As revealed last week, Seattle-based Undead Labs is making several new games for Microsoft Studios. One of them is presumably a sequel to State of Decay, the developer's flawed but engrossing and very, very popular zombie survival game for Xbox Live Arcade - back in June 2013, Undead Labs stated that such a project would "clearly" release on Xbox One. Further details are hard to come, naturally, but studio founder Jeff Strain has made a number of illuminating remarks in a new interview with Gamasutra.
State of Decay on console was conceived as a precursor to a fully-fledged MMO on PC. The idea doesn't appear to have faded away. "One of the uncracked nuts in the industry, when I look across where everything is, is that persistent online worlds have always been and largely continue to be the realm of the PC," Strain observed.
"The foundation and history of our team is in the MMO world - more broadly in the online gaming world. I was at Blizzard for five years, from 1995 to 2000, heavily involved in the genesis of BattleNet and the transition of all our games to being very focused on online. And of course many of the people here were principal developers at ArenaNet, did all the Guild Wars games. So that's kind of in our DNA.
"And the long-range plans for Undead Labs is to move back into that PC space. But by focusing on the console side initially, it allowed us to think about things like long-range designs and player interactions that weren't based on the standard PC MMO template, which we've all become very familiar with over the past decade.
"Instead, it really challenged us to think about ways that we could create games that had that kind of communal play experience but that weren't rooted in something that was exclusively PC-centric. So I think that was a big part of it: [asking ourselves] where do we want to go in the next ten years and how do we achieve that goal of building something new and fresh which still captures all the power of online worlds."
Undead Labs now feels that these are visions it can realise on console and PC simultaneously, thanks to the trimming down of Xbox Live publishing procedures, and the reworking of the platform to better support service-based games.
"We're big believers in the digital distribution channel," Strain commented. "Steam has obviously been very successful in that space, and digital distribution was certainly the hallmark of what Xbox Live Arcade was - although historically there have been very specific constraints from Microsoft on what an Arcade title could be, in terms of the footprint on the player's hard drive, the resources that could be allocated to it, even things like Achievements and Gamerscore. These were intentional, explicit constraints.
"I'm not privy to any of Microsoft's internal plans for the future of digital distribution, I only know what's been said publicly. But I think it's clear to everybody that moving forward into the Xbox One generation that distinction [between Arcade and other downloadable titles] is going to fade away.
"For us, when we look at the future of our games both on PC and on console, it's not just about digital distribution but the ability to have games that have a live service model behind them. Games that are a continual experience rather than a throw-it-over-the-wall product. Whether you want to call that our MMO heritage, or just the kinds of games that people are playing and where the industry is going, this is what's exciting to us.
"So when we're looking at our next round and what we're doing in terms of development, we see the PC and the Xbox One as very peered platforms - different playerbases and different content expectations - but for the first time we can and want to be delivering strongly a shared, consistent experience across both platforms."
This last sentence could be construed as a hint at cross-platform multiplayer, which would suit us down to the ground. Microsoft's Phil Spencer has said that allowing PC and Xbox One users to play together "makes a lot of sense".
