State of Decay 3 made an impact at the 2020 Xbox Games Showcase with a slick trailer that teased features that wouldn’t make the final cut, like undead deer and frigid landscapes. Six years later, things have changed at developer Undead Labs as it navigates life after Xbox and a shift in gameplay design that led the studio to ditch ideas to make State of Decay 3 an MMO.
Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain planned to make the threequel far bigger than its predecessors, and after his departure in 2019, several design team members kept building the tools to support that vision. Speaking to GamesIndustry.Biz, Undead Labs CEO Philip Holt said the studio scrapped this plan by the end of 2022, choosing instead to rebuild State of Decay 3 to more closely resemble the first two games, which offered both single-player and co-op modes.
“When the founder was here, I think he always had a vision of making an MMO and the ultimate global scale of a zombie apocalypse,” Holt said. “And so there was just a different set of creative objectives the team was trying to pursue at that time.”
Holt, who previously worked at Guild Wars developer ArenaNet, was well familiar with how challenging it can be to build and maintain an MMO, especially if it becomes successful. Undead Labs eventually pivoted away from its MMO goals for State of Decay 3, and Holt added that the current version has been in development since 2023.
“We basically rewrote the entire State of Decay game, and we will not do that again,” Holt added. “We have the benefit now of this pretty significant investment in software that we got to figure out how to make the most of. I think it’s highly unlikely that we spend as much time on the next game as we did on State of Decay 3.”
Holt previously said the 2020 trailer was made to keep the project and the studio on Microsoft’s radar. Since then, Xbox has divested itself of Undead Labs–and several other studios–and the developer has become an independent employee-owned entity. State of Decay 3 doesn’t have a release date yet, but it is still coming to Xbox Game Pass.