Ever since the game’s announcement two years ago we’ve heard very little from State of Decay 3, which is the third installment in Undead Labs’ open-world survival horror game series. Although recently, the head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty, revealed a few facts about the game on the Major Nelson podcast on Xbox.
State of Decay and its sequel State of Decay 2 were great games that received massive developer support and also did very well commercially. After the release of State of Decay 2 in 2018, the studio was bought by Microsoft and announced State of Decay 3 in 2020. Although it was only CGI, completely different ambitions were shown in the presentation and graphics.
Unfortunately, the game experienced troubled development at the studio, which was blamed for a toxic work environment and key people leaving the studio, prompting Microsoft to step in to improve the situation. And it seems as though things are moving in the right direction.
In Major Nelson’s latest podcast, the head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty talked about the game and revealed that it uses the Unreal Engine 5 game engine, which should make it possible to deliver something really special, and that Undead Labs is getting help from the Coalition. This is the studio behind the Gears of War series, and this will help the studio in the development of the game, both in terms of Unreal Engine 5 and general gameplay.
During the podcast, the following was stated:
You mentioned Undead Labs, they’re working with The Coalition up in Vancouver, our Gears of War studio, using some of the technology around Unreal Engine 5 and some of the stuff that’s been in Gears of War before to bring that into State of Decay 3.
State of Decay 3 was formally announced over two years ago. At the time, developer Undead Labs said the game was still in early pre-production. However, five months ago, a report suggested that development issues were keeping the game still in pre-production, so let’s hope things are better now.
