Lifeless Brought Back to Life by Original Dev Duo
First released in Early Access in June 2016, Lifeless was a promising PvP-with-factions spin on the zombie survival/crafting genre. However, the game shut down a year later. Now, it’s back, and being rebuilt from the ground up by the original two developers.
The first version of Lifeless was published by Green Man Loaded, the publishing arm of digital store Green Man Gaming. For various reasons, including underperforming financially, Lifeless ran out of juice very quickly and promptly died.
“As you may know, Lifeless had a rough start. We always believed in the game’s potential, but various issues kept it from being the post-apocalyptic adventure we dreamed it could be,” said Kristoffer Blasiak, the CEO of former developer Rigid Soft and current co-founder for Lifeless’ new studio, Desync Donkey, on the game’s official site and Discord server.
“We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve (myself and Hampus Rosén) fully reacquired the rights to Lifeless and have been hard at work for the past few years (since 2021 to be exact) to bring you the game we always promised.”
A Zombie Game Without Legs
Lifeless initial release was met with healthy and optimistic praise from players, due to its focus on faction-based PvP, an open world, and relentless zombie menace. Favorable comparisons were made to Planetside 2, as well as gamers expressing their preference for Lifeless over similar games popular back then, such as H1Z1 and DayZ.
However, reviews soon soured once it became apparent that the developers were no longer paying attention to the game, after a minor patch in November 2016 signaled the last public effort by the studio to fix anything. Instead, the developers revealed a horde survival spin-off title, Super Death Arena, in January 2017.
Blasiak posted online at the same time that “the launch of Lifeless was unfortunately not very successful and it did not sell as many copies as we thought,” before elaborating upon his hopes for Super Death Arena and the future of Lifeless:
“The updates, performance tweaks and bug fixes done on Super Death Arena will be able to be transferred to Lifeless in a future patch too, so the work done on Super Death Arena will also have a positive effect on Lifeless in the future.”
“If Super Death Arena is successful we will be able to continue working on Lifeless as well. We have not given up, and we hope you understand the situation from our perspective.”
Super Death Arena itself died a death, with servers going offline by March 2017. Unsurprisingly, player blowback was swift and merciless, with many decrying the developers as being shameless cash-grab artists.
However, not everyone was against them as some players understood both the gamble of Early Access and the involvement of Green Man Loaded (which rebranded to Green Man Gaming Publishing in 2015 and is still going).
“Lifeless was handled badly either by the developers or by pressure and lack of support from Green Man Gaming. The fact that six months later and the developers are pretty much broke only goes to reinforce that idea,” said Larry, a user on the game’s original official forum in February 2017.
Back From The Dead
Both core developers, Basiak and Rosén, effectively dropped off social media in 2017 when Super Death Arena released, with the Lifeless account going silent, as well as their respective personal ones. Now, though, they’ve started an official Discord server and reinstated the Lifeless game page.
“Lifeless now runs on Unreal Engine 5.4.4 and the game is now a single player, co-op experience,” Basiak said on the game’s site. “We want you to feel safe that once you play Lifeless, it can never be taken away from you. This means that we also don’t want the game to have to rely on ANY infrastructure that you are not in control of.”
“Secondly, even if we enabled large PvP worlds, it would be infested and ruined by cheaters. If massive corporations can’t solve this problem, it would be naive to think that we could.”
Gamers in the Discord channel have expressed pleasant surprise at seeing Lifeless brought back from the dead, with most already helping to squash bugs and offer suggestions and advice to fix parts of the updated game. And, for those who have commented on things such as the lack of content right now, both developers, but primarily Basiak, have been very forthcoming with responses.
“Something that is very important, is that we are focusing on a stable base to work from. Making sure our core systems are working well and get balanced (with player feedback) before adding tons of new content. So while that is possibly not as entertaining, long term we think it’s going to make for a 10x better game,” Basiak said.
“We want to emphasize that Lifeless is still created by just two dedicated developers, myself and Hampus, in our spare time. Every feature, every fix, cup of coffee, every improvement comes from countless late-night sessions after our full-time jobs. Your ongoing support means everything to us.”
