When State of Decay 3 randomly returned at the end of last week with the announcement of upcoming Alpha Playtests, it took us by surprise — mainly because we haven't heard a whole lot about the game in recent years.
In fact, it will have been six years this June since State of Decay 3 was announced at the Xbox Games Showcase 2020, and if you're wondering why it's been so long, it's (at least partly) because the first trailer essentially had no game or team attached to it - just a few people and a "Word" document, according to one developer.
Undead Labs Studio Head Philip Holt discussed this in a recent interview with Sunny Games:
"That trailer in 2020... there really wasn't a game or a game team when we were working on that trailer. It was so early. I mean, there was like, four or five people [on the team]. The game was in a Word document."
"The trailer was done by Blur, it was all pre-rendered, it represented a concept — our thoughts at the time of what might be cool to explore in State of Decay 3, and as we've had a chance to build the team and get going on the game, some of those elements I think are going to persist in the game that we deliver, and some of those things we're just like — "yeah, we're not doing zombie animals".
Xbox did actually come in for a fair bit of criticism back in 2020 after revealing the likes of Fable, State of Decay 3 and Perfect Dark — not because they weren't cool reveals, but because they seemed to be years away from release. Of course, the Xbox Series X and S hadn't released yet when State of Decay 3 was first unveiled, so some of these big, early announcements in 2020 were likely just trying to build hype for the upcoming consoles.
It's still taken a long time to get to this point though, and a report in 2022 did mention that the game had been "trapped in pre-production" for a couple of years. Undead Labs later suggested it was embarking on a "new era" in 2024, which is also when State of Decay 3 returned with a new trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase 2024.
Whatever happened in the interim, at least SOD3 is finally coming to fruition now, and it sounds like the playtests are going to continue throughout 2026 in preparation for a hopeful release in 2027. We can't wait to get our hands on it.
Just don't go expecting anything like the trailer above — and definitely no zombie deer!