The Walking Dead: Empires is a survival MMO game set in the thrilling and dangerous world of AMC’s The Walking Dead. Players can download and play the game for free on PC or Mac through Gala Games, then take on walkers and hostile survivors alike in an open-world strategic challenge for survival.
If you haven’t played The Walking Dead: Empires yet, follow this simple guide from the development team. It will take you through essentials like crafting, shelter, leveling and food gathering, as well as the added advantages of NFT item ownership.
To fully experience The Walking Dead: Empires, follow these key steps:
1. Hero Selection
Once you’ve installed the game, choose a hero. You’ll find beloved characters from the show, along with some new game-exclusive heroes you haven’t met yet! The variety of characters’ weapons and skill sets provides for unique gameplay experiences with every character you have available.
2. Early Game
Start your journey in an apocalyptic world crawling with walkers and all sorts of other dangers. Your primary objective is to gather materials, then use them for crafting to survive the challenges and enemies you encounter.
Tool and Weapon Crafting: Use the materials you’ve gathered to create tools and weapons. Crafting enhances your hero’s abilities and opens up a progression to higher-quality items. This is crucial for facing the increasingly difficult threats of the wasteland.
Shelter Construction: Collect resources like wood and metal to build and upgrade your shelter. A higher-level HQ offers stronger defenses, additional crafting stations, and improved facilities that provide key advantages.
Build HQ
Food Gathering and Preparations: Search and hunt for food to keep your hero in good condition. As you improve your culinary skills, you can craft meals that boost your hero’s recovery, which is vital for surviving tough battles.
NFTs: Owning and activating NFTs offers significant advantages that can enhance your gameplay experience. Player-owned items may include unique heroes, advanced crafting stations that allow you to create higher-quality tools, weapons, and other items. However, it is important to note that players who do not own NFTs can still enjoy the same gameplay experience. The core gameplay experience—focused on survival, combat, and shelter building—is accessible and equal for all players.
3. Leveling Up and Masteries:
Hero leveling: As you complete missions or explore the world while eliminating walkers, your hero gains experience (XP). Once you have enough XP, your character will level up. With each level, new skills and upgrades are unlocked, increasing your combat effectiveness and survival capabilities. Each level-up comes with specific requirements or conditions:
Mission and Exploration: Actively participating in missions and exploring new areas is key to earning XP. The more you engage in these activities, the faster you will level up.
Elimination of Walkers: Defeating enemies is also an important source of XP. Each enemy defeated contributes to your progress toward the next level.
Resource Gathering: While not directly related to leveling up, resource gathering is essential for keeping your character in good condition, allowing you to continue facing missions and battles.
HQ leveling: Upgrading your HQ is essential, as it directly affects your survival capabilities and shelter efficiency. A higher-level HQ unlocks more advanced interior structures, crafting stations, and stronger defensive structures, giving you a significant advantage against walkers. To level up your HQ, you need to collect specific resources such as wood and other valuable materials. The amount and type of resources required will increase with each upgrade level.
A higher-level HQ also improves the defense of your shelter, making your survival more sustainable. Additionally, as you progress in the game, walker herds become stronger and more numerous. A high-level HQ is crucial for withstanding attacks from these herds, protecting your hero and defending your resources.
Masteries: Specializations in different skill disciplines are known as masteries. By mastering a particular skill, you can craft high quality weapons, tools, and equipment that provide an edge in combat, exploration and defense. For example, tool crafting mastery can be leveled up by simply crafting more tools.
4. Gameplay Choices: Cooperative or Solo
The Walking Dead: Empires allows you to decide how to face this horrific new world. While you can choose to play solo, relying on your own skills alone to survive, there comes a point in the game where joining an alliance becomes almost essential. As you level up your HQ to higher levels, the herds of enemies attacking your base will become increasingly challenging, defending it alone nearly impossible. Working with other players in an alliance lets you share resources, overcome tough challenges, and effectively protect your base. This cooperative approach is key to surviving and thriving in the world of The Walking Dead.
Screenshots from game
Inventory: The snapshot shows the moment when the player collects supplies from an abandoned military truck and stores them in their inventory.Combat 1 and 2: Combat between the players and herds of walkers.Police station interior: Player inside the building in combat against mid-level enemies.Collect resources: Player using a crafted weapon to cut down a tree and collect wood.
The fight continues, survivors! The challenges of this apocalyptic world require that everyday people rise from the ashes. These new heroes can come from any background, boasting skills honed by the need to survive.
We’re continuing to build new systems and ways to survive in The Walking Dead: Empires. Before we talk about what’s in store for September, though, we still have one epic hero left in August…
Carol was an unlikely candidate for apocalyptic warrior, but she quickly proved herself to be infinitely adaptable, becoming fierce, reliable, and a major advantage to any group she supports. And soon, you could recruit her to help build your empire.
Carol Sale
This sale takes place on Friday, August 30th at 7am PT. Carol Hero Cards will follow a tiered pricing structure based on the remaining supply, with Common Hero Cards staying at one low price throughout the sale.
This sale is not time-limited; Carol will be available in The Walking Dead: Empires Store until the supply is exhausted or her remaining Hero Cards are taken down to make room for new heroes in the future.
Like our other direct Hero Card sales, any Carol purchased in this sale will fulfill directly to GalaChain, ready to play in the game!
September Updates
Just as your empire grows, The Walking Dead: Empires is hard at work to implement new ways of bringing the world of the apocalypse to life. Before we wrap up our August event cycle, we wanted to talk about what to expect in September.
We’ll be taking a break from the regular event cycle during September. We appreciate you participating in these events over the past months. We’ve learned a lot from them, and the insight you’ve contributed will help shape the game in the future!
The current event cycle will end after this weekend’s stockpile event closes on Monday, September 2nd. Good luck with this last leaderboard, survivors!
This last event begins tomorrow. Are you ready?
There will certainly be more events coming in the future, but for now our team is concentrating on some important features that we can’t wait to get out to you, including an all-new. dungeon system that players will hopefully be able to check out in October. These instanced areas will soon give you more ways to survive and new challenges to overcome.
The Fight to Survive
Tomorrow begins the last leaderboard event for a while. Are you going to show off a top score this weekend?
Whether or not you’re crafting up a storm to dominate the competition, starting tomorrow you can suit up as Carol to face the challenges ahead. Don’t just survive with your empire… grow your empire.
You need more to survive out there than just grit and strength. You need heart.
Today we’re proud to welcome back a hero who has plenty of compassion to go around, along with the ability to look at life in the apocalypse with a fresh eye. Anyone who watched him grow up in AMC’s The Walking Dead knows that Carl’s bravery and determination were the backbone of his family and the survivors around him. Now you can bring that unique strength to your empire!
Sale Details
This sale takes place on Friday, August 23rd at 7am PT. Carl Hero Cards will follow a tiered pricing structure based on the remaining supply, with Common Hero Cards staying at one low price throughout the sale.
This sale is not time limited, and Carl will remain available in The Walking Dead: Empires Store until the supply is exhausted or it is removed to make room for new heroes in the future.
Like our other direct Hero Card sales, Carl cards purchased in this sale will fulfill directly to GalaChain and be usable in the game right away!
Survival at Any Cost
A weekend Walker Wipeout is coming. Are you ready for the challenge? Have you scavenged enough this week to climb the leaderboard?
Carl will arrive for direct purchase tomorrow. Will you welcome him and see how great your empire could be?
When the outbreak began, billions of peoples’ stories changed drastically overnight. Only a small percentage survived. Some survivors would go on to become heroes of this new world, creating order from chaos and rebuilding from the ruins of the old world.
Tomorrow, the story of a new hero begins. An original character is coming to The Walking Dead: Empires Store – say hello to Eleonore!
Once upon a time, Eleonore was a journalist, chasing leads and finding meaning in the stories of others. Now, she uses those keen instincts and inquisitive nature to navigate the dangers of this world to survive. Your empire is young. Heroes with tenacity like Eleonore can help you grow strong.
Eleonore Sale Details
The Eleonore sale starts on Friday, August 16th at 7am PT. All rarities will be available in this sale.
The sale will continue until the supply has run out, or the card is removed to prepare for new Hero Cards.
All Eleonore Hero Cards will fulfill directly to GalaChain and will be immediately available to use within the game.
Eleonore’s a hardened survivor who wants to regain the sense of purpose she had in her old life. Building your empire could be that purpose.
Build the Future
This weekend starts the Build the Future event. Have you scavenged enough resources to climb to the top of the leaderboard?
Grow Your Empire
An empire isn’t built alone. You need heroes you can trust to fight like their lives depended on it. Eleonore is ready to do more than just survive. She’s ready to help your empire become the beacon the new world needs.
Hot diggity dog! It’s time for Negan to make his appearance in our weekly direct Hero Card sales.
Negan is a force to be reckoned with. Negan’s past actions were distasteful, to say the least… but no one can dispute that his leadership and strength helped The Saviors survive and rise to prominence. Sound like somebody who could help grow your empire?
Sale Details
This sale takes place on Friday, August 9th at 7am PT. Negan Hero Cards will follow a tiered pricing structure based on the remaining supply, with Common Hero Cards staying at one low price throughout the sale.
This sale is not time limited, and Negan will stay available in The Walking Dead: Empires Store until the supply is exhausted or it is taken down to make room for new Heroes in the future.
Like our other direct Hero Card sales, Negans purchased in this sale will fulfill directly to GalaChain and be usable in the game right away!
Survival at Any Cost
The new event cycle for August has begun. Are you ready for this weekend’s Walker Wipeout? Have you scavenged enough this week to climb the leaderboard?
Negan will arrive for direct purchase very soon. Will you add him to your empire? Lucille is thirsty, and Negan is ready to put her to work building your empire.
Today we are releasing a new build for The Walking Dead: Empires. For most players, you probably won’t notice any difference in your gameplay. On the tech side,however, this update is absolutely critical to future work we’re planning.
This build will add new tools to help us manipulate and adjust game code. Overall, it will speed up the process of implementing new features going forward.
The first major test of these new tools may be noticeable to some players. We’ll be adding the initial pieces of an all-new first time user experience. This will be an iterative process. Each step of this tutorial content will be added incrementally until the feature is complete.
Adjusted Event Schedule
As we said when we first released weekly events, we’re keeping a close eye on the data to make these are as fun and engaging for players as possible. This is what releasing a public development build is all about! We’re listening to your feedback and watching the data to continually refine and improve your experience while you survive.
First, the Survivor’s Trial XP event has been removed. We noticed that players weren’t engaging with this one as much as the others, so we’ve eliminated it entirely for right now.
Second, events will no longer last a full week. On Monday through Thursday each week, you’ll stock up those materials for the Deadland Scavenge event. Weekends will then alternate between events focused on crafting or wiping out walkers each week.
It’s our hope that these adjustments give the events a little more purpose, as you’ll be able to put the materials you gathered throughout the week to good use on the weekend!
As always, we’ll be watching the events closely and making adjustments as needed to improve.
Sasha Sale
Sasha will be the first direct purchase Hero available in August! Recruit Sasha to your empire on Friday, August 2nd at 7am PT.
Sasha was a hardened survivor, capable of fighting her way through incredible hardships. While she often carried the scars of the past, she never lost her ferocity or pragmatic instincts.
Starting this Friday, Sasha will be able to bring her abilities to your empire. Sasha was always there to fight for the people she cares about. Will your empire welcome her home?
This sale will run with a tiered pricing structure. As the supply of any rarity Uncommon or higher decreases, its price will incrementally increase.
Common Heroes will stay at one low price throughout the entire sale.
As usual, any Sasha purchased in this sale will fulfill directly to GalaChain and be usable in-game right away.
This sale will not be time-limited. All rarities will remain available until their supply is exhausted or until further notice.
Building Bigger
Thank you for playing the public development build of The Walking Dead: Empires! As we build more features and world, your feedback is indispensable for continually improving the game.
There’s definitely more coming for August, but this will get us started for now. Stay tuned for upcoming news, and don’t forget to grab Sasha in The Walking Dead: Empires store on Friday!
