State of Decay 3 was announced back in 2020 with an eye-catching debut trailer that showed a zombie deer eating the remains of a wolf. It got fans of the survival series excited that they would not only have to context with your typical zombie menace when the game eventually came out, but zombie animals, too. Unfortunately, State of Decay 3 will launch without zombie animals of any kind, and that trailer was little more than a “concept” built at a time when there was essentially no game to speak of.
Six years after State of Decay 3’s announcement, developer Undead Labs is readying the game for an alpha test. It is finally ready, then, for the public to give it a shot, having come a long way since that trailer helped get Xbox fans for the upcoming Xbox Series X and S. So what happened to those zombie animals, then? In an interview with Sunny Games, Head of Undead Labs, Philip Holt, said that as the developers got to work making State of Decay 3 a reality, they realized some things they’d initially thought were cool ideas simply weren’t going to work.
“No zombie deer,” Holt said. “So that trailer, there really wasn’t a game or a game team when we were working on that trailer. It was so early. There were like four or five people. The game was in a Word document. There was really like the very beginnings of software.
“The trailer was done by Blur. It was all pre-rendered. It represented, I think, a concept, our thoughts at the time of what might be cool to explore in State of Decay 3. And as we’ve had a chance to build the team and get going on the game, some of those elements, I think, are going to persist in the game that we deliver. And some of those things, we’re just like, yeah, we’re not doing zombie animals.”
“Okay, well, you guys heard it,” Sunny said in response. “There’s no zombie animals. I got to say I’m a little bummed about that, but either way, I thought it was kind of an interesting concept, but it makes sense.”
Zombie animals weren’t the only thing about the trailer that got fans excited. As Sunny pointed out in the interview, the trailer also suggested snow and camping as mechanics. Will those make it into the game? With the alpha due out in May, we’ll find out soon.
State of Decay 3 became the sole focus of Undead Labs in September 2024, with the developer ending updates for State of Decay 2. Undead Labs released nearly 40 content updates for State of Decay 2 in the six years since its 2018 launch on PC and Xbox One to that point.
We also learned that Undead Labs had teamed up with Fallout: New Vegas, Grounded, and Avowed developer Obsidian on a “shared world feature” that aimed to provide a more flexible online co-op experience for State of Decay 3 players.
“The acclaimed Grounded released with Undead Labs’ shared save technology and State of Decay 3 will build on that to deliver a truly open co-op world owned by multiple players,” Microsoft teased at the time. There’s still no release date for State of Decay 3.
Undead Labs itself has faced allegations of fostering toxic workplace conditions and a lack of direction.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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