They’re not zombies, they’re zeds.

The seemingly endless waves of running, crawling, hulking creatures you face in Killing Floor 3 aren’t the byproduct of the dead coming back to life, but rather a corporation’s bioweapon experimentation.

If you’re not familiar with the Killing Floor series, that distinction may not be that obvious.

But in an interview earlier this month, Bryan Wynia, Tripwire Interactive’s creative director, was quick to correct me when I likened his game’s horrific creatures to the undead.

“This is where we get super nerdy,” Wynia said. “If you can't tell, I'm a big horror fan. I've got a room full of monster model kits and skulls. I think one of the things that the team at Tripwire has done is distinguishing them from zombies.

“I know the common consumer calls [Killing Floor] a zombie wave-based shooter, but I think the devils in the details and we view these enemies as zeds.”

What’s the difference?

Well to Wynia, that means the creatures are bioengineered killing machines. Sort of a cross between a zombie and a Terminator.  And because they are created, they come in distinct forms, with distinct abilities.

“They’re not soulless, faceless, brain-eating zombies. And I think that's what helps give them a little bit more character.”

The distinction means that while a zombie-centric video game may tap into the plethora of zombie flicks for inspiration, the team at Tripwire have a much more gruesome set of inspirations, mostly drawn from the realm of body horror.

“I would say as far as the design of the game goes and the way that the world was built, there was a lot of looking into things like The Thing,” Wynia said.

Wynia said the team spent a lot of time watching the creations of people like director and writer David Cronenberg, considered the creator of the body horror genre.

“There was an examination of what elements make things unsettling,” he said.

While the creatures of Killing Floor 3 are body horror brought to life and out to kill you, the feel of the game is more inspired by another sort of specific horror: action horror. That included looking at movies like Aliens and Predator, films that feature a small group of people facing off against an impossible evil.

That also gets to one of the key elements of Killing Floor 3’s design: the team wanted to make a game that manages to deftly balance players on the razors edge between dying and just barely surviving. Get that wrong and, as a player, you either feel hopeless or overpowered.

“Balance is the name of the game,” he said. “We playtest daily, constantly, and we’re basically trying to find metrics on what’s the right number of zeds. What’s the right amount of ammo? What’s the right amount of rewarding the player?”

As an example, Wynia points to the shotgun. At one point the game had a shotgun that was really underpowered, and players would get eviscerated. But when they made the gun stronger, players no longer feared anything in the game. 

The team also spends a lot of time tweaking resource management, to ensure players both support one another but also are judicious with the purchased upgrades they make between rounds.

Fortunately, I was able to experience much of what Wynia and I spoke of during a play session with an early build of the game.
I dropped in alongside a handful of other media outlets and a dev or two to try my hand at surviving the encroaching waves of zeds.

The play session kicked off in a stronghold where players have an opportunity to select which of the six specialist classes they want to play as. They can also go in and level those classes up after running through a map. All said, the game will include 30 levels for each class as well as three skill categories and more than 30 skills per specialist.

Killing Floor 3 will launch with seven survival maps, three difficulty modes, 14 enemy classes, and three boss fights.

Once you’ve selected your class, you select the weapon you start with. There are 36 weapons spread out across the classes: 24 primary, six secondary, and six grenades. There are also six ultimate gadgets, and six tools. The weapons can also be tweaked with more than 150 mods.

After you’re kitted up, you hop on a shuttle and make your way to the killing floor.

Like most wave-based games, things tend to start out relatively easy, lulling you into a sense of confidence that you quickly realize can become a life-threatening misjudgment.

The zeds start to slip out from surprising places, attacking you from what Wynia likes to call “boo holes”. It’s an effective way to amp up the action and dread at the same time. There’s also plenty of other ways for the zeds to get to you, some might be slithering down the walls from above, slipping through vents, or even knocking through a wall like an unholy spike-fisted Kool-Aid Man.

You quickly learn to keep your team by your side and at your back. It becomes a rolling match of cover and fire.

Between the waves, you have an opportunity to spend earned credits to upgrade your weapon, buy extras, or swap to a different one all together. You also have to think about how to spend that money. Should you rank up your gun or give yourself better armor?

A few sessions in underscores why the franchise is so popular (Killing Floor 2 received dev support for nine years and maintained an impressive fanbase.) When a studio focuses on a very specific sort of play and iterates on that over time, the result can be a sort of singular experience that exceeds the traditional limitations of its genre.

Killing Floor 3 feels like that sort of game.

Surprisingly, it also manages to slip in a bit of narrative to the mix. Specifically a three-act campaign driven by in-game narrative assignments.

What does that mean in action?

It means you can decide, in the midst of a throwdown with your team against a horde of zeds, to wander off to find or complete an assignment. In my case, I walked around until I found an audio file that asked me to look for and gather evidence as we played through the map.

Allowing the player to decide if and when they want to engage in the story is a great idea, and it also creates a dynamic of pulling the team apart, with some players hunting for clues while the others do everything to survive without them.

Wynia said that the team is “really excited” about telling new stories within the world of Killing Floor, but that also didn’t really want to deviate from the franchise’s classic wave-based combat.

The game has character and specialist voice overs and environmental storytelling, but then they threw into that mix something they call an “evolving assignment campaign.”

“It’s a series of objectives that players have that can be everything from investigating a massacre at this Area 51-inspired military base, to uncovering various corpses across a variety of maps to kind of stitch this story together that’s very SCP or X-Files inspired,” Wynia said. “I’m very interested in telling stories about science gone wrong.”

He does have one suggestion for new players interested in those storylines:

“If we’re playing with a group and you want to run off and do your assignment while we were getting attacked by fleshpounds, you might want to focus on killing them before you try to investigate that audio log,” he said. “In the map, you have that freedom to check out assignments and objectives when you want.”

Killing Floor 3 takes place decades after the events of its predecessor, in the year 2091 and players are still facing off against the creations of megacorp Horzine. The game’s narrative is meant to fill in a lot of blanks, like why you are in particular locations, and the motives of some of the game’s villains.

I asked Wynia if there were any thoughts of expanding the Killing Floor universe past these wave-based games. He declined to say, but did note that the world of Killing Floor has a lot of stories to tell.

“Nightfall is a very new group of team members and we’re introducing a new villain: Moorcroft, that you’re going to hear a lot about,” he said. “I would be very interested in the future, in new ways that we could continue telling stories and building out the world of Killing Floor.”

Killing Floor 3 is available now for pre-purchase and a beta is set to hit the game later this month.

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