While the first game was met with positive reviews, State of Decay 2’s bigger sandbox was not met without criticism by some fans. Its 2020 Xbox Games Showcase announcement was notorious for a pre-render trailer that dwelled on a zombie deer, seen through a crossbow’s scope.Since the release of the first game for Xbox 360 and PC back in 2013, the State of Decay games have mostly been about exploring a large map to find supplies to protect the player’s base, fighting the different types of zombies that get in the way. State of Decay 3 still has no official launch date or window. “If this was what pre-production was like there was no way I was sticking around for full production,” an unidentified developer told Kotaku. While Holt relented, the disruption still pushed a lot of Undead Labs veterans out the door, developers said.

Developers “revolted,” according to the report, considering the work and crunch that would be necessary to get the project o such a state. State of Decay 3, according to unnamed sources cited by Kotaku, was supposed to have two more internal demonstrations in the fall of 2021, and Philip Holt, the studio executive brought in as Undead Labs’ chief of staff after Microsoft acquired the studio in 2018, wanted both to include actual gameplay. That, said Undead Labs veterans, was followed by a rushed internal demo for Microsoft leadership, that accelerated their feeling of disarray. In fact, reports Kotaku, Undead Labs was pressured into announcing State of Decay 3 at the Xbox Games Showcase in July 2020 well before developers felt the game was ready for it. State of Decay 3 has lingered in pre-production for the past two years, reports Kotaku, while Undead Labs has mutated from a lean and ambitious independent studio into a first-party Xbox developer battling big-time industry problems, such as a toxic workplace, discrimination, and burnout.

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