STACK #163 May 2018

GAMES FEATURE

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You look out over your backyard.There are a few mates pitched in makeshift beds, a little campfire going, and a storeroom full of cool stuff. Everyone seems pretty relaxed.You look over the fence into the vast canyon beyond and notice about 20 zombies meandering towards you.This is State of Decay 2 . Words Alesha Kolbe F ive years after the original game’s release, State of Decay is returning to Xbox One and PC screens. A survival you to know that it’s a simulation game first, zombie game second. in Sydney. “We were a small team, creating our first product, with an unproven new IP. I’ve been in this industry for 20 years, but State of Decay was a very unknown formula. Even Microsoft was like, ‘we don’t even know

State of Decay released in 2013, but it was about six months prior that developer Undead Labs knew they needed a sequel. “When we had to announce that we weren’t going to be able to ship with multiplayer at release, that was a very painful decision,” Strain tells us at a hands-on event

game at its roots, the premise is all about creating and supporting a thriving anti-zombie community, by building up bases and making sure your people are well looked after. State of Decay 2 features co-op multiplayer, and Undead Labs’ founder Jeff Strain wants

what this is’. We did know, however, that the core experience we were making was begging for a co-op multiplayer, and that’s what everyone wanted after we shipped: ‘I just want to be able to play this game with my friends’. So, we knew that when we had to cut that in order to get the game out the door, we needed to do another one, and that if the game was even moderately successful, we had to do a sequel.” Once the team had decided that State of Decay 2 needed to ship with multiplayer – this game has drop-in, drop-out co-op gameplay – they had to start everything from scratch. “The thing about multiplayer is it’s not just something you can graft on after the fact; once you start developing the object model of the game, how items are represented, how characters move, all that stuff, if you haven’t built it around a networking model, you can’t simply graft it on and be happy with that,” Strain explains. “For us, working on State of Decay 2 , we knew we were going to have to change game engines this time around, and that was really frustrating for us, because usually when you build a sequel you

[ State of Decay 2 ] is a simulation game first, zombie game second

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MAY 2018

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