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State Of Decay |OT| Eat Flesh

SoA confirmed...?

Might be for the best.


(fucking hurry up on the PC version)

I guess I'd be happy with it in the SoA promotion. That would guarantee it a lot more exposure. Would have preferred it on Weds seeing as I have two days off.

Bah.

From their twitter.

To be honest I get the feeling that it will come out on Wednesday but they don't want to commit to it incase it doesn't. I am hopeful too but I suppose thats the risk of releasing it close to E3.

I hope so. I really do.
 

SinsArmor

Neo Member
SoA confirmed...?

Might be for the best.


(fucking hurry up on the PC version)

def not SOA

Undead Sanya just answered that question on the forums

"Oh, no, this one I can positively refute. They want to make money on this, starting immediately, as badly as we do. Every day we don't launch is another day we're spending money without making any money. "
 

quickwhips

Member
So I played it at Pax east and this game was a blast. Can't wait to get to play it for more that 10 minutes at a time. Playing this made me feel like I was playing GTA 3 on PS2 for the first time all over again. It just feels way fun. You can do a lot of cool stuff except swim. :( But they said they might add coop if the game sells well. Also I didn't have frame rate issues at all.
 

Karak

Member
Ya agreed. I am not too stressed about it and it most certainly isn't MS's fault. Cert of a game like this is bound to take some time and both want it launched.

From their Twitter - PC VERSION IS IN PROGRESS
No release date yet planned for that though it looks like
 
I'm not too clued up on this game but it looks interesting. Is there an underlying story or does it lean more towards being a simulator? Or is it both?
 

quickwhips

Member
I'm not too clued up on this game but it looks interesting. Is there an underlying story or does it lean more towards being a simulator? Or is it both?

There are quest and missions and I believe a story line I don't know if it has a true ending or not since its part simulator also.
 

Trigger

Member
Has the price not been confirmed?

I'm not too clued up on this game but it looks interesting. Is there an underlying story or does it lean more towards being a simulator? Or is it both?

Both. There's a storyline, but from we've seen it's possible to ignore it and just simulate live after the end.
 

Karak

Member
I'm not too clued up on this game but it looks interesting. Is there an underlying story or does it lean more towards being a simulator? Or is it both?

It is more of a mixture of both with the ability to effectively freeze the main story by not pushing forward with the story mission and just playing through the random missions that pop up all over the world.
It does have an end game.

Price is not confirmed.
"As much as some of the bigger XBLA games" Was the quote.
 
Haha, that IGN let's play series is pretty great. "Damnuht Bobbeh" lols truly was a great Hank Hill. Get hype, defo day one for me.
 

bengraven

Member
I guess I'd be happy with it in the SoA promotion. That would guarantee it a lot more exposure. Would have preferred it on Weds seeing as I have two days off.

Bah.

Well I'm hoping the cert process is quick in this case.

Can't wait to watch the Twitch videos while waiting for the PC version. :p
 
Well I'm hoping the cert process is quick in this case.

Can't wait to watch the Twitch videos while waiting for the PC version. :p

Indeed. Let's hope so.

I'm double dipping personally, seems like a game that deserves as much support as possible. If only so the MMO gets one step closer to actually being made.
 

Frologic

Member
When this comes to the PC I seriously hope they add co-op even if it's just two player. "Music by Jesper Kyd". Oh god yes I don't even care anymore!
 

hitoshi

Member
Undead Labs put up a nice blog post about the release date

http://undeadlabs.com/2013/06/news/almost/

Is June 5 the release date for State of Decay?
I sure as hell hope so.

As everyone on the planet seems to know at this point, our target release date of June 5 was leaked by a GameStop employee a few weeks ago. I’m not sure why they had that date in their system, but it’s a date we’ve been shooting for internally, so it’s unlikely someone just made it up and got lucky. In any case, despite our best efforts to clarify it’s not an official release date, word spread, got picked up and repeated by the Big Guys (I’m looking at you, IGN!), and quickly became fact.
A quick peek at #stateofdecay confirms it, as about 20% of the tweets are something along the lines of “State of Decay is out June 5th!”. Another 20% are “So excited to play State of Decay!”, and the remaining 60% are “Wanna play State of Decay now? Try the Leaked version here: [bullshit phishing URL redacted] … I’ve been playing it a week now.”
[Hint: No, he hasn't.]

When we know the official release date, you’ll see something like this on the front page of our website:

OMFG THE OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE OF STATE OF DECAY IS XXXX!
I can tell you this: we don’t know the release date, and neither does anyone at Microsoft. But we do know the release process, and we can make some informed guesses about what that means for the release date. There’s no reason you shouldn’t know as much as we do — there are no conspiracies or big corporate secrets here — so I’m going to tell you what we know about how all this works.

Every game released on the Xbox 360 must comply with a series of Technical Certification Requirements, or TCRs. These requirements have nothing to do with the actual game — whether it’s fun to play, whether the art is beautiful, the music compelling, or the mechanics well balanced and interesting. Instead, they specify requirements for how games interact with the Xbox hardware and software. For example, there are TCRs stipulating how a game must handle a controller being disconnected, or what to do if the player logs out, or if the storage device becomes unavailable. There are TCRs that stipulate the maximum amount of time you can be in a loading screen without showing something interactive or entertaining (e.g. hints, videos, etc). There are TCRs mandating minimum framerate, and stipulating text must be legible on standard definition televisions. There are TCRs that stipulate proper terminology and spelling for the Xbox controller buttons (e.g. Start, LB, RT). In short, TCRs ensure a baseline level of quality and a consistent way of handling events.

TCRs are A Good Thing, because they protect the value of your Xbox and ensure a poorly coded game can’t delete all your save games or brick your box. That said, there are several hundred of them, some of them clear and relevant, and others somewhat vague and dated. The current list represents 12 years of Xbox development evolution, and if you think about the way the current Xbox 360, with its HDMI ports, Kinnect sensors, and cloud saves, compares to the original Xbox of 2001, you can understand how some of the older TCRs might be a bit harder to map to modern game development.

But, we don’t get to pick and choose which TCRs we care about buffet style. Every game published on the Xbox 360 — whether it’s a retail game on disc, or a digital game for Xbox LIVE Arcade, published by Microsoft, or another publisher such as EA — must pass through the same certification gauntlet.

The certification process if divided into three discreet phases: Build Verification Test (BVT), Compliance, and Functional. You start at BVT and move through each phase, one at a time.
BVT is a suite of tests designed to ensure the game is packaged correctly for the Xbox system and executes properly. It ensures all Achievements are in place with proper point distribution, Avatar Awards are properly referenced, and Leaderboards are properly integrated. It checks that all supported language files are in place and loadable. In short, this phase is largely a sanity check before committing a large number of real live human beings to the next two stages.
Compliance is the doozie. In this phase the game is tested against all TCRs. If any fail, it’s deemed a Certification Failure Event (CFE) and your game gets booted out. There is a formal challenge process in which you can ask for an exception to the TCR, but exceptions are rarely granted, and only under very specific circumstances. Usually you have no recourse but to fix the issue, test it, and resubmit, which starts the entire process from scratch. That’s an important point: you can’t fix it and pick up where you left off. Every resubmission starts from the beginning. Developers often refer to this phase as “TCR hell”, and indeed it can be quite rough on smaller developers who do not have experience with TCRs. We’re fortunate for two reasons: First, several of our programmers have been to this rodeo numerous times, so we were on top of the TCRs from the start; and second, our excellent production team at Microsoft was able to get us in for several pre-certification tests, which is to certification what a dress rehearsal is to a play.
The final phase is Functional. This is the phase in which the certification team is actually playing the game. They’re not making qualitative judgements, but instead simply ensuring the game can be played, is completable, and fulfills the gameplay description provided by the developers. While not impossible, it’s far more rare to get booted from certification in this phase.

One important thing to keep in mind is the certification process, unlike quality assurance, or QA, is administered by the Xbox 360 team — the platform holder, rather than the Microsoft Studios team — our publisher. Our publishing team has no more influence on the process than any other publisher in the industry. Everyone has to play by the same rules. So, now you know everything you ever wanted to know about the certification. But what you really want to know is what it means for State of Decay!
I can tell you that as of yesterday, State of Decay passed through Compliance and into the final Functional phase of certification.

So what does this mean? It means it is more likely the game will complete certification. While we don’t have a definitive timeframe to complete Functional testing, our hope and expectation is it will be early next week. If that happens, and if the game does not fail certification, then we may indeed meet our target date. It’s widely known XBLA updates on Wednesdays, so if we miss that target date, we’ll retarget for the following Wednesday, and keep at it until we get it done.
In short, our release date will be the first Wednesday after we clear certification, and right now we’re hopeful that will be June 5.

One more note on this: If the game does fail certification for any reason, it’s not due to evil publishers, government conspiracies, or greedy developers who for some reason think they’ll make a lot of money by delaying the release of the game. It just means somebody was doing his job, and found a serious bug nobody would want to see go live to 20 million players.
(Hey I can hope, right?)

Whew. Now you know what I know, and what our dedicated team at Microsoft Studios knows. I promise we will let you know the very second we get notice State of Decay has cleared certification.
After that, our job is not done. We have a PC build of the game to finish and deliver. We will certainly want to fix a few bugs that slipped through (we saw a few in the video streams today that we jumped on immediately). And we have super secret plans for a few other treats to roll out in the future that Sanya would shoot me for even mentioning.

To all of you who have joined us in the past few weeks, and especially to those of you who have stuck with us for the past few years: Thank you, from everyone at the Lab. Your support and enthusiasm has helped us through the ups and downs as we wrestled this huge, awesome beast to the ground. And now we’re almost there.

Hear that? Hang in there. We’re almost there…
 

Gowans

Member
Their communications/community/pr management is some of the best I've seen.

Honest, open and transparent, from forum posts to that blog post. This is a A+ lesson in how to manage it.

They need a pat of the back for it.
 
Their communications/community/pr management is some of the best I've seen.

Honest, open and transparent, from forum posts to that blog post. This is a A+ lesson in how to manage it.

They need a pat of the back for it.

Yep. Pretty amazing team.

I really do hope it passes cert for this Wednesday.
 
To be honest as much as people complain about the certification process, it's good Microsoft has these standards, it takes as long as it takes I guess. Hopefully they will make it and we can get down to some zombie killing.

I'm assuming the other stuff they're talking about us dlc and the co-op update they talked about being a possibility which is good.
 
co-op update would be huge.

Also, the map in that new IGN video...WOW! Looks like there will be at least two towns to explore...

CBfLvBb.png


Doa78jJ.png

Oh Lord, this game.

This game.
 

theRizzle

Member
He said a co-op update would be huge.

Even just adding a second player (nevermind 3rd or 4th) would be amazing, but I really don't see that happening unfortunately. It definitely would be a nice surprise.
 

SinsArmor

Neo Member
Co-op update....wait...really?

IF the game was the sell well the devs said they would work on adding a co op update if possible

found it

Q: Will State of Decay have co-op gameplay?

A: Not at launch. Class4 is an online world, and our hope is to offer the multiplayer options (that we have to develop for Class4) for State of Decay at a later date.

class 4 being the MMO they want to make set in the same world if state of decay sells well
 

derFeef

Member
They should not have mentioned coop and PC imho, looks like some people are holding off now. That said, I can see coop a bigger undertaking with how this game works.
 

Ryan_IGN

Member
Part 3 of our video series goes up on Monday.

Also, when the rest of the office found out about my Hank Hill impression I was made to perform it on the spot, like a clown for their amusement. Now if Mike Judge would just call and say he's retiring and wants me to restart King of the Hill take over for him, I'll be SET FOR LIFE.
 
Part 3 of our video series goes up on Monday.

Also, when the rest of the office found out about my Hank Hill impression I was made to perform it on the spot, like a clown for their amusement. Now if Mike Judge would just call and say he's retiring and wants me to restart King of the Hill take over for him, I'll be SET FOR LIFE.

Ahhh, thanks for the update. Was looking forward to part 3 today. Guess I'll just have to rewatch parts 1 and 2.

That was a great impression. You should absolutely do it again, perhaps for the entirety of part 4?
 
Part 3 of our video series goes up on Monday.

Also, when the rest of the office found out about my Hank Hill impression I was made to perform it on the spot, like a clown for their amusement. Now if Mike Judge would just call and say he's retiring and wants me to restart King of the Hill take over for him, I'll be SET FOR LIFE.

You're a failure. You fail. God damned fail. Need more zombie killing footage. I didn't think you sounded like Hank Hill. I thought you were doing the "I'm a veteran of four foreign wars" guy from Beavis and Butthead. I guess they're the same voice, though aren't they?

Is there a review embargo? In case you couldn't tell, we're really enjoying your videos. Thank you for them.
 

Trigger

Member
Part 3 of our video series goes up on Monday.

Also, when the rest of the office found out about my Hank Hill impression I was made to perform it on the spot, like a clown for their amusement. Now if Mike Judge would just call and say he's retiring and wants me to restart King of the Hill take over for him, I'll be SET FOR LIFE.

God gave you a real gift.
 

Big_Al

Unconfirmed Member
I really really want this but I'm going to have to hold out for the PC version I think. Watching some footage the framerate didn't seem particularly great and I've just been spoilt these days.

The actual game itself looks fucking awesome though. We any idea how big the actual world is ? Do you move about from town to town or is it only one main area etc ?
 
Aside from the framerate/tearing in the vids, this looks like the ultimate zombie game. Still bums me out that it is left to some vague possibility in the future, but co-op better fucking happen.
 
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