A new dawn rises in State of Decay 2 [review]

To be clear, I merely argue that Doppelgangers in BS are superior to Chef Boyardee Romero Zombies. I agree that the 70s version is superior.

I agree on The Thing, Carpenter is King.

On “The Blob”, you need to grow some Steve McQueens and wake the F up!

Christian Nyby’s (allegedly really Howard Hawks’) The Thing From Another World is so markedly different from the Carpenter film (adherence to the source material for one thing) that comparing the two is pointless.

The 50’s version is silly but it has two Hawks hallmarks - great dialogue, and a strong female lead, a rarity for genre films of that era.

I was on the fence about getting this. I really liked the original but the initial review weren’t great.
However, your review got me to change my mind. But not being on Steam is a show stopper for me. Life is too short and my game backlog to long to have deal with Microsoft only platform.

Agree 100%—Someone’s been watching TCM or Filmstruck! :) I can watch Hawks’ films repeatedly.

Will this ever come to Steam? Or, Why I hate exclusives (including on Epic).

I am betting on YEP, and probably 1 year after release.

I don’t think it will ever come to Steam now that MS owns the studio outright and this is basically a first-party title like Halo.

Yeah, I would also be very surprised if this ever showed up on Steam, for the reason rei cites. This is an MS exclusive developed by an in-house studio. Seems like the kind of thing they’ll keep on their own platform.

Digital distribution exclusives really are kind of amazing. Imagine if you could only get Monopoly at the Hasbro Store in town back in the day.

I liken it to VHS vs BETA. BETA made the mistake of not allowing everyone to build their machines, and Sony kept the tech for themselves. Even though BETA was the better format, it sank due to market saturation of VHS machines. Same thing happened early on with Apple vs Windows.

This is exactly what I wanted:

More information here. Out March 26th as a free update.

-Tom

Same here. I have a lot of hours in SoD2, but in the end I really can’t enthuse on it the way I could with SoD1. These changes should certainly perk things up.

I was told by one of the developers today that he thinks I’m going to lose a community once the free update arrives. I think he intended it as a warning, but I would love for such a thing to happen!

-Tom

This alone’ll be a huge immersive change.

Looking forward to it!
NOT looking forward to feral packs unless I’m in a car. Yikes.

Considering now, even after the “accidental” slight difficulty change, I deliberately have to make my survivors do really stupid crap (half-dead, out of ammo, accidentally hit RB with fuel bomb equipped) in order to get them killed. Yes. I can’t wait to mourn my survivors.

I need to take a second look at State of Decay 2 if losing survivors isn’t as frequent as in the first game. In the first game if I ever survived a play session, when I came back a few days later to play again, I always lost that survivor on the second session. Always.

I tried SoD2 recently based on all the good things said here but dropped it after being in a giant evacuated encampment that was visually full of various things that could be used as weapons only to have to search for what was essentially a 3d version of old Sierra adventure games’ hot spot to light up to find anything I could pick up. The immersion was great until I realized it was just 99% static visuals I couldn’t interact with.

I kinda liked the first one so maybe I’ll go back to this at some point.

Is the Heartland expansion for SoD2 supposed to be out on Gamepass now? My install button is greyed out.

Oh my god, these storylines are the absolute worst. I wish post-apocalyptic games would stop making the driving force of the story to be finding a missing person. What an absolute drag.

From IGN:

One story has players following a woman on her quest to find a father she never knew who hasn’t been seen since the outbreak. The last place he was seen was Trumbull Valley.

The other tale has you following a man finding a hero he’s never met who hasn’t radioed in days. The last time he heard his hero’s voice he was in Trumbull Valley.

I’d rather hunt for a Water Chip any day of the week.

I thought they were saying they had to get back to Troma Valley, which I thought was pretty funny.