State of Decay

The end is here.

Life as you knew it has gone to hell after the mother of all zombie outbreaks. Now you and the few scattered survivors must band together to survive and rebuild in a 3rd-person action game set in a dynamic open world. You choose where to make your stand, designing and fortifying your home base, performing daring raids for food and ammunition, and rescuing other playable survivors with unique talents. The open, sandbox world develops in real-time, shaped by your actions, dynamically generating content based on your choices and the ever-increasing zombie threat.

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State of Decay is our ambitious zombie-survival open world game, first released for Xbox360 and PC in 2013. In April 2015 we released State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition, a stunning, remastered version of the game full of new missions, weapons, and extra content.

What’s new? Mysterious supply crates start dropping into remote areas across the map, attracting massive hordes of zombies. While wiping out the infestation and you can grab some of the rarest and most powerful equipment seen in State of Decay.

As you fight the undead hordes you’ll find new survivors. Your favorite characters from Lifeline can now be unlocked in Breakdown, including the previously unplayable Kelly “Sasquatch” Eldridge.

Year One Edition also features new vehicles and weapons. Players navigate the apocalyptic landscape in a brand-new SUV. Custom vehicle skins are also distributed across all maps for greater personalization. As for weapons, you’ll find new assault rifles equipped with under-barrel grenade launcher attachments as well as shotguns that fire incendiary rounds.

We’ve all sat around with friends, debating the best ways to survive the zombie apocalypse. Well, the time for speculation is over; State of Decay will let you put your personal survival plan to the test.

Here’s what you can expect to see in State of Decay:

Zombie Survival

What if society came screeching to a halt? What if all our rules and laws no longer mattered? State of Decay brings these questions to life in a very real way. It’s not just about combat; it’s about doing what you must do to stay alive. Food, water, shelter, and ammo — you’ll need them all. Taking you beyond the initial panic, and beyond the first weeks of the crisis, State of Decay is the embodiment of the “What if?” zombie apocalypse scenario.

Intense Action

Move through the world like a zombie-slaying badass. Dive through windows, jump on cars, and take it to the living dead with baseball bats. Hop in a truck and mow down some undead pedestrians. Break into the local police station and clear out their arsenal or walk into the local grocery store to stock up on your favorite junk food. The world is your oyster…a shiny oyster that happens to be filled with zombies.

An Evolving World

State of Decay is an open sandbox world that develops in real-time, dynamically generating content based on your actions, the choices you make, and the ever-increasing zombie threat. Decide where you’d like to set up a fortified safe haven for you and other survivors you’ve rescued, then form raiding parties to gather resources and create supply chains. Use the materials you’ve gathered to develop your community as you see fit, but be careful — resources will deplete as you pillage areas, and zombies are attracted to noise and activity. Take up the offensive by assaulting hordes before they reach your settlement, or focus on improving your defenses against the massed zombie attacks. Every choice and every action matter in this fully simulated, evolving world.

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State of Decay News

Feb 13 2013

A Matter of Character

A good story isn’t about characters as unchanging archetypes. It does explore innate potential and expectations, but it’s also about choices and change (or refusal to change). A good survival story in particular puts its characters to the test, but not just as individuals. A crisis is both a test of the individuals and of the dynamics between them. In designing the character and skill systems for State of Decay, we’ve tried to capture all of these elements.

We’ve talked before about the fact that you don’t get to tailor-make your characters. Instead you encounter a wide variety of survivors with vastly different personalities and skill sets and then you decide who to bring into your group and who to leave out on their own.

So that’s the high level. If you’ve been following State of Decay closely, you’ve heard that before. Today we’re going to going into more depth about exactly how characters and skills work.

Let’s dive right in.

Feb 01 2013

Scenes From Our Next Teaser Video

It has been a crazy, crazy month here at the Lab. We are very close to a major milestone: Delivering the first complete version of the game to Microsoft for evaluation. Please note that this means nothing in terms of a release date, though. (For a bit more information on that, check out this post on the forum.) Still, it means we’re making progress, and we are psyched!

Jan 16 2013

Setting the Tone

As we get ever closer to release, we’re immensely enjoying the way the music and sound pulls everything together. Sound Guy Kevin, and Jesper Kyd, have been kicking a lot of ass. Today, we’d like to share three terrific tracks composed by Jesper. But why just share them? Let’s have a contest!

Jan 10 2013

Day By Day

A new game starts with a lot of ideas and ambitions. Then, day by day, you work to make those ideas a reality, while being true to those ambitions. Along the way, you find that no matter how many times you’ve done it before, every project is a learning experience.

With State of Decay we started with several ambitious goals, but the central challenge was to create a dynamic world where there was no single right answer or right path, where all your actions had real and lasting consequences, and the choices were yours to make. We wanted to do this not just with a scripted, branching approach. Instead we intended to let you take on the zombie apocalypse in a much more freeform and real way.

As Jeff mentioned in an earlier article, we knew this meant managing the game world with an extensive simulation. We had to develop an ecosystem of resources, survivors, and zombies that evolved naturally over time. And then we had to give you a variety of tools for taking on the challenges you’d encounter. Everything would have costs and trade-offs and every problem would have more than one solution.

So what does that really mean? What kind of choices do you have in State of Decay? It might be best to get the answer from the survivors themselves…

Dec 21 2012

Paying Our Respects

Many of you have asked what our influences have been. I usually flap my hands and say “everything!” Undead Labs has seen, read, and played everything we could find in the genre. This is not a team that does things halfway.

We’ve tried to tip our hats to our great loves whenever we could. One of our artists, James, wanted to share some of that with you. He sent me four screenshots that are packed with homages. Can you spot them all?