Dead State Interview
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PCG: You've talked about Dead State being a very open-ended game. Is there an endgame? Or do you just keep playing forever or until you die?
BM: We definitely didn't want to do something where you just continually play, because we have a lot of story/narrative progression. And a very open narrative, not like a heavy-handed, linear narrative. A lot of stuff opens up as you play. We do have multiple endings. There are a lot of different ways that you can end the game, and some of those are failure states. We do have ways that you can end the game prematurely just because you played so poorly. Which I find refreshing, because you don't see that anymore. But we're not going to punish the player too much. I really don't want to get people into the, (Oh, hey, you messed up once: You're dead!) kind of situation.
Depending on who you meet, depending on your relationship with other groups, depending on where you go and at what time we open up a lot of possibilities as the game goes on. There will definitely be ways to get a little bit more of a heroic ending or a selfish ending. There are going to be a lot of options. It really depends on how you play. I know there are always going to be people who are like, (Well, I killed off all of the allies at the shelter. I win!) But really, our focus has been having every player have their own narrative of what they did at their shelter. What is their story?
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PCG: In terms of story, are you going with a more unknowable apocalypse? Or will it be possible through gameplay to discover what happened, where all the zombies came from, etc.?
BM: I'm a big believer in the unknowable. Because it's always hokey, right? Whenever they try to explain where the zombies came from, or where vampires came from, or whatever. It always ends up being something really ludicrous. And how many people would even know [in the game world] about what's really going on? It's one of those things where we throw out a lot of theories. Everybody seems to have their own theory, and everybody has kind of heard something. But communication has broken down, and now it's like a game of telephone where everybody has heard something, but you never really know.
