It’s not every day you get to hear about a game being nothing more than ramblings on a Word document when its announcement trailer had fans eager to learn more, especially if it’s the latest title in the State of Decay franchise. We’re still not sure if scrapping that zombie deer was a good idea when we consider the possibilities its presence could have created for State of Decay 3, a title we’ve known about for a while thanks to a rather forward-thinking approach to survival in the real world from Philip Holt, who leads Undead Labs.
He revealed The Game Business that putting that trailer out early was a conscious choice, taken in the face of a spate of acquisitions by Microsoft, which led him to think about how its search for bigger fish could leave his team’s hard work underappreciated.
“It was a relatively small game inside a giant organization; I didn’t think Microsoft was done being acquisitive, and I didn’t think they were going to continue buying small developers. I figured they’d start buying big things. I was a little worried about getting swallowed up or even divested before we had a chance to present to the world what we were working on. It was a bit of a marker on the table for me. We’re saying State of Decay 3, we’re announcing it, it’s public, the audience now knows it’s in development.”
Given how things have turned out, and that Undead Labs has now left the Microsoft umbrella while development continues, it’s safe to say the decision has worked out well. For our part, we’re happy the team continues trying to make this one as great as its predecessors, and hopefully surpass them with a potentially heady blend of the first game’s spirit and the second one’s mechanics.
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