Payday studio delays its Walking Dead game to the back half of 2017

It seems that Overkill went a bit Underkill on the release date for its first-person The Walking Dead adaptation. Publisher Starbreeze announced that Overkill's The Walking Dead is now planned for release in the second half of 2017 instead of sometime in 2016.

According to Starbreeze, which owns Overkill, this is the good kind of delay: a big investment from Korean game company Smilegate will allow Overkill to expand the game and launch it in Asian and western markets simultaneously. The Payday studio will also work on a "premium" co-op PC game based on Smilegate's Crossfire online shooter franchise. Meanwhile, Fast & Furious producer Neal Moritz is adapting Crossfire into a film, so expect to see a lot more of it in the coming years.

Getting back to zombies, Overkill's take on The Walking Dead franchise will be first-person, have online co-op, and take place in a “bigger world than Payday currently encompasses". Overkill hasn't revealed much else about it so far, although we do know it will be based on the original graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, rather than the AMC television show. The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct pretty well salted the earth for shooters based on the TV show.

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar+.