Zombie apocalypse: Roleplay ideas? More than just surviving

[NNS10]

There are various zombie-type apocalypse mods out there. My preference is Draugnarok.

 

How do you roleplay it? Any ideas? Just surviving gets old fast.

 

I had one playthrough where the character had a motive for going around helping fight back the invasion in various cities, but that got old after a while. It's barely a step above surviving. That just becomes a cycle of fighting zombies/draugr non-stop and the purpose kind of gets lost.

[Kitty-Ears]

I have been wanting to make a Zombie Playthrough.

 

I wish there was a mod that did real zombies (I know there is one that adds zombies as a mob)

The Draug just are not really zombie like to me.

 

I plan on getting a hunger and thirst mod like ineed to make it harder to service. I pretty much want don't starve with zombies in Skyrim.

 

Maybe one day.

[NNS10]

There are other zombie mods, but Draugnarok has the best spawning mechanism.

 

28 Days and a Bit 5 has actual zombies, but zombies spawn from doors so it'll only feel like a zombie apocalypse in the cities and towns. You won't see many zombies while traveling outdoors.

[NNS10]

Necro'ing my old topic instead of creating a new topic to ask the same question.

 

I have an itch again for an apocalypse-type playthrough, but the same issue came up again: I'm not sure what else to do besides surviving, since that would get old fast.

 

For those of you who have successfully done zombie apocalypse roleplays before, what other goals do you have besides surviving? Any other mods you use to make that happen?

[inei1888]

In Oblivion, I got mods that would allow me to have anyone follow me so i could have a band of survivors to escape the city if a city went to shit.  I would have them follow me to a remote location and build a makeshift refugee camp, I would keep going until I had done so with all areas.  Of course, that mod had zombies outside the cities.  Not sure if this is a mod for either game, but I would love to be able to build fortifications to hold off a zombie invasion.

[NNS10]

I think there are mods to build fortifications, but I don't think there's a mod to get the zombies to wander and attack your fort.

 

Also, does no one really have any comments on this? I would've figured an apocalypse-type playthrough would've been a popular thing many people attempt at least a few times...

[GrimReaper]

I suppose Skyrim is just the wrong game for zombie survival, for many reasons.

[NNS10]

I suppose Skyrim is just the wrong game for zombie survival, for many reasons.

 

In a world where there are essentially zombies already (draugr) ?

[carnifex]

Draugr aren't really zombies, they're more like mummies - ancient corpses preserved by blasphemous magic, rising up to punish those foolish enough to disturb the lifeless peace of their tombs and awaiting the return of their dark gods.

 

But that's more of a nitpick, because the issue is not with lore, but with the mechanics of the game. Whether we're talking draugr or other kind of undead, the game world isn't programmed to react to a mass invasion scenario, and as far as I know, existing mods that introduce such a scenario don't do much besides creating a mechanic that throws a lot of zombies at you and the cities. With the NPCs oblivious to the apocalypse (except in the very moment the undead are charging to gnaw their faces off) and with no way to deal with the invasion other than killing whatever zombies the game spawns near you, it's hard, if not impossible, to really do anything except try and survive, because the game won't recognize any other objectives you might set for yourself.

[GrimReaper]

^

 

That and draugr are too intelligent. You'd need brand new animations to make them behave like zombies and strip them of all their weapons. Have you seen how silly a draugr attacks without weapons? They're just slapping you. But of course, one could change that accordingly - but you'd still have the problem that the game itself doesn't do well with big scale battles, the game is too small for a believable survival setting and the setting of Skyrim itself - medieval fantasy with a few steampunk (dwemer) elements - is not really one that is fitting for a zombie apocalypse.

 

I'd say with Fallout 4 we have a much bigger chance for a nice zombie total conversion.

[Kaz Aanh]

Just install better females by bella and you have a perfect zombie apocalypse mod.

[carnifex]

I wouldn't say Skyrim is the wrong setting for such a scenario - arguably, it would be more interesting and less explored to have an honest to god zombie apocalypse in a fantasy setting as opposed to modern and/or post-apocalypse settings.

 

I'm saying that current mods don't really support any scenario other than survival, and the base game doesn't really react to the scenario in a way that would encourage emergent gameplay.

[GrimReaper]

I wouldn't say Skyrim is the wrong setting for such a scenario - arguably, it would be more interesting and less explored to have an honest to god zombie apocalypse in a fantasy setting as opposed to modern and/or post-apocalypse settings.

 

I'm saying that current mods don't really support any scenario other than survival, and the base game doesn't really react to the scenario in a way that would encourage emergent gameplay.

 

The zombie genre mostly works because the premise is to fight a supernatural/magical threat - because, let's face it, there's no way you can explain zombies other than some sort of magic mumbo jumbo going on, even if you try to explain that it's caused by a virus - with what's there in real life. In a fantasy setting, zombies would just be another magical threat on top of all the magical threats that are there in the first place. A few mages and priests could obliberate thousands of zombies without breaking a sweat. Necromancers could raise their own dead to fight the zombies or just take control of the zombies etc.

 

I'd like to see a non-fantasy medieval setting with zombies, though. That's something that could work well if done right, imo.

[carnifex]

Arguably, Fallout has the same problem - it's already a (science) fantasy setting, and any zombie virus would be just another fantastic menace to be dealt with in the wasteland.

 

I'd posit TES magic isn't powerful enough to make a zombie invasion a non-threat. Faced with thousands of zombies, most mages of Tamriel would fare about as well as professional soldiers fare in modern zombie fiction - kill a bunch of them, run out of ammo (magicka), get eaten.

[GrimReaper]

Fallout has some wonky stuff in it, but I wouldn't call it fantasy in the same way you call TES fantasy. A zombie virus would still be deadly in the wasteland because people can't rely on spells or holy magic to instantly fry an army of undead. A zombie apocalypse in the Fallout universe would still follow the rules of the average zombie survival setting, for the most part. Sure, you have some nonsense about how radiation works for example, but you can't use that to your advantage when fighting zombies. The only thing that would give you an edge compared to what we have available IRL is things like robots, energy weapons and power armor. Though none of these are readily available for your average wasteland survivor.

 

 

I doubt that tbh. A single mage is more than capable of killing hundreds of undead, and that isn't even taking into account what priests could do - those guys and gals are generally the best for instantly destroying undead. If you fling fireballs or freeze everyone solid, zombies become much less of a threat. You don't even need to hit them in the head because the fire will eat through everything and when they're frozen they can't do jack shit. If you have some holy magic on your side to keep the undead from entering the very ground on which you walk, it'll be even more of a joke to deal with them.

[carnifex]

Let me put it this way: at the core of all zombie fiction lies the shock factor of something blatantly supernatural and malicious happening in a very mundane world (a common trope in other horror stories as well). You won't get that effect in either Fallout or TES, because both settings have blatantly supernatural elements, generally employed in a way that evokes wonderment and amusement, not primal terror.

 

Likewise, you can still have a zombie apocalypse in either setting, it will just feel noticably different (both from the baseline scenario and from each other). That's not necessarily a bad thing, because mixing things up staves off ennui and lets us develop a whole new level of appreciation of our favorite genres by helping us understand what makes them work.

 

Consider that the mechanics of TES games don't necessarily accurately mirror the lore of the world, in the sense that what your character can do is not necessarily the same as what the world assumes a similarly skilled character can do. With that in mind, I don't recall many stories in TES lore about single mages taking out entire armies or even squads. In fact, if you read an in-game book titled A Hypothetical Treachery, you'll see in it that running out is a serious problem for mages, even seasoned adventurers, which leads me to believe the abilities of a player character mage in any Elder Scrolls game are exaggerated compared to what is expected of a mage in the setting. And even discounting that, an average mage in Tamriel isn't an Expert of Destruction magic loaded on powerful magical items and hoarding one hundred Magicka potions in their backpack. Hence, I posit the threat of a necromantic contagion mirroring the effects of every zombie virus ever would be much more dire than you give them credit for - sure, it probably wouldn't be more terrifying to people than massive invasions from a plane of Oblivion, or the return of the World Eater, or madmen building giant God-Golems... you get the point but I'd say it would be about comparable, assuming an outbreak that spans across an entire province.

 

Hell, now that I think of it, the Blight diseases in Morrowind were quite a lot like your usual zombie virus, and the Blight was considered a major problem in that story.