Scopely's Jori Pearsall Talks The Walking Dead: Road To Survival

For more than a week, viral websites and phone calls set the stage for something big coming out of the world of Skybound's The Walking Dead -- and then on Thursday it was revealed as The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, a new, free-to-play mobile game from Scopely and Skybound set in the world of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's comic book series and centering on the city of Woodbury, GA.

The game will track the rise and fall of The Governor -- at least at first. Developers are billing it as an experience, with in-app purchases, new features added regularly and literally years of new content planned which will ultimately nudge players in the direction of the All-Out War storyline...something you can already start to see being set up in a system of factions, wherein the game allows you to choose alliances and team with other players for cooperative play.

Jori Pearsall, VP of Product at Scopely, joined ComicBook.com to talk about another ambitious take on the world of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead.

It's uncommon to see such a cool, elaborate viral campaign launched for a free-to-play mobile game. What made you guys decide to do that?

When you think about the types of games we're trying to make, I think the industry has shifted a lot. This is going to be a service that we're going to be delivering to our fans and to our players for three-plus years to come, so establishing that momentum and setting the stage that this isn't a throwaway product that you're going to play for a few days and then forget about. This is something that's going to be around for a long time to come and is going to be a AAA game, we wanted to give it a AAA release.

You're also seeing your ability to get momentum and visibility in the App Store is requiring a larger and larger effort these days and when you bring together an integrated launch campaign and tie it all together, the reach that you can get is a step function larger than if you'd slowly set it out there and waited to see what happens.

Can you talk a little bit about what makes Road to Survival different from the other The Walking Dead games out there?

As far as I know, this is the first free to play game of this type based on Robert Kirkman's comic series. It's really true to the comics, and there's a community that's going to be engaged and maintained for years and years. We already have a plan of content for the next several months.

The storyline's going to continue to progress. We have big features that we're planning to roll out. We see this as the start of creating a game community that's going to stick around for a long time

In terms of the gameplay itself, I think this is the first time on mobile that The Walking Dead fans have been able to engage in this particular storyline. We worked with Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga to trace the rise and fall of the Governor, and we crafted our story around Woodbury as kind of the center point -- what was going on before Governor came to power, and parallel pathing that story.

I think it will be exciting for fans because it's a different angle than they might have gotten to see before but still familiar to anyone who just generally knows of The Walking Dead. We touch on elements like the prison battle and character that everyone's familiar with.

In a lot of ways, the prison was the watershed moment for the series, but some fans think that it never really exceeded that. Did you want to start there in part to make sure different kinds of fans all came with something to love?

Where that really came from was, what's the starting point? How do we capture this world? What's the starting point that we can anchor to and then build on top of?

We're really excited to be able to use Woodbury as that anchor point and explore the old canon but we already have plans to kind of drive the story toward Alexandria and we're very tactfully thinking of how we introduce Negan later on. We're pacing it out, and we're trying to plan for the next two plus years already.

Obviously the book took on a different pace and a different tone as it moved through some of those stories. Will that be reflected in the gameplay?

I think the deeper into the story we go, the more we're trying to shift the focus.

If you're paying through the game you'll notice that early in the game, there's a lot of dealing with walkers, the very visceral "gotta get through to the next moment" kind of storytelling. The deeper we go, we want to focus our attention on the community in the game and kind of inter-group rivalries. A lot of the features we're introducing are trying to support that. You can already join a faction, and we're going to extend that out so that there's conflict between the factions down the line and take those steps in that All-Out War kind of direction. That's the thing about the world of The Walking Dead: there's the constant threat of walkers around you at all times but really the biggest threat is the other groups.

As soon as you start putting people into factions and pitting them against each other, I have to wonder: Is this a game that will be conducive to or enjoyable for casual gamers who just want to try it out because they like The Walking Dead?

We tried to design the game from the ground up to support The Walking Dead fans of all levels of gaming experience.

So if you are kind of the more casual player, what we're expecting is you'll engage in the story line and this progression through the various zones and that kind of story arc and that should be relatively easy to get into the rhythm of what you're doing.

Then we also have a feature called the roadmap where we have time-limited stories that pop up on a regular basis. That's our way of providing something that's really fresh and engaging for people who care a ton about the characters, about the story, exploring backstories from characters that haven't really been explored in depth before and new stories and characters we're introducing into the product.

The plan is for every week to introduce more stories and more kind of bite-sized pieces of gameplay.

For people who are really into it from a competitive, player vs. player aspect, we have factions if you like engaging with the community, we have a number of different ways that you can start going really really deep in terms of making your team stronger, spreading it out, working on strategic challenges.

We really did everything we could to make it as appealing to the broadest base possible but giving the mega-gamers something unique and interesting.

Do you have an endgame place? You've said "2-3 years" a few times.

Our plan is basically to operate the game for as long as humanly possible. We already have product that has been growing for four-plus years. I would love to get on the phone with you four or five years from now and say it's still going strong and it's still supporting fresh and engaging content. As long as we can keep doing that, we'll keep making it.

Any last thoughts on the launch?

A couple of things that are a really exciting for me: we hit top free app in the app store this morning in the U.S. and we're in the top ten in over 50 countries already. That's a really exciting validation that a pretty broad audience of fans are excited about the product.

We didn't touch on the gamer side of things. I think being someone who historically has made a good number of mobile RPGs, I was really excited about this product. If you compare it to most of the other successful PRGs in the market this is a much more mature, visceral experience. Characters have to make choices that are morally ambiguous, and they carry with them meaningful consequences, as authentic to The Walking Dead world as possible. That's just not something you see in free to play mobile RPGs today. Bringing that to an audience that I think is excited for that is really exciting.