28 MONTHS LATER UPDATE - MARCH 08 news

At its core 28 Months Later will be a clash of 3 very distinct game play styles that have existed in the industry: Survival, Stealth and Shooter, with each "class" representing one or if not a blend of those three.

Military combat in both the Infection and Objective based modes will be very familiar to fps veterans. Military personnel will be outfitted with appropriate weapon systems that will be modular in design. They are the least complex class to play and will require almost purely the player to utilize guns and light tactical decisions in combat. Nevertheless they will still be a deadly adversary since they are utilizing ranged weapons over the infected AI and players.

Civilian combat in the Invasion / Objective / Infection based modes will require players to use more survivalist style tactics in combat situations. They will utilize the player’s ingenuity to create their own weapons and be more wary about what they are carrying. The primary focus at the moment is giving them a melee combat system that will allow them to stand toe to toe with infected to an extent, but also giving them the ability to require ranged weapons over time as the game and player experience progresses. However these weapons will be created and found almost solely by the player.

Infected combat will be much more reliant on stealth based tactics in order to engage opponents in combat. They will be able to traverse terrain with much more agility, by utilizing stamina base moves that may allow them to lunge, do devastating melee attacks, bite in order to infect opponents, or more draining yet devastating moves such as vomiting on there adversaries. However, they will not be able to block attacks (an ability given solely to civilians). But at their core, they are a much more different kind of play style in that their emphasis will be on utilizing shock tactics in coordination with the prey’s lack of agility in order to engage opponents who will be armed with much more devastating weapons.

Weapon Modularity

Since the civilians are going to be the focus of the game mode, ranged weapons will be hard to come by, which is why we are creating a melee system and engineering system that will allow civilians to create weapons based on the players experimenting. Say you start off and see a plank of wood, for example, if you stumble across a nine inch nail, you may be inclined to fuse it into the board, and what you get now is a better and more effective weapon which will increase how much damage you can do. Slamming the wood against a person might even break the plank and chip it giving it a sharpened end, now it has become more of a stabbing weapon rather than like a bat. This will change the properties of the weapon such as what animation is played, or how much damage it does. This system will allow the player to utilize whatever they can think of to create effective fighting systems against the infected. A classic if not brilliant example is a rag with a full bottle of wine, two ways it can be changed, if by breaking it and using it as a melee weapon. Or combining it with the rag and creating a Molotov cocktail style grenade. Simple projects like this can lead to scavenging around a map for particular parts to make your own weapon. It also controls the flow of the game, and encourages player movement rather than just sitting and camping. Modules for weapons will be placed in logical places so that the player can find things more easily, such as an abandoned tool shed, or a home depot sort of establishment contain shovels and other DIY tools. Certain guns will utilize upgrades such as mounted flashlights or bayonets in order to increase fighting effectiveness and encourage better tactical maneuvers and game play.

Getting to know the team

In a small interview with the founder of 28 Months Later and head of development, =DBD= Jey, I'm able to bring you a small preview of what is to come.

So, what sort of features can we expect to see in the first few stages of this mod?

The first release of the mod will be more about the game play then the visual feast that will be in the full release. All the initial fundamentals of the game will be in place for the infection gamemode. Though don’t expect all our custom models and animations to be in there. We will however have new maps, new skins, new sounds, new weapons and some new animations / models and of course the gameplay code.

The how greatly will AI bots play a role in this game?

Hopefully we will be able to have a coop gamemode, though we have not definite answer on this yet, as we still have to get AI functioning on dedicated crysis servers. If we do get it fully working you can expect objective bases coop game modes to appear. Where you carry out missions ranging from defend the mansion, to rescue operations. We have lots of really original ideas to utilizes AI, so let’s hope that our coders can crack this :)

Zombies or Infected?

Infected.

Content Update

Death By Design has been hugely busy at work on the 28 Months Later mod, we have lots of special previews below of what you can expect to see in the mod. All of which as well as further news updates of the DBD mod team are available at our new developers site, ‘www.deathbydesign.net.’

Weapons:

Below we have work by our top modelers, this shot is of the new Spaz 12, modeled by our very own =DBD= Frogfish. An impressive detailed modeled yet to be integrated into our mod.

 

 

=DBD= Falco made our very own SA 80, model the first few shots of which can be seen below in its first stages of development, apparently since has been skinned and looks deadly. As if it didn’t already.

 

 

Not only this, he’s managed to model our own standard kit, M4A1 Rifle. Those who played the zombie css mod will be more than familiar with this weapon.

 

 

Finally, our head developer =DBD= Jey in between time coding and dancing around roles has managed to dig out a nice power tool from his tool it arsenal which you can look forward to screwing some infected up with.

 

 

New Character Update:

This update we bring you a preview from one of our new developers who has joined our team as a modeler. =DBD= Nervlink has given me this preview of a old man infected character model to gaze at.

 

 

Maps:

Of course our mappers have been hard at work to bring you urban levels, rural levels. Maps which will completely involve you in your daunting apocalyptic environment. Our first preview is what most people will be most interested to see, the picture speaks for itself:

 

 

One of our modelers "=DBD=Seb" has been working hard with =DBD=Jey on producing these models for the Paris metro.

 

 

AI:
Last but not least we have a small video teaser for you demonstrating the work of our Single Player Coder "Rad15"

 

Download a high def version here: Deathbydesign.net

 

To bring it all down to a conclusion, this mod isn't dead, it's infected and it's spreading.
Looking to bring you more and more now with the SDK, and the latest on DBD.net as it comes...

Head of Public Relations =DBD= Blank