The zombies are not magical dead people, but alive people infected with super-rabies, like in L4D or 28 Days Later. It’s a different gamemode, where raging people sprint at you on sight, but after a few weeks most of them starves to death and in some cases the infection mutates, so there maybe semi-sane people, who try to eat from animals too and drink water and are more careful about attacking you, or in some rare cases they may even pretend they are not infected. Initially the zombies are more spread around having chased after people trying to flee, maybe you could start with better survivors, like a street kid, or a left behind soldier. Maybe there could be a way to try to find a way out, or get away before the place gets bombed.
That’s essentially classic zombies when NPCs get fixed.
Except they don’t rise from the dead, you don’t want to fight them without a firearm, if that’s possible, because they are faster than you and really persistent with their chasing, and if one attacks you the rest will notice and follow. They could be found outside towns too, near crash sites, fuel station and maybe outside forests or randomly on bigger roads.
Also, after a couple of weeks most of them dies of starvation, but those, that don’t would be either really strong and agile from all the exercise they’ve been doing in the past weeks and they’d be consciously hunting for humans. And those that didn’t get a lot of food would be sneaky, trying to hide from you until you are really close. I’m picturing thin, crazy looking people that would wait for you on corners, behind trees, inside houses. They’d stay still until say you are entering the room they are waiting behind the door. Also, I could imagine you see only one or two zombies on the road, you decide to deal with them than once you are attacking them suddenly a lot of the sneaky ones would run at you from houses, from behind car wrecks and bushes.
The question begs is that if these people don’t come to life, then is the disease directly transmissible?
Would sound unfun if it was game over every time a zombie nipped or scratched you.
Also wondering what keeps rabies infectees from eating each other.
Well, maybe the emit pheromones that keep them calm.
I think this game mod would get boring really fast as they starve to death. Plus, going into any town in the beginning would be suicide if you can’t outrun zombies and can’t fight them at close-quarters.
I think classic zombies wouldn’t even have the raise from the dead feature, because that’s not classic zombies. That’s Cataclysm zombies.
[quote=“Sheb, post:5, topic:1597”]Well, maybe the emit pheromones that keep them calm.
I think this game mod would get boring really fast as they starve to death. Plus, going into any town in the beginning would be suicide if you can’t outrun zombies and can’t fight them at close-quarters.[/quote]
Except the ones that survive, evolve and are actively looking for people to kill, and the ones that are sneaking, hiding and waiting for you to get close to them, than an angry, crazy and distorted creature attacks you. You could get hints, like “You feel like someone is watching you.” “You think you saw something.” “You hear heavy breathing.”. They might even be able to track you to your hideout, which would make heavy sleeper and poor hearing really punishing.
Lost me at “…may even pretend they are not infected.”, intelligent zombies is not something I’d want to see.
Yea, the problem with “crazies” style zombies is that it only supports an “outbreak” scenario, not an “end of the world” scenario, and as you note over a very short amount of time the vast majority of them would starve, and only a few would that could manage to forage would be left to be a persistent, but occasional threat.
The answer to this is to leave them crazy, but intelligent, so they could forage inteligently (if they can open cans, they should be fine) There’s a technical problem with this, the AI code in the game is nonexistent, and no one is even working on it at the moment because the lack of AI isn’t a serious hinderance for most of the enemies. (arguably CHUDs fall in the same category and should have some intelligence to them, so expanding CHUDs might be a path forward for this sort of thing.)
I don’t have a problem with this concept in principle, but I don’t think it’s something we’ll be pursuing soon. That having been said, if someone is on fire about it, they can feel free 
I need to get into coding.
I imagined it as, you know in real life there are some dangerous sicknesses that get less dangerous over time, I mean what’s the point of running out of food source? So I thought that initially it would try to spread as fast as it can, but when it’s running out of food it would start mutating, trying to sustain less of it for longer.