Overkill’s The Walking Dead was predicted to die prematurely from the start

Recently, an employee on the Overkill team revealed that from the beginning they knew The Walking Dead would fail miserably.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead was one of 2018’s biggest disappointments: the game only sold a few hundred thousand copies when it was expected to sell in the millions. This failure forced publisher Starbreeze to go under management. regime. Now, Eurogamer has posted details about how some members of the project were fully aware of the game’s problems before it was released, but didn’t have enough time to fix them.

“Everybody knew it was going to fail,” says one developer (all Eurogamer sources prefer to remain anonymous). “No matter how badly you polish a product, it’s still bad. It can’t get any better than before.”

Originally slated for release in 2016, Overkill’s The Walking Dead was built around a new in-house engine called Valhalla. But according to Eurogamer, the engine is “nearly unusable”, featuring little more than a graphics renderer. This slowed development of the game, until Overkill and Starbreeze moved the project to Unreal Engine 4.

However, at this point, the game has been in development for many years. Starbreeze hesitated to push the release date beyond 2018, so the Overkill team was forced to develop the game from scratch in just 18 months, using an engine that only “10%” of members were familiar with. “This is a beta because we completed it in just a year and a half,” a source said.

While The Walking Dead is seen as the main cause of Starbreeze’s recent troubles, it’s not the only one. Eurogamer reports that when Overkill was officially acquired by Starbreeze in 2013, after the 2012 Syndicate Reboot failed, Starbreeze was completely taken over by key Overkill members, namely studio founders Bo and Ulf Andersson. . After the huge success of Payday 2, Ulf left the company. Meanwhile, Bo, as CEO, decided to expand the company, investing in games like Dead by Daylight and Raid: World War 2. Raid: World War 2 is a game very similar to Payday, which means Starbreeze is “competing against itself”.

In addition, Starbreeze also invested heavily in VR and acquired Valhalla for Overkill. All of this puts great pressure on The Walking Dead, forcing the game to succeed. And when it failed, Starbreeze completely lost everything.

Starbreeze is currently glitching. With the new CEO (Andersson has since left the company), the common goal is to “improve the future” and “create a clearer working system”. But if Starbreeze can recover, it will certainly be very different from what it is today.

By PC Gamer