State of Decay 2 interview | How Undead Labs are shuffling away from the horde

During our exclusive hands-on with State of Decay 2, we sat down with developer Undead Labs design director Richard Foge about how to stand out from the other zombie games.

Given the name Undead Labs, is it fair to assume that a sequel to State of Decay was always inevitable?

“[laughs] It really does feel that way. When we named the studio, Jeff [Strain, studio founder] wanted to be very clear that we were all in on this concept. That, or vampires, or witches - not that we’re doing that right now [laughs]. But certainly, the zombies have served us very well.”

Concepts involving zombies have come time and time again to the point of fatigue. How do you differentiate yourself from the horde?

“When we got into [State of Decay], it kind of sprang from an idea that Doug [Williams, art director] pitched, wanting to explore the human side of things in the zombie apocalypse, focusing more on a community survivors as opposed to an individual, and then having the base-building alongside the simulation of community management.

Even now, no one’s done that exact mix of survival, simulation and action we made in the first game, so we wanted to essentially keep things moving forward, enhance some things that people loved, like unique survivors, unique dynamic narrative and cool base-building and toss out the things they didn’t like, such as offline progression [a controversial mechanic where time passed in the game world even when you’re not playing, with detrimental effects for players’ community morale and resources if say they hadn’t logged in for a week].”

State of Decay 2 | At a glance

You’re also introducing online co-op multiplayer, though it’s not an integral feature as with Microsoft’s other first-party titles (i.e. Sea of Thieves, Crackdown 3). Was it important to keep State of Decay 2 a single-player experience at its core?

“We talked about that a lot. But because we already established what State of Decay was with the first game, we had an audience that were definitely passionate about their survival experience, and that’s the hook of the game: how will you survive? For a lot of people, turns out their answer is By Myself [laughs], with my community, with total control over it.

We didn’t want to alienate fans of the first game, we want to make sure they have a really good time playing single-player, or multiplayer, if they wanted to. You’ll still get rewards and make progress on your survivor’s skills, but all the base-building and management stuff, you’ll have to go back in your own game to do that. The host has to make decisions for their world, because some of these things are potentially destructive. If you were to go up say ‘I’m going to threaten these people”, you’ll suddenly change the shape of their game in ways that we want to make sure you don’t.”

Speaking of your community, how much more diverse are the range of characters and survivors we can expect to see compared to the first game?

“Oh, the combinations are crazy. There’ll be thousands - millions - just based on the traits alone. They are procedurally composed from thousands of different traits that have various impacts on moment-to-moment gameplay and simulation side of things. All these people you have the potential to recruit them into your group depending on the context on which they’re established in your game, and the relationship you develop with them. Obviously if they start off antagonistic, that’s going to be a little tricky.”

Does having a random diverse set of characters also mean more of a free-form story this time as opposed to a set narrative?

“From a structural standpoint, when the first game came out, even though it was a very sandbox game and you made a lot of choices, the base game you went through was still fairly linear. Who survived, who didn’t, was variable, but a lot of the survivors were key parts of the story. When we released DLC, we pulled out those specific story elements and introduced a more free-form structure without specific direction. People responded really strongly to their community, their story, their storytelling - so we wanted it to be even more of a sandbox, so the choices that you’re making affect the way that your community develops and the story that you’re telling is basically in the context of the game world.”

With a freeform structure, is there a clear path to ‘beating’ the game, and what will keep players invested in the long-term?

“While there’s not a specific directed story, we do have a structure that the community arc is going to go through. Everybody starts from a tutorial and there are specific circumstances that’s going to be very similar, in terms of everybody knowing about blood plague, establishing a base, and other specifics of how this post-apocalyptic zombie world works. After that, it opens up with the focus on goals, not directions. You’re going to have high-level goals like, find a leader for your community. We don’t tell you who that leader is or how you go about deciding who that individual is going to be - you decide. After that, clear this town of these plague hearts, and again, we don’t tell you how to do it, we just tell you what needs to be done.

Once you’ve accomplished that, the person may not be the original person you may have put in as leader, that person may have died and death is permanent. Whoever’s the leader of your community at that point is going to have an agenda towards leaving a lasting impact on the world with your community and they may have different philosophical approaches and goals in mind. But once you complete that goals of theirs, it’s sort of the end of that community. And you can take members of that community and move them forward into a new one, sort of like new game plus, with some bonuses from the previous community. Or players who want to play an individual community forever, they can make it last as long as they want.”

Some survival games can start off as an initial struggle but you eventually master it and it just becomes busywork in the background as threats die down. Do you have to consider whether or not to escalate situations to make it a constant struggle?

“It’s challenging to find that right balance because everybody has different styles. It’s certainly the case that a very good experienced player can get to the point where you don’t worry so much about the simulation and resources, but there’s still always going to be surprise moments that catch you off-guard - where you weren’t expecting quite as many zombies to show up, or you were trying to take on a plague heart, and one of your favourite survivors gets blood plague, and somebody ends up dying - that can kind of throw a wrench into the whole thing. Losing a critical survivor that was your guy for supply runs, and now suddenly you have to pull someone from your rookie bench up to fighting shape, they’re interesting challenges that present themselves.”

But it’s impossible to destroy the zombie threat?

“There’s systems that make an area safe for a little while, but if you haven’t been back there, you’re not keeping it up or maintaining it, the zombie population will eventually fill it back in and take over.”

It almost sounds like gardening.

“Yeah, a constant struggle [laughs].”