The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Dev Log Gives BTS Look In Creating Zombified New Orleans

I have to take my hats off to The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners‘ marketing team. I’m what you might call an anti-fan of VR. If you tell me something is coming out on VR, I instantly assume it’s going to be unfinished garbage. A lot of this prejudice comes from the early days, a dark time when E3 demos had a good chance of being nausea-inducing nightmares. I understand that the technology has come a long way, but most VR games still haven’t evolved past gimmicky bullshit. There are only so many whacky offices I can flail around in before the shtick gets stale.

Then here comes The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have me excited. The game looks like an actual game, focusing on moral choices, exploration, and violent zombie kills. On top of that, they’ve been doing a great job of promoting the game beyond your stock standard trailers. They made an entire podcast just to set the stage, which is something they really didn’t need to do given the existing The Walking Dead canon. The Special Edition unicorn backpack is a collector’s item I actually want. And on top of all of that, Skydance Interactive has been releasing a series of BTS videos to give us a better idea of what went into making Saints & SInners.

In the newest BTS video, Skydance explains how they approached creating the story for The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. As they are working within the existing The Walking Dead IP, it’s important to create something that feels like part of that original world while still being its own unique story. The team goes on to explain that they are focusing on the human stories that make The Walking Dead so iconic. Still, players will be able to pick up Saints & SInners without any previous The Walking Dead knowledge. All of the characters are new, and New Orleans has its own slew of factions, conflicts, and local legends. Just watch the video above for the full story.

Personally, I’m all on board for distancing Saints & Sinners as much as possible from the source material. I don’t know anyone other than my dad that still considers themselves a hardcore The Walking Dead fan. The best The Walking Dead games have nothing to do with the existing comics/shows. And besides, the comic series was created to show just one story in a much larger world. The core of The Walking Dead isn’t Rick Grimes, it’s the world in decline and subsequent struggle back to something more civilized. I want to see what’s happening in Japan, Russia, Poland, wherever. Hopefully, this is a big step towards an expansive extended canon.

So whether you want to see this new slice of The Walking Dead world or just want to kill zombies in VR, you won’t have to wait long. The Walking Dead: Saints & SInners comes out on January 23rd for the HTC Vive, Valve Index, Occulus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality. You can pick it up for $39.99. You can find more information by clicking here for the Steam store page.