Rigid-Soft Studios made a huge announcement over the weekend as they revealed an upcoming engine change for the zombie survival MMO, Lifeless. The game launched in Early Access in August of this year with two separate digital versions available with the cheapest selling at $25 but despite its low cost, the game still faced criticisms from the MMO community through poor comparisons to War Z, DayZ and other zombie related titles.
Other criticisms the developers faced were the quality of graphics and familiarity of assets used within the game. Lifeless was originally developed under the Unity engine and although it gave Rigid-Soft Studios the tools they needed to make a game worthy of an entry in the zombie genre, it wasn’t without its drawbacks. This weekend Creative Director Hampus took to the forums to announce an upcoming change that counters many of those drawbacks with the transition to the Unreal engine.
[quote cite=”Hampus, Creative Director “]In Unity we have built up a foundation and tried out ideas, and in Unreal Engine we will reuse those aspects that worked, remove what was disliked and use the information we now have gotten to improve everything about the game. This lets us get a clean slate and not keep on trying to (crudely put) polish a turd.[/quote]
The team also released a new batch of images showing the new assets and models that will be seen when the game re-launches under the Unreal engine. Surprisingly the team have adopted an entirely different approach to graphics, showcasing a style not too dissimilar to Borderlands and other cell-shaded games.
Source: Official Forums