If you have been keeping a candle lit for State Of Decay 3 since its 2020 reveal trailer purely for the prospect of fighting a zombie deer then, I’m afraid, it’s time to blow that candle out. Apparently, the CGI reveal trailer was made when the open-world zombie survival game was barely a concept.
Six years on from the reveal, Undead Labs have a working build of the game and it doesn’t feature the reanimated corpse of Bambi.
Though it does let you turn a kettle into an IED.
“There really wasn’t a game or a game team when we were working on that trailer,” Undead Labs’ studio head Philip Holt told Youtube Sunny Games in a recent interview. “It was so early. It was like four or five people. The game was in a word document.”
Holt goes on to say that the trailer “represented a concept” and captured what they thought “might be cool to explore in State of Decay 3.” As the team began preproduction some of those ideas remained, others were dropped. “We’re not doing zombie animals,” he confirms.
State of Decay 3 isn’t the first game to have unrepresentative marketing, but considering the zombie deer was really the only thing that was new in the announcement it’s a disappointing quite so much of the smoke and mirrors turns out to be vapours.
Undead Labs now actually have a firm grip on what they’re making, and they aren’t purely in the business of putting out fluff trailers to pad Microsoft showcases, so Holt’s willing to give up a little of what State of Decay 3 will feature.
Set years after the zombie outbreak, instead of the weeks and months of the first game, “The world’s been picked clean,” Holt says. You won’t be finding cans of beans and boxes of ammo, instead you’re searching for materials to bring back to your settlement. “That’s going to allow you to craft or build weapons or improvised devices that you can then take back out into the world.”
That doesn’t sound like a significant departure from what was possible in State of Decay and State of Decay 2. Yes, in those games you found fully-made weapons out in the world instead of just the parts needed to craft them back at base, but does the additional crafting step add much?
?That said, I do enjoy the level of detail going into the crafting. “We talk internally a lot about maker culture, making use of what you find and then reassembling those into new things that you’re able to use in the game,” Holt says. Apparently, there’s a concept artist at the studio who tries to work out how to build all of the improvised weapons in the game, down to the circuitry of the weaponised upcycling. “He’s doing research on a tea kettle and how do you turn that into something that, as it whistles, attracts zombies and explodes. I’m just fearful that the Department of Homeland Security is going to break down our door at some point because we’re looking for how to build these bombs.”
I’ve put many hours into the State of Decay games over the years and I was looking forward to seeing some significant changes for the sequel, especially after the success of the last game. I’d hoped we would be seeing something that was a significant leap in ambition on what came before. Holt’s interview and the string of CGI trailers for the game haven’t shown that yet, but perhaps that will change when more information comes out from the State of Decay 3 alpha later this year.
