Its like the year of the zombie games. Yet another 2012 open world zombie game being planned for a fall release. (NOW SUMMER 2013)
At least the car physics when hitting zombies and zombies attacking the cars looks cool and at least its something new, I also like the fortification of a base prospect mentioned.
The end is here. Life as you knew it has gone to hell after the mother of all zombie outbreaks. Now you and the few scattered survivors must band together to survive and rebuild in a 3rd-person action game set in a dynamic open world. You choose where to make your stand, designing and fortifying your home base, performing daring raids for food and ammunition, and rescuing other playable survivors with unique talents. The open, sandbox world develops in real-time, shaped by your actions, dynamically generating content based on your choices and the ever-increasing zombie threat.
State of Decay is an open world zombie-survival game, currently under development at Undead Labs for release on Xbox 360 / Xbox LIVE Arcade and PC.
Yeah, a lack of any sort of coop makes it much harder for me to raise any amount of give a shit about a game, unless we’re talking something absolutely amazing.
However, I’d thought I’d heard some buzz that there was multiplayer planned for this game.
I remember hearing about this project back when it was just “Class 3” and the MMO was “Class 4” or something like that. Too bad that DayZ has stolen a lot of their thunder.
I’m interested, but the concept seems a bit ambitious for a fledgling studio, especially with plans for a XBLA version.
Ars had a write-up about this with one of the devs crowing about their dynamic systems. Techno-doublespeak for random encounters aside, the game calculating progress for the interval between play sessions sounds interesting. It could be either really cool, or totally aggravating.
And, again, that simulation doesn’t stop when you stop playing. “When you stop playing the game for the day, conceptually the world is still running,” Strain said. “When you start up the game, what we effectively do is look at the amount of time that’s elapsed and forward the simulation by that amount of time. We’re careful not to punish you for that. You’re not gonna log back in after two weeks and find your bases destroyed and all your people are sick, but as a conceptual design platform we do say that time goes on, even when you’re not there.”
The kind of world a player returns to in a new State of Decay play session will depend largely on how the player’s behaved in the last play session. If you made sure your people had growing food and ammunition workshops and medical facilities in their safe house, they’ll be in good shape when you log back in. If you didn’t plan for the future, though, you might find your survivors have gotten into an untenable situation.
Since they are going the full sim route, I hope they will operate in a somewhat realsitic manner in dealing with the zombie population. By that, I mean “in theory” that there are a finite number of zombies and these zombies must travel by conventional means. For example, you clear out a small area, that area will stay clear unless zombies actually wander in from a neighboring area (thus reducing the pool of zombies from the other area). What I want to avoid are zombies that simply spawn in from nowhere.
This way it would be possible to reclaim a small town with only zombies coming in from the outside areas (presumably you could build walls around the whole place) and cleared out buildings would remain safe.
And, again, that simulation doesn’t stop when you stop playing. “When you stop playing the game for the day, conceptually the world is still running,” Strain said. “When you start up the game, what we effectively do is look at the amount of time that’s elapsed and forward the simulation by that amount of time. We’re careful not to punish you for that. You’re not gonna log back in after two weeks and find your bases destroyed and all your people are sick, but as a conceptual design platform we do say that time goes on, even when you’re not there.”
The kind of world a player returns to in a new State of Decay play session will depend largely on how the player’s behaved in the last play session. If you made sure your people had growing food and ammunition workshops and medical facilities in their safe house, they’ll be in good shape when you log back in. If you didn’t plan for the future, though, you might find your survivors have gotten into an untenable situation.
These two paragraphs directly contradict each other. Good reporting.
I saw the article and am curious as well. I won’t be getting it on Xbox so I have no clue how or when I will playing it. Assuming of course I have enough interest to overcome whatever price I end up staring at. I thought I saw in an update that they are really hopefully about the fifth for XBLA.
