If you’ve ever wanted to prove you have what it takes to survive the zombie apocalypse, here is your chance!
We recently had a chance to pose some questions to the development team at Undead Labs, about their big project State of Decay.
This game was originally codenamed Class 3 and now gamers have a chance to learn more about what you can expect from this title fit for the month of October and Hallowe’en.
1. State of Decay is one of the upcoming games in the works for the XBox Live Arcade. What can gamers expect from it?
A kickass apocalypse simulator – an open world sandbox filled with zombies where you decide the survival strategy.
Which survivors will you rescue? What kind of base will you build? Do you want to focus on offense or defense? Who do you want to be after everything falls apart?
2. Survival appears to be a key element of SoD’s gameplay. How will survival elements play into the game’s overall mechanics? Will the player have a need for food, shelter, vehicles?
Survival is the whole point!
You need to decide on your base building strategy. Food and vehicles are finite resources. Once you loot the quickie mart, you’ll need to grow your own food. The factories have all closed down, so whatever vehicles you find are all that’s left – maybe you should rescue a survivor capable of keeping your vehicles running, if having a working truck is important for your community. Or it might not be important to you. Maybe you’d rather set up a machine shop to build molotov cocktails and landmines to take the battle to the zombies.
There’s no one right way to survive the apocalypse.
3. There are a number of different human characters seen in the game’s trailer. Will there be multiple playable characters? If so, how important is it to keep these other characters alive?
In State of Decay, you aren’t one character. You’re the whole community.
Instead of customizing a character with strength or charisma, you customize your group by rescuing a survivor with strength or charisma. You can switch between the viewpoints of everyone in your community. That’s important, because State of Decay has permadeath. If a survivor dies, he — and his skills and abilities — die with him.
Your choices are meaningful, and your choices have consequences. For more information on our concept, check out these two links:
http://undeadlabs.com/2012/08/news/who-do-you-think-you-are/
http://undeadlabs.com/forums/showthread.php?898-Followup-Q-amp-A-Customization-%288-17-12%29
4. Online interaction has been reported for this game as well. Would gameplay play out similar to a “Horde mode” or will online play be similar to State of Decay’s regular gameplay?
Our next game, codenamed “Class4″ will be an online game. State of Decay will launch as a single player game, though we hope to introduce a coop mode in the future.
5. State of Decay was originally titled Class 3. Why the name change?
It wasn’t a change, Class3 was the codename for State of Decay!
It’s an in-joke based on the Max Brooks Zombie Survival Guide: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Outbreaks
6. When can gamers first get their hands on State of Decay?
We are targeting early next year, and we can’t wait!
Please check out http://undeadlabs.com/about-state-of-decay/, especially all the links at the bottom of the page. We’ve been in design mode for two years and in hardcore development for one, so there’s a ton of good stuff available for interested gamers. Our forum community rocks, and the gang on Facebook is a riot.
http://undeadlabs.com/forums/forum.php
http://www.facebook.com/UndeadLabs
Special thanks goes out to Sanya Weathers, the Community Director at Undead Labs, for her support in hunting down the answers to our questions here at GameNTrain.
