Undead Labs’ studio head Philip Holt has explained the six-year gap between when State of Decay 3 was announced and its re-reveal this past week.
Holt told Sunny Games that State of Decay 3’s announcement trailer from 2020 was not actually of the game. “There really wasn’t a game or game team when we were working on that trailer, like, it was so early,” he said, adding that only about four or five people were working on the game then.
“The game was in a Word document,” he added, as reported by GamesRadar.
Undead Labs didn’t go totally dark after announcing State of Decay 3 in 2020, as the game got another trailer in 2024, but again, it was a cinematic trailer and didn’t have gameplay. Another high-profile game, The Witcher 4, had a trailer that fans originally thought was the game, but was actually a tech demo.
It is a fairly common practice for developers to announce games very, very early with CGI footage for the purpose of recruiting staff, and that seems to be what Undead Labs did with State of Decay 3. Holt went on to point out that the announcement trailer for State of Decay 3 was made by the visual effects studio Blur and that the footage was all pre-rendered and not of the game itself.
The trailer, he said, represented a “concept” or what the studio thought “might be cool” to explore as ideas in State of Decay 3, as opposed to a representation of what the studio was actually making.
“As we’ve had a chance to build a team and get going on the game, some of those elements I think are gonna persist in the game that we deliver,” he said.
Not everything in the trailer will be in the game, though. Holt confirmed that the “zombie animals” that showed up in the trailer, including the zombified deer, will not be in the full game.
State of Decay 3 recently resurfaced out of nowhere, with Undead Labs also announcing an upcoming alpha test for the zombie game. The game’s alpha begins in May, but the full game doesn’t have a release date yet. It will be the first new game in the series since 2018’s State of Decay 2, and it’s coming to Xbox Series X|S and PC.