Overkill’s The Walking Dead team ‘knew it was going to tank’

Overkill's The Walking Dead sunk pretty much without trace following its messy launch on PC last November, and according to one anonymous source, the team knew the project was always destined to flop.

'Everyone knew it was going to tank,' the source told Eurogamer, during an in-depth feature on the fall of publisher Starbreeze Studios. 'No matter how much you polish a turd, it's still a turd. It was never going to get any better than where it was. It was always hacked.'

Eurogamer's report mentions that Overkill's The Walking Dead hit a massive stumbling block after its planned new engine, Valhalla, proved 'near unusable,' forcing the team to switch to Unreal Engine 4.

The team effectively had to turn around the whole project in 18 months, with a design team that were only about '10%' familiar with the engine. A source added: 'It's a beta game because we made it in a year-and-a-half.'

The game was delayed multiple times, having originally been planned to ship in 2016. The console release hasn't even come out yet; in fact, it's been delayed yet again, with no release date in sight.

Starbreeze itself has run into a load of problems as of late. First and most obvious, there's the underperformance of Overkill's The Walking Dead itself. Not long after the game's release, the publisher filed for reconstruction, and later found its office raided by Swedish authorities in early December, with one person detained.