OXMUK
For XBLA's fastest-selling new IP, State of Decay is oddly easy to dismiss at a glance. A glance will tell you that it's a zombie masher with a photorealistic aesthetic, that runs on sturdy but hardly mind-blowing proprietary technology.
A glance won't, however, tell you anything about all the variables that help the game transcend its secondhand premise. It won't tell you about what to do when a friend gets caught in a zombie-infested barn, miles from home. It won't tell you about how to manage your community so that not everybody's exhausted, wounded or clinically depressed at once. It won't tell you how to put down a Feral on your lonesome.
For more on all that - and for more on the game's first title update, which appears to have caused more problems than it resolved - we spoke to the developer's Sanya Weathers and Jeff Strain. The interview that follows is an "unholy mashup" of their responses.
Looking at how people approach State of Decay, is there anything that surprises you - any particular weird and/or wonderful quirks of survivor behaviour?
What we hoped for, but didn't expect, was the emotional involvement people have with their survivor communities. The genuine attachment takes people by surprise, but instead of getting mad that their favourite character died, the players come back for more. That's been wonderful.
I wouldn't say it's weird, but it has been fascinating watching the players stand at the intersection of pragmatism and idealism. "This survivor is a psychopath, but he's a great shot. He could murder us in our beds one of these nights but in the meantime he makes everyone feel safe." Making hard decisions for the greater good, when there's no clear right or wrong answer, isn't something most of us have any real experience with.
One of the biggest surprises to us was the size of the survivor communities players have been able to build. During three months of round-the-clock QA testing on two continents, the largest community our QA testers were able to build and sustain was about 25 survivors. We used that number as a guideline to tune several design and technical systems.
That guideline did not survive impact with the law of large numbers - we've seen players building communities in the low and even mid 30s! We had to make adjustments to the game to account for the ingenuity and tenacity of our hardcore players.
The point being that if a thing can be done, players will find it and do it... and we want them to. There are a lot of systems in the game, and testing every possible combination is mathematically impossible. So our community is even now discovering new ways to use distraction devices, explosives, and the different kinds of survivors to trigger elaborate zombie killing strategies.
Are there plans to expand the building and strategy aspects of the game more with future updates - perhaps giving people the opportunity to set up shelters wherever they please, rather than in certain buildings?
Free-form building would be more than an update - very nearly an entire rewrite of the base building system as it exists in State of Decay! The underlying system depends on a set structure with available nodes. One never knows what will be possible in future games, of course, but I think in State of Decay, buildings-where-you-please won't happen.
That said, it's certainly possible to add strategy elements to the game. The game is built on a sophisticated simulation engine - we call it FateEngine - that is used to drive game events by modeling a giant conflict of Humans vs. Zombies. It's similar to an RTS AI, in that it is designed to respond to player actions and changing world conditions.
State of Decay makes good use of FateEngine to tell the story of the game and model impact to you and your fellow survivors for the choices you make as you play, but we can (and will) do much more with the technology. Expect to see some additional strategy elements in the forthcoming sandbox mode, and potentially more additions with future updates.
How about formal, paid expansions? Could you add new areas and storylines to the mix?
Anything's possible. But we just launched, and our focus right now is getting the Steam version out the door, and as for a formal expansion, the thing we've announced is the pure sandbox mode. No storyline but the one you tell yourself as you try to survive.
Have you considered allowing players to completely disable all the base management and social stuff, and letting them wander the world as a lone wolf?
Lone wolf play is fun, but that's just not what State of Decay is about. The entire game is designed and tuned around simulating a survivor community struggling with the very real ethical choices you must make in the zombie apocalypse. As we expand the simulation opportunities provided by the State of Decay engine in the future we will explore ways to directly support lone wolf play, but the game as it exists today is not designed around that experience.
How did title update 1 wind up being so buggy, and what actions are you taking to ensure this doesn't happen again?
Title Update 1 wasn't buggy - it just didn't work at all! The simple answer is this was our first title update, and we made a bad assumption about how the process worked and it wasn't caught during testing.
Every game is split into the executable file (similar to an application on your computer), and game data. We built FateEngine to be heavily data driven to give our designers tremendous flexibility to add, change, and balance content without needing to write code or change the game engine.
When you run the game, the first thing it does is load all these data files. Due to a difference in the way the Title Update process works in the live environment versus our internal testing environment, the game was not properly loading the updated data files after Title Update 1 was applied, and was instead still loading the original data files. Since most of the changes in TU1 were encoded in the data files, the net effect was a patch that did nothing.
We've identified and fixed the problem for TU2, and have adjusted our process with Microsoft to make sure something like this can't happen again.
Do you have to pay for every Xbox Live update beyond the first?
That's a contractual detail we can't discuss. Suffice it to say that there is nothing preventing us from releasing as many Title Updates as needed to ensure the game is stable and awesome.
You've discussed plans for a State of Decay MMO. How's that going?
At this time it's a concept, not a project. All of our energy is devoted to getting State of Decay in the best shape we can manage, and then following up with the PC version, sandbox mode, and perhaps other expansions.
Is it possible you'll release another single-player State of Decay title, in light of the reception? What would you change or improve, if you had the opportunity?
We could happily add cool new stuff to State of Decay forever. We have concrete plans to release a pure sandbox mode that more heavily relies on the simulation than the story and introduces a few new play mechanics.
We of course know many players would love to see co-op multiplayer added. We can think of a hundred features we'd love to add, new weapons and vehicles, new characters, mission types, simulation events, skill tracks, etc. Some of these we will certainly get to do, but others may need to wait for the possibility of a full sequel, in whatever form that might take.
How has it been, working with Microsoft as an independent? Obviously the absence of self-publishing on Xbox has caused a lot of controversy - do you think Microsoft should change its policies, or is the firm justified in leaving entry thresholds where they are?
I can't speak to policy changes, but I can say that Microsoft appreciated our vision from the beginning, and has been very supportive of the project even though a persistent world arcade game with permadeath was just about as far from a sure bet as you can get. They believed in it and helped make it happen, while leaving us completely alone as to design and execution. Doesn't get better than that, really.
The great thing about a free market is that the results will let them know if the policies are justified. That's just not something we need to worry about. We make games.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/57078/features/state-of-decay-undead-labs-talks-dlc-update-bugs-sequels-and-microsofts-indie-strategy/?page=3
