In the zombie survival MMO H1Z1, the virus of the same name has been raging on Earth for 15 years, leaving its mark: Not just on humans, but also on buildings.
We now know how the zombie apocalypse affects people. They become at least as biting as a striker from Uruguay. But what actually happens to our world? What happens to open-plan offices, intersections, supermarkets, gas stations, and our cars when they’ve been rotting away for 15 years? And how can a whole, growing, sprawling world be efficiently recreated and constructed?
A team of graphic designers at H1Z1 is addressing these questions. They have now illustrated through a series of images how the design of such a rapidly spreading world works.
From scratch and over weeks, they designed the main street of a small settlement and documented their successes. Here you can see how individual buildings slowly become a street and thus a world. For the look of the street, they started with a small shopping mall, single-story buildings, and a gas station. Then they added office spaces – with the typical “Cubicles,” the tiny, partitioned workspaces that can make you feel like a zombie even without the virus.
The differences can be clearly seen in the pictures. While the main street appears deserted in one of the early working phases, it does not look “good” in the zombie sense, but rather in the bad sense of “something is still missing for me to believe that”:
the street looks much more believable and “lively” with a few additions:
With an abandoned police station, a few different fundamental buildings, and other facades, a diverse and vibrant picture emerges. In doing so, the urban landscape is given the morbid look of an area where no one has found the time to maintain anything for 15 years through a “wear and tear” program.
These “building block cities” are particularly important for the survival MMO H1Z1 because after the release, they want to constantly expand the map and bring new variations of villages and towns into the game. The fans’ reaction to these pictures has already been positive. Fans are especially impressed by how the quality of the design increases significantly with just a few additional models and elements.
