State of Decay

Back in July Arktos Entertainment and Hammerpoint Interactive announced War Z, a survival based MMOFPS zombie, and then earlier this month Day Z was announced as a standalone release aiming for a Fall release. Now State of Decay, previously known as Class3, has been announced by Undead Labs as another survival based open world zombie game, except this one isn't first person and it isn't multiplayer like the War Z or Day Z. This game will give you a big dynamic open world full of zombies to fight and survivors to find. You can capture buildings and turn them into outposts or homes, which will keep the zombies away from that area and allow you to research new technology and provide a community for the survivors you find throughout the world. The game is pretty ambitious, just like the other two open world zombie survival games I mentioned, but they have already been working on the game for two years and have a lot of information available, plus there is quite a few screenshots and a first gameplay video. First up, take a look the game in action. It certainly looks a little rough and it doesn't have a release date yet, but they are going to release the game on PC and Xbox 360.

If you watched the video then you will likely share the same opinion that shooting looks terrible, but melee looks a bit more promising. With melee weapons you can chop off the limbs or heads of zombies and it doesn't sound all that easy to do, especially if you are facing multiple zombies. All of the weapons in the game will be craft-able and based on real world weapons, so there won't be anything crazy like basketball bombs or electric baseball bats. They may be adding durability to the game, but either way you will be able to find common melee weapons in buildings. However, you won't be able to use any random thing as a weapon and guns can only be found, not crafted. Different areas will have unique weapons and items, like military bases, plus you can find vehicles scattered around the world, vehicles that will need fuel. Fuel will also be used for many other things in the game, like crafting and generators.

State of Decay is planning to have nearly all of the functional buildings in the game to be capture-able and enter-able. You will set a main spot as your home, which is where you will conduct research, build new facilities, keep supplies, build a farm and a spot where you can sleep safely. Outposts are more refuge and supply areas that you can establish far away from your home. The only special thing a home needs to be made into a home, as opposed to an outpost, is a perimeter fence of some kind. When you are building a new structures you won't have total control over construction, like Minecraft, in order to make it fairly easy so you can focus more on other aspects of the game. Once you make a building an outpost or a home it will get an area of protection around that will not let zombies spawn in the area and it will be harder for zombies to infest nearby buildings, but none of that will stop zombies from other places from coming in and attacking that area.

The world will be changing as you go through it. Zombies will spawn, survivors will spawn and zombies will attack outposts and roam the world in the hordes. Everything will be more dangerous at night and zombies will obey the regular rules of sight and sound. During the day you might run into a few zombie loners, but at night they tend to be in much larger groups and much more aggressive. Since zombies can respawn you won't be able to permanently erase them from areas unless they are around an outpost or your home. Survivors will also respawn, but if too many die it will become increasingly difficult to find more. Survivors aren't going to be static entities either, you will have to earn their trust and each will have a different outlook. You may run into some that are openly friendly, while others are more reserved, but they haven't clarified if there will be the possibility of running into hostile survivors.

You, and the survivors, will need food and you will have to roam the world to gather supplies, but you can also eventually set up a farm at your home and eventually they want to add the option to have livestock. Presumably if you have a huge amount of outposts set up in the world you will need an immense amount of supplies to keep everyone well fed. You can send people out on missions to gather food or scout, plus you can call in assistance if you in a tricky situation, but I'm sure that is all relative to research and how developed your outposts and homes are. Each outpost and home will have a limit, based on the building, for how many survivors you can recruit.

State of Decay will have a story in the game, so it won't be entirely open ended sandbox with little lore and no direction. You start off in a mountain, coming back from a fishing trap, and run into a zombie apocalypse that has been going for two weeks. You will be able to technically finish the game, but even after that you can still come back into the world and keep playing. While State of Decay will be singleplayer only it will also have some persistent offline elements. If you had upgrades being built when you logged out then those will continue to build while you are offline, same goes for weapon repairs. Your communities will also slowly eat food while you are offline, so if you log off for months you may come back to a bunch of starving people and hopefully that means they will also give you time to rebuild your supplies before losing people if you are only playing every so often.

If the State of Decay release goes well and the game does well then they plan to turn the game into something very similar to the War Z and Day Z, a multiplayer zombie survival game. Much of this information has been revealed through Q&A's over the last couple of months and more of those should be coming, like one on character creation. State of Decay has some good ideas and sounds like the kind of zombie game I have always wanted to play, ever since I saw Night of the Living Dead in the 90's. Here is to hoping this is a great game, but for now we the impending releases of the War Z and DayZ standalone this Fall. Thanks for reading and for more information take a look at the links below.
Main Website: http://undeadlabs.com/stateofdecay/
Q&A #1: http://undeadlabs.com/forums
Q&A #2: http://undeadlabs.com/forums

-Written by Sean Cargle