid movie now as well. Its built around a "Big Brother" cast and its producers, followed by a zombie outbreak. I HIGHLY recommend this movie to anyone who is a fan of zombie movies.
Anonymous said... September 20, 2010 at 1:46 AM
I too loved the pre-wrath zombie event, though it had flaws.
Were they to do it again, I'd suggest that they:
1) temporarily raise infected players to level cap, if not already there. As some have said, low level players were totally locked out of this except as a ganking target, which is a shame
2) Make it easier to opt out. They had healers in all the major cities. Each of those should have handed out stacks of a potion that cured the zombie disease and granted temporary immunity.
3) Ramped up NPC guard response over time. Outbreaks are fun, but having cities under lockdown isn't. They should have had the guards get stronger the longer there were continuously zombies in each of the major cities. Ideally, within a half hour or so of camping the guards would be strong enough to overrun even the most geared zombie players.
Also, I too would love to see this come back in some limited fashion. Perhaps they should have a boe potion as a rare drop from bosses in appropriate instances such as scholo or strat. Using the potion would turn you into a zombie, giving you the ability to start your own outbreak if you can last long enough. Since each of these potions should in theory be somewhat precious and rare, outbreaks would be rare but memorable events.
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