Official Thread State of Decay 2

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So budget title confirmed then. That's unfortunate, i was looking forward to what they could do if properly funded. Still looks rough animation wise and not much of an upgrade to the graphics from the previous game. Guess i'll have to wait for Days Gone to get my gritty post apocalyptic game fix.
remember that dead island was not full price and look how that game turns out!
 
Oh okay. Now that i agree with. Can you imagine what it's like in my head? I actually do a good job of keeping it in house among my friends. They'll be talking about other hobbies like biking, going to concerts, and i'm just trying to decide if i like Xbox or PS more that day. Always going back and forth. But i love both, and i think that's what makes the hobby great and fulfilling. For me anyway.

Sounds like it. How anyone could ever doubt you is beyond me..
 
I remember the first State of Decay being kind of an underdog darling so I wouldn't write this one off yet. I do think a lot has changed in 5 years though so the market might be a lot different.
 
I remember the first State of Decay being kind of an underdog darling so I wouldn't write this one off yet. I do think a lot has changed in 5 years though so the market might be a lot different.

This one already looks like it's gotten a lot more dev time than the first one, clearly this team has learned from the first game and that's a good thing, hopefully it's fun.
 
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Nice to see animation looks much better! The improvements to the lighting model are appparent as well over e3 footage!

I'd like to see a Knocking on Walls mechanic to draw out zombies inside houses like they do in the Walking Dead.

Game is looking good and fun. I can see this being big with streamers too. Also, did I see some Dead Rising style weapon crafting?

Edit: Still watching the vid... Did Someone die? There were three women and one man when they started. After the cut there were Two Dudes and Two Ladies...

They should also turn on friendly fire, as that would add higher stakes.

I noticed that they like to shoulder open door alot. Seems like a pretty noisy way to do things in the zombie apocalypse.

The dialogue is pretty cringey. I don't like the voices not reacting to what's happening. Saying lame comments in a relaxed voice while fighting for their lives is a bit jarring...
 
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http://m.ign.com/articles/2018/03/09/state-of-decay-2-first-hands-on-bigger-better-and-more-rpg-y

State of Decay 2 First Hands-On: Bigger, Better, and More RPG-y
The zombie-apocalypse-survival RPG doubles down on what it does best.
Ryan McCaffreyMar, 09 2018
My car was abandoned in the middle of the road somewhere behind me. I couldn’t go back for it even though I desperately wished I could. I had to bail out of it – while it was moving, mind you – because it was the dead of night and I didn’t see the Bloater standing in my path until he exploded on the front bumper, filling the cabin with noxious gas. I was left to limp up and around a mountain, as a straight-line path back to my community’s base just wasn’t possible. My health was critical. My stamina was exhausted because I hadn’t slept in two days and simply couldn’t run more than a few paces anymore. I figured my odds of surviving – and thus not losing valuable geocacher/masseuse Fulgencio Arellano permanently – were barely north of zero. Between my body, my mind, and my situation, I really was in a state of decay.

Such novella-worthy stories are typical in State of Decay 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2013’s smash Xbox Live Arcade hit. The original was special because it did what other zombie games didn’t: it looked beyond the physical act of beating back hordes of zombies and focused instead on the survivors. It wasn’t a horror game, but if you were to spend enough time thinking about the plight of the community members you were tasked with taking care of, you might have started to think it was. Resources had to be managed, relationship flare-ups had to be mended, and houses needed to be raided – quietly, if you were smart – in order to stay equipped and stay alive.


The sequel, which I spent two days with at Undead Labs’ Seattle development studio, admittedly may not win over anyone who, for whatever reason, didn’t like the original. It is a sequel in the traditional sense, and considering how good the first game was, that’s a good thing here. It’s bigger, prettier, and doubles down on the stuff it did well the first time around. It’s running on a new engine – hello Unreal Engine 4, goodbye CryEngine – a new console, and yes, it’s finally got four-player co-op multiplayer. The only thing it has less of, based on my time with it so far (played exclusively on high-end PCs running at 4k resolution and a steady 30fps), is wonkiness. Sure, I saw my share of the jankiness that the original game could never escape, but State of Decay 2 is already much more smooth, polished, and technically clean than its predecessor – and the team still has a couple months left to polish it. The fact that it’s priced at $29.99 should buy it a lot of goodwill from gamers, too, even if a bit more wonkiness than desired creeps into the final product.

State of Decay 2’s depth starts with the world. It’s a much bigger one this time around, set some time after the events of the original in a totally different place. I’m told that it loosely ties into the first game, narratively speaking, but you certainly won’t need to play SoD1 to understand the sequel. You need a bigger world, of course, when you have the ability to bring three friends into it to help you out in co-op multiplayer. It works in a fairly unique way we’ll tell you more about later this month, and I spent an entire afternoon trying it out. One quick tip for now: splitting up generally doesn’t end well. But if you’ve gotta go your separate ways, at least bring one friend along. Buddy System FTW!

You can install mods in your facilities, such as an original Xbox that will boost morale.

Next are the characters themselves. They’re procedurally generated, which ensures that not only will every simulation be different, but the possibilities for community personalities are myriad. In my group, Eyman had asthma, which limited his stamina. Zina is a hero – your community members can progress from citizen to leader to hero if you work with them long enough – and thus has a bonus of +1 ammo resource per day for the group. She also has a high pain threshold, which increases her fighting ability and XP rate. “We wanted to integrate characters more fully into the simulation,” said Undead Labs studio head and State of Decay 2 executive producer Jeff Strain. “We wanted to see the effects on your community rather than just [have] RPG stats that affect their standing in the world.” And thankfully, even when your weapons break (and they will, I promise), you’ll never be completely helpless. You’ll always have a screwdriver or similar-caliber stabbing object to give you at least a fighting chance when things go from bad to worse.

Added character depth naturally means that your base building and upgrading mechanics have a lot more to them as well. You can install mods in your facilities, such as “Install Game Console” (fittingly depicted as an original Xbox) in order to boost morale. You’ll need water outposts, fuel outposts, and power outposts in order to keep your HQ running smoothly. You can temporarily have your farm churn out medicine instead of food in times of crisis. The Resources screen breaks down exactly what all of your various inputs and outputs are, resource-wise. This daunting level of detail may be music to the ears for some, but if you’re overwhelmed at the thought of this, know that everything I saw and played was from a world halfway into the meaty campaign. In other words, you’ll work up to what I saw. Said Strain, “You don't haveto drill way the hell down into all this to succeed and have fun, but you can.”

Having Blood Plague isn’t so bad, so long as you manage it and, ideally, cure it in time.

Blood Plague Hearts are a big new gameplay focus this time, meant to drive both tension and action. They’re effectively like tiny MMO-style instances – they’ll require all of your wits and skills thanks to the waves of hungry zombies they scream out for after you begin whaling on them – but they’ll leave you with a sense of satisfaction upon completion...and quite likely a case of Blood Plague as well.

Having Blood Plague isn’t so bad, so long as you manage it and, ideally, cure it in time. A meter will start to fill every time you get slashed by an infected zombie, until eventually you just die and turn (thus potentially taking out one or more of your other survivors) if you fail to treat it. Naturally, you can only get Blood Plague samples from certain zombie types, and you’ll need five to fashion the aforementioned cure. Bloaters you already read about, but skitter-on-all-fours Feral, progress-halting Screamers, and hulking Juggernauts are back too.

Increased firepower will help you stem the tide of the apocalypse. Being able to open car doors as you buzz past stray zombies at highway speeds lets you make roadkill in ways that never get old, plus it protects your vehicle’s structural integrity too (oh, and by the way, you have to fill the cars with gas now, lest you run out at the exact wrong time). The ability to now properly crash through fences rather than unrealistically slam into them as if they were concrete barricades should promote the longevity of your rides as well.

Nighttime, I should add, pretty much always qualifies at “the exact wrong time.” The team at Undead Labs have taken special care to make the witching hour and beyond especially terrifying. Yes, the zombies have red eyes at night and yes, they seem a bit more irritable. The day-night cycle has even been made a bit longer than it was in State of Decay 1. But it’s the environment itself that’s been paid special attention. The developers explained how most games have an almost blue-ish nighttime, by design, so that you can see your surroundings. Undead Labs wanted State of Decay 2 to be a bit more realistic and terrifying of a rural setting, so the black of night is much more black. It’s not quite can’t-see-your-own-hand-in-front-of-your-face kind of black, but it’s dark enough that a car without headlights on, barreling down the street, might, say, completely miss a Bloater in the middle of the road and end up having to tuck and roll to avoid a cabin full of deadly gas caused by the Bloater living up to its name.


Permadeath, resource management, relationship building, vehicle procurement, maximizing your community’s skills, building outposts, trying to figure out which survivors are friends or foes – all of it and more are what made State of Decay special. And State of Decay 2 deepens all of these systems and more, with the result being a game the Undead Labs team had to peel me away from after I spent two days with it. It’s fair to wonder how it’s going to run on a stock Xbox One – I only played it on a high-end PC, to which an Xbox One X should compare nicely – but from what I’ve seen so far, State of Decay 2 may be a steal at $30. And playing it reminded me that, annoyingly, there haven’t been any State of Decay copycats in the five years since the first game. Thankfully, the real thing returns soon enough.
 
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Am I the only one who dislikes nightime in games...I mean,I got this nice new 4K set and all,I want to see where I'm going lol...so yeah,this is not a good ''feature'' for me.

That being said,Sea of Thieves didnt convince me to grab Gamepass but this one might,it seems more solo friendly then SoT at least lol.
 
Been playing the original again and it's far more enjoyable on the X1X than it was on the 360, it still has a lot of bugs but at least it seems more polished overall. I hope in SOD2 they fix the animation when you slam on the brakes and the zombies fly off of the hood, they should fly off faster and hopefully with a ragdoll type of animation vs the same canned looking delayed animation that happens in the original. I also hope they have more varied animations so you don't get two or three zombies standing next to each other doing the exact same movement like they are Lady Gaga's backup dancers lol, to be fair that happens in a lot of open world games though but it would be nice if that type of thing was addressed in the sequel.
 
No idea what gave you that idea.

Yeah. Odd comment considering co op is only a new feature and it was entirely about single player in the original. I suspect the comment about not moving about alone was taken as you needing to have a co-op partner. But what they are referring to is about having NPCs with you. They said this for the first game as well.
 
Yeah. Odd comment considering co op is only a new feature and it was entirely about single player in the original. I suspect the comment about not moving about alone was taken as you needing to have a co-op partner. But what they are referring to is about having NPCs with you. They said this for the first game as well.
Ah NPCs is the part I missed.
 
ahh, s***, yes.

just saw it in my twitter feed and posted it without thinking, haven't even watched it yet.
If you don't like State of Decay 1, don't watch it. If you liked 1, then enjoy, it looks to be an evolution of the game, not a revolution.
 
remember that dead island was not full price and look how that game turns out!

Oh, i hear ya. Chalk it up to another TD overreaction. I think the game looks okay. I'm going to play it and enjoy it. Nothing wrong with a $30 game at the end of the day. Worst case scenario is they sell it at $60 and it's not really a $60 title. So whatever, trying my best to be optimistic but it's just so easy to question things when even the biggest Xbox fan, Crapgamer gets down at times. Seriously, y'all think i'm bipolar check his latest videos out, lol.

 
Oh, i hear ya. Chalk it up to another TD overreaction. I think the game looks okay. I'm going to play it and enjoy it. Nothing wrong with a $30 game at the end of the day. Worst case scenario is they sell it at $60 and it's not really a $60 title. So whatever, trying my best to be optimistic but it's just so easy to question things when even the biggest Xbox fan, Crapgamer gets down at times. Seriously, y'all think i'm bipolar check his latest videos out, lol.


You know crapgamer is not a bad person but those titles lately have been over kill.
 
I like what I've seen of this. I never actually played the first one, used one of my free month codes for Game Pass last night so I could get in a little time on the first one before this comes out.
 
I like what I've seen of this. I never actually played the first one, used one of my free month codes for Game Pass last night so I could get in a little time on the first one before this comes out.

Nice, let us know what you think of the first game. I watched some videos of it and it looked pretty rough but I'm excited for the sequel. The only thing that concerns me a little bit about the sequel is I read there is some player ganking allowed. It sounded something similar to The Division's Dark Zone where players can betray each other. I'm not really a fan of player backstabbing.
 
Nice, let us know what you think of the first game. I watched some videos of it and it looked pretty rough but I'm excited for the sequel. The only thing that concerns me a little bit about the sequel is I read there is some player ganking allowed. It sounded something similar to The Division's Dark Zone where players can betray each other. I'm not really a fan of player backstabbing.

The first was very rough but equally it was very fun to play. Some people didn't like the micro management required so if your not interested in that piece be wary of this game.

For the sequel players can only join you on request. You either fire a flare for help or respond to a flare for help. I'm not sure what the situation is with team damage once you do go into co-op but I thought it was switched off. That's not to say someone could intentionally attach zombies on your position or whatever. I'll probably only be co-op'ing with people from my friends list for the start of it anyway.
 
The more I see the more I'm looking forward to it, it's still not the best looking game ever (doesn't look bad either) but they've made a huge jump visually compared to the first one and it looks fun, the character models kind of remind me of The Division for some reason.
 
The more I see the more I'm looking forward to it, it's still not the best looking game ever (doesn't look bad either) but they've made a huge jump visually compared to the first one and it looks fun, the character models kind of remind me of The Division for some reason.
Hanging backpack straps...