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shikamaru317 on 11 May 2024
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G2ThaUNiT said:

I’m sure this will age well. Narratives being flipped quite a bit these days.

I'm somewhat skeptical of Jez's claim here honestly, and even if it is doing well now, I still don't think we will see release until at least 2026. The behind the scenes article that Kotaku did on Undead Labs in March 2022 stated that from the time of the Xbox acquisition in 2018 till late 2021, Undead Labs got barely any work done on State of Decay 3. That article mentioned severe workplace culture issues involving Phillip Holt, who replaced founded Jeff Strain as studio head after Strain left in 2019, and the head of the studio's human relations department, supposedly there was alot of sexism/racism/homophobia issues with female, non-binary, LGBT, and non-white employees having their opinions ignored by their managers and supervisors, with the HR head inadequately addressing those issues and Xbox not stepping in and addressing those issues for 3 years due to their hands-off policy of 1st party management; Holt favoring new employees from other studios he had formerly worked at for promotions over Undead Labs employees who had been there longer; etc.

Additionally, the article suggested that the team largely spun their wheels those first 3.5 years of development on SoD 3, it says that during those 3.5 years there was mass turnover, expansion of the studio too quickly, multiple teams on multiple early prototype builds of SoD 3 arguing over which prototype was best and employees being moved around between those teams frequently, people wasting time working on relatively minor technical systems like parkour and different enemies spawning in different weather types while ignoring the elephant in the room, the need to design a proper, strong main storyline. According to that report, Undead Labs was unable to get a proper pre-production vertical slice demo ready for Xbox leadership by the September 2021 Holt set for them, and the vertical slice demos didn't really shape until until early 2022. 

If that is true, then SoD 3 only exited pre-production and entered full production just over 2 years ago. AAA games these days usually need at least 4 years of full production, so if full production didn't begin until around February 2022 like the Kotaku article suggested, it stands to reason then that the earliest we might see SoD 3 release is February 2026, 4 years later.

Then again, it was a Kotaku article and Kotaku is pretty crap and seems to have it out for Xbox, so maybe the article was crap and they got alot more work done on SoD 3 those first 3.5 years than the article claims they did. I'm skeptical about the sexism and racism claims at the very least, but I wouldn't be surprised if the stuff about them spinning their wheels for years and not really getting a proper vertical slice demo done until late 2021 was true. 

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 11 May 2024