The Walking Dead interview with Mark Latham

Recently T&G Productions headed over to Mantic HQ to play The Walking Dead: All Out War. Paul from T&G also had chance to sit down with the game's designer, Mark Latham, to ask him some questions about the making of the game.

We've highlighted a few of the answers from Mark below but you can watch the rest of the video to find out more about the making of All Out War and some hints about what might be coming up in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWenUiLLtyE

How did you feel when you started on the game?

When Ronnie rang me up and offered me this gig, I jumped at the chance because I absolutely love The Walking Dead. It was a lot of pressure because there are a lot of die hard fans, plus the TV fans compared to the comic book fans are different. This game is completely based on the comic book IP, rather than the TV series, so we don't cross the streams.

What research did you do?

The biggest part of research for making the game was reading the comics again from issue one. There was a real pressure to reflect the IP and the Walkers are a force of nature who aren't actually the main threat. The main threat are the other humans who have gone bad, so you're just trying to fight to survive.

What were some of the key elements you wanted to include in the mechanics?

It was really important to us that you never had your opponent controlling the Walkers all the time and that they could move on their own as well, which means there's a real element of unpredictability. Also, they're quite harmless on their own but they get exponentially harder and the combat bonus ramps up so fast. Even the hardest characters will go down when you get surrounded by Walkers.

How will the characters progress throughout the expansions?

We're going to do several versions of each character that represent them at different stages of the story. So the first Rick is quite idealistic. He's a cop and still wears his badge. He's a pretty good shot, is fairly confident, he's a good leader and can calm down the threat. Whereas later he goes through a bit of a dark period and he won't be quite so good at fighting.

Anything else you can tell us?

Well for that you'll need to watch the video above!

The Walking Dead: All Out War core game is available now. The February boosters, including Rick on Horse, Carol, Lori, Andrea and the Walker Booster are all available to pre-order now.