Take a look at the Alpha Playtest Announcement Video for State of Decay 3, the third installment in the third-person action hack-and-slash zombie game developed by Undead Labs. Players will take up arms against the undead and cultivate a life for the community survivors amongst the ruins. An upcoming Alpha Playtest is set to deploy soon, with sign-ups available now. The first of a series of Alpha Playtests kicks off in May 2026 for PC, with State of Decay 3 coming soon to Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Love to see it, but it threw the thought in my head of how long development has gotten. It’s crazy to think we’re now getting next Gen (most likely 2027), but a game announced in 2020 is just now having its alpha test.
They have been using SoD2 to not only improved but also understand what the game needed to be. Also, they opened a support studio that uses UE5, so I think they’re more busy behind the scene than developing a ground up game. I won’t fault them for taking a while. The fact the Alpha is happening now saves us from the fear of another PD.
Would an official thread per game work better, unless it’s an official DayOne article (in which case it gets its own thread) or it’s been a while since the last post on it and something new has come up?
Just thinking we’ve a few State of Decay 3 threads, a bunch of FH6 ones and a load of Starfield ones - while they make the forum look busier most get little engagement and push other threads further down, whereas say an official FH6 thread for example we’re more likely to see the update rather than it disappear into a list of zero reply threads…
I guess I’m talking more the state of the industry and game development in general. More a neutral observation. State of Decay 2 was a 2018 game and 3 was announced in 2020. Six years later we have an Alpha. GTA VI similarly is about to just barely come out before next Gen. The Elder Scrolls VI almost definitely won’t and will launch 2027 or later.
Yep, development times for big games are getting out of hand but this is the gaming world we live in. Most reviewers and a big part of the core gaming community won’t tolerate less than stellar animations or lower fidelity graphics, you know the infamous “jank”…so naturally development times have ballooned.
Also I haven’t played the previous SoD games but I will definitely check this one out.
It’s better to think of this as more of an alpha for the MP component, though, which is pretty normal. For comparison, Marathon’s alpha test was 11 months ago.
The original State of Decay 3 trailer was put together back when the game was a word document.
2020 truly was a different time for Xbox announcements . They were a lot more desperate to say studios were working on something, but obviously they had JUST bought a lot of these studios. I’m glad the game pipeline is good enough now that games can cook and get announced when ready.
. They were a lot more desperate to say studios were working on something, but obviously they had JUST bought a lot of these studios. I’m glad the game pipeline is good enough now that games can cook and get announced when ready.