State of Decay

[Roxas65]

Any fans of zombie survival games should check this gem out.

I realize that there has been a lot of zombie survival games lately, but this one is different in the way that it doesn't focus on only -your- survival, but more the survival of a community.

What does this mean? Well, early on in the story -- Yes, there is a story. more on that later. -- you will be introduced to a community housed in the town church. From this point forward, this group's survival is in your hands. You will have to go on supply runs to get food, medicine and other stuff that you need to survive and expand. These supplies are all finite and as the game goes on will become more and more scarce and force the player to get increasingly ballsy to get what he needs.

With these supplies you build additions to your base such as farming areas and more dorms but eventually your community will become too big to accommodate for everybody and you will have to move some survivors to another base. Eventually there will be several and you need to try and maintain all of them or, you know, let them get overrun.

Because they will. Throughout the days, zombie hoards will randomly spawn here and about. If these zombie hoards venture too close to your bases, they will attack and the state of the base and its inhabitants will decide what happens with it. They might be fine, somebody may get hurt or they might even be completely wiped out. you can of course take care of the hoard before it gets there or distract them to lead the hoard away. I had to do this once with no weapons at all. Stuff got bad.

The game's gameplay is mostly based on stealth. One zombie is rarely a problem and two are also an easy task but somewhere around three things may get out of hand. Stamina depletes quickly and if you run out you can barely fight. Guns are useful but noisy. Even seemingly clear areas might have zombies coming out of every crevice when a shot is fired. Cars too attracts a lot of zombies with its noise, which doesn't seem so bad while you're driving at full speed, but you gotta stop at some point or other.

Every survivor is different. they have different traits that allow them to be good at different things or handle missions differently. You can bring them with you to raid supplies or clear infestations to make it easier, but make sure not to remove all the firepower from your base. If you max out affection on a survivor, you will be able to play as them yourself.

The game does have a story and progressing the main story will cause the conditions of survival to change. The army gets involved at one point, for example.

Admittedly, it's a bit buggy, but not to any unplayable levels. This is Undead Labs' first game and is actually a sort of test for an MMO using the same sort of gameplay.

Sadly, this game is exclusive to Xbox 360 and it costs 1600MSP, but there is a demo that let's you play for around an hour. So if you own a 360, I highly suggest checking this one out.

[muhaha8]

Ugh this looks so amazing. It makes me wish I had an xbox still. But alas, I will wait for the MMO and hope that it's F2P.

[Nymus]

Undead Labs are doing this? I've been watching them for a long time, never heard about this one!

[Roxas65]

I don't blame you, Nymus. Despite being an exclusive, Microsoft has spent no energy marketing it. Only two days before release did they put it on the front page. This game is quickly gaining a dedicated community, though.

[McKnighter]

This looks pretty interesting, I always liked the small community type of management and responsibility. I'll give it a shot!

[Harmonic]

Watched some vids of it... seems okay, but man am I tired of zombie games. Especially ones that I want to be promising, but ultimately fall short of every expectation. I think this game wasn't designed to be successful, in my opinion---it definitely shows in some areas.

[Roxas65]

Well, you've got nothing to lose in trying out the demo, Rensin. I never really seem to get tired of zombie games for some reason. I really should have at this point, but I haven't. I had more fun in this one hour demo than I ever had during the entire playthrough of some other zombie games.

[McKnighter]

Dang it. I had a whole thing posted up but my phone derp and now it's gone.

TL;don't want to retype:

Buggy and low FPS was annoying. NPC's are only good for lugging supplies to your base and will stand around like derps half of the time. Zombies and combat was hard and rewarding. Story was meh and a bit rail roaded. I thought it was going to be like rebuild 2 in third person but was disappoint(it was close, rebuild 2 is my ideal zombie game).

Granted I beat this game in one sitting(13 hours), and I just wanted to get the game over with. Your survivors needed more baby siting than I wanted to do, wish they were more useful. Food and meds were easy to stockpile, ammo and materials weren't. Fuel was pretty useless for me.

I'd give it a 6. Fun, but only if you're a zombie game.

[Roxas65]

Dang it. I had a whole thing posted up but my phone derp and now it's gone.

TL;don't want to retype:

Buggy and low FPS was annoying. NPC's are only good for lugging supplies to your base and will stand around like derps half of the time. Zombies and combat was hard and rewarding. Story was meh and a bit rail roaded. I thought it was going to be like rebuild 2 in third person but was disappoint(it was close, rebuild 2 is my ideal zombie game).

Granted I beat this game in one sitting(13 hours), and I just wanted to get the game over with. Your survivors needed more baby siting than I wanted to do, wish they were more useful. Food and meds were easy to stockpile, ammo and materials weren't. Fuel was pretty useless for me.

I'd give it a 6. Fun, but only if you're a zombie game.

The devs are aware of some of the issues you mentioned. They've actually already submitted the patch for better optimization and better AI for your survivors. Some survivors are meant to be worthless, though. It's supposed to be somewhat realistic and in a real situation, not even half of your group of survivors would be any useful. Just like if it was real, you do have the choice to throw out or get rid of any survivors you believe "aren't pulling their weight."

The game also had an error where it counted infestations from all over your map to the penalty. when you hit 3-4 infestations active, survivors tend to get missing a lot and the offline progression is harsh. Since infestations counted across the whole map, it was literally impossible to keep them down. the coming patch fixes so that only infestations within 500 meters of your home actually counts towards the penalty. Survivors won't go missing as much.

Food and meds were meant to be easy to stockpile, because they're actually spent while you don't play. Ammo and materials are not because the player needs these thing himself. The fuel is, currently, worthless. They wanted cars to use fuel, but couldn't get it into the time frame. As it is now, cars are a bit over powered. In the end they had to cut a lot of things because the limit for an XBLA game is 2GB and the game is already more than 1.8GB.

There are only 22 devs for this game and they're interacting a lot with their fanbase. They're monitoring their forums like hawks, picking up any complaints about the game. In fact everything in the upcoming patch has been major complaints from players. The game should largely be considered beta right now.

Despite that, this game has sold more in its first 48 hours than any other XBLA game except Minecraft with more than 250,000 copies sold in the first 48 hours.

The devs are working on this constantly to improve it and they're also working on a PC version (confirmed) and supposedly co-op. They haven't confirmed co-op, but they tease it A LOT. If you ask a dev if there's co-op, he'll always say "not right now, but stick around." so there's that to look forward to.

[McKnighter]

Well, that is good news to hear! I would've held onto my money though if I heard they'd be making a PC verison. Ah well!

I just wish AI's in the sense of needing help every other scavenger run was annoying, even if I had 8 outposts. I wanted there to be an option so that I can send one or more survivors to complete a task, the more there are the better chance they'll succeed. It seems that they meant for more than one survivor to go on scavenger runs since both the radio message and the text would use the plural 'scavengers' are on their way.

If it's considered beta, then I'd be more relax about my nit-picks. Maybe they should've held off longer, but timeframes are a b. I just wanted more options for my community to do things on their own and/or give me a better reason to switch characters apart from getting wounded. Another thing that bothered me is that I think some of the home abilities used either real world time or a long ass game time to complete. Not sure if that was on purpose, but I long completed the game before some of them were half way done.

Could you have multiple homes? I thought it was implied that you could, but as far as I saw in game, you could only move and have one. I was really sold on the aspect of having multiple enclaves that could occupy different parts of the region, but when I moved away from the church I lost control of it. :/ It was a bummer.

[Roxas65]

Well, that is good news to hear! I would've held onto my money though if I heard they'd be making a PC verison. Ah well!

Fairly recent announcement, yes. I hadn't seen that when I made this topic.

I just wish AI's in the sense of needing help every other scavenger run was annoying, even if I had 8 outposts. I wanted there to be an option so that I can send one or more survivors to complete a task, the more there are the better chance they'll succeed. It seems that they meant for more than one survivor to go on scavenger runs since both the radio message and the text would use the plural 'scavengers' are on their way.

If the number of infestations becomes high, the survivors will have a difficult time doing scavenging runs and similar and often goes missing. this aspect will work better once they fix the infestation bug. I'm under the impression that you were supposed to be able to send multiple scavengers and also take some with you, but it had to be cut not because of time restraints, but space restraints. 2GB limit for a modern game is pretty small.

If it's considered beta, then I'd be more relax about my nit-picks. Maybe they should've held off longer, but timeframes are a b. I just wanted more options for my community to do things on their own and/or give me a better reason to switch characters apart from getting wounded. Another thing that bothered me is that I think some of the home abilities used either real world time or a long ass game time to complete. Not sure if that was on purpose, but I long completed the game before some of them were half way done.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that the amount of testing done to this game before release was limited because they couldn't afford testers. They're basically using the players as beta testers and they're picking out a lot of problems every day that people have reported. I guess it works, but it would've been nice to have been told it's basically a beta. The good news is that it can pretty much only get better from this point. They also got some complaints that some things go by real world time and some go by game time. They're trying to clear that up too by either making it just game time or RL time or just writing in clear text which one of it is used when they say how long something will take.

Could you have multiple homes? I thought it was implied that you could, but as far as I saw in game, you could only move and have one. I was really sold on the aspect of having multiple enclaves that could occupy different parts of the region, but when I moved away from the church I lost control of it. :/ It was a bummer.

I was under the same impression, actually. That was actually an error on my side. i misinterpreted something that I read and what they described was enclaves of other survivors. You can't control these, but you can interact with them and trade with them as well. They also recruit and die while you're doing your stuff and sometimes they ask for your help. But it seems that you yourself can only have one home and needs to move everybody when there's too many of you.

[Harmonic]

I tried it out a little... it's just too buggy right now for me to warrant buying. It just feels like every other zombie game, except a bit more glitchy. Like all the others, it feels like a good concept, but at the moment that's all it is. A good concept with poor execution, whether or not of the dev's intention.

It is what it is now, and it's hard for me to say I enjoy it, because really it's to me another faceless zombie game, that's like all other zombie games and has it's own slew of problems.

Meh, probably a bit negative, but it just doesn't seem purchase worthy to me.

Edit: It reminds me a lot of fort zombie. However, it feels like fort Zombie with poorer execution, and almost useless A.I., that has very little use. It may be intended to be that way, but man does it make the game less fun.

Sure, in fort Zombie you can give a child a magnum, but... that's actually funny in the long run. Plus you don't have to feel like a babysitter the whole time.

[Roxas65]

Today, State of Decay is released on Steam. BUT TAKE IN MIND that this is basically a beta version. It'll be a bit unstable and, most importantly, it can only be played with a 360 controller at this point. They'll be working like animals on the PC version in the coming weeks.

[Nymus]

Today, State of Decay is released on Steam. BUT TAKE IN MIND that this is basically a beta version. It'll be a bit unstable and, most importantly, it can only be played with a 360 controller at this point. They'll be working like animals on the PC version in the coming weeks.

Going to be released. Although by the time many of you see this, it'll be released.

Disappointed in only being able to use a 360 controller, though. I have two, but no way to connect it to my computer.

Also I just saw GODUS was released and the temptation to get Early Access for that piece of delicious pie is too much for one man alone to bear.

[Roxas65]

They've said they'll be gradually implementing keyboard+mouse control schemes in the coming weeks. Again, this is basically a beta for the PC version, so it should be treated as such.