"We basically rewrote the entire State of Decay game": Undead Labs spent years trying to make State of Decay 3 into a full-blown zombie apocalypse MMO

State of Decay 3 was announced with a snazzy cinematic trailer all the way back in 2020. The open-world zombie game was due to move to colder climes, where you would face undead deer and survive the frigid elements. We've since learned that the teaser bore very little resemblance to what was actually being worked on, and was pushed out the door to plump up a Microsoft showcase.

However, what the teaser also didn't reveal was that Undead Labs' ideas for the game were much larger in scope than the two survival games that came before. For several years they were trying to make State of Decay 3 into an MMO that captured the scale of a global zombie apocalypse.

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In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz detailing the recent move to independence after Xbox cut the studio loose, Undead Labs CEO Philip Holt explains that the team's founder, Jeff Strain, planned to expand the series from its co-op roots into a full MMO. While Strain left the studio in 2019, his ideas remained with the small team working on the prototypes for State of Decay 3. "He always had a vision of making an MMO and the ultimate global scale of a zombie apocalypse," Holt says. "And so there was just a different set of creative objectives the team was trying to pursue at that time."

After State of Decay 3 was announced in 2020, a small team worked on developing the technology to support an MMO, while the rest of the studio continued supporting State of Decay 2. However, towards the end of 2022, Holt and the team decided to go back to a game that better resembled the scale of the first two games. "There was a pretty significant pivot creatively on State of Decay 3's development," Holt tells GI. "So I would say the game that's present today has really been built probably since '23, maybe late '22." Later in the interview saying "One of the things I learned is just how much respect I have for teams that make successful MMOs, because I've seen them swallow people whole."

It wasn't a flippant change, as it meant throwing out much of what had already been made. "We basically rewrote the entire State of Decay game, and we will not do that again," Holt says. "We have the benefit now of this pretty significant investment in software that we got to figure out how to make the most of. We hope that State of Decay 3 has a long and successful life and becomes a live and evolving game. But yeah, I think it's highly unlikely that we spend as much time on the next game as we did on State of Decay 3."

Though, it did mean that when Xbox cut ties with Undead Labs they had a project near enough to release that they've been able to find a publisher willing to fund State of Decay 3's final months of development. Still, even with that support, Undead Labs still had to lay off "a significant number" of staff.

I've a real soft spot for the state of Decay games, though I've never played them in multiplayer. For me, they were always an apocalypse I could mooch around in solo, gradually expanding my survivors' camp and making a dent in the zombie hordes that roamed across the environment. An MMO take on the same world wouldn't have appealed to my misanthropic sensibilities, but I'm interested to learn how the tech that was produced has been rolled into the current version of State of Decay 3.

Still, one day, I want to face down a zombie deer. Granted, I'll immediately run and hide, but it'd be nice to see one.