State of Decay 3 Games Showcase Deep Dive | Official XBOX Podcast

SPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Official XBOX Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside XBOX. As you can see, we're not in the traditional studio today. No, instead, we are down in the historic Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle at Undead Labs. We're about to sit down with a couple of fine folks who are building a game I'm very, very excited to get my hands on. State of Decay 3. Now, Game Showcase showed us some of what we can expect, but there's so much more. Today, they're going to talk us through what we saw, talk about some details you may have missed, and answer way too many of my questions. Let's get to it. We're here with Philip Holt, the Studio Head of Undead Labs and Wayne Laybourn, the Art Director of State of Decay 3. Philip, Wayne, welcome. Thank you guys for bringing us in today. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

PHILIP HOLT: Doing great. Thanks for coming all the way out to Seattle. I'm happy to have you here.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, yeah, it's so far for me, so far. How about you, Wayne? How you doing?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I'm doing good. Yeah, awesome, nice to meet you.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, awesome, nice to meet you as well. I appreciate the time. I know super-busy coming off the heels of Showcase and just what you guys have got cooking is so excited, so we wanted to swing by and talk about it. I'm a massive fan of State of Decay. I've played them all. I think State of Decay 2 came out the year I joined XBOX or pretty close to it, so it was like one of the first launches I remember where everyone in the office was just excited and really looking forward to it. So here we are, State of Decay 3, what sets you guys apart from other zombie games, and how would you explain State of Decay to someone that hasn't played before?

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, so State of Decay is a zombie survival sandbox fantasy. All of those words are sort of important to contemplate. It's an open-world game. It's very much a survival management simulation, so you're responsible for a community of survivors and you got to keep them alive, and the zombies are trying to kill you. There's base building, there's community management, there's resource -- you've got to find food and water and ammo and medicine and all those kinds of things to keep your community going, and you sort of play against this very dynamic plague threat that's coming after you. I think the thing that really sort of separates the game tonally, perhaps, from other zombie games, is that there's a big part of our game that because it's so centered around keeping a community alive, there's this idea of hope that tomorrow could come and it could be a better day, and that we have mutual responsibility to each other to keep us alive.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, I love that. I mean, I love that you said "hope" because that's -- when I am trying to convey this game to someone else, that's kind of where my head goes is like hope and community because so many post-apocalyptic games or zombie games are pretty dreary, through and through, and I do feel even in the past titles, there is this element of what are we trying to save? Look at this beautiful world. Look how we're working together. You do develop some compassion for the NPCs in your community and in ways that I was even shocked I felt myself. I do want to touch on that a little bit. Wayne, I imagine, you know, part of like the hope in the community and the vibe of the game, you know, that rests on your shoulders, correct?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, it's as fun to make as it is to play, I think, because of the breadth. It's not just -- there's space for stillness. There's space for nostalgia. There's space for hope and love, and then there's also space for violence and horror and all those things. I think as artists and developers on the team, there's room for a lot of us, for all those different tastes in the same way as for players, as well, so you can kind of pick your own adventure of making it just like you can when you're playing it.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, that's fascinating. Now, let's talk a little bit about community, because obviously, it's a huge crux of the game. You know, why is that word so important to you? Talk about how that community -- what community means to State of Decay 3.

PHILIP HOLT: You know, so it goes back to just survival. I got really interested a couple of years ago in Medal of Honor recipients and listening to their interviews and how they talked about their acts of heroism. I was really struck by, after listening to a dozen or so interviews, they all kind of told the same story. Ultimately, it came down to I did my thing because the person standing next to me would have done it for me. There's this, like, when the bullets are flying and when your life is really on the line, you are going to fall back to the people immediately around you. That's the people that live in your house and the people on your street, and we see this in weather-related disasters all the time. It snows, and all of a sudden everybody's sort of friendly and in a good mood, right? We are biologically evolved for group defense, and what separated early humans from other primates is that we shared food, and we participated in group defense. The game then places you in this role as a caretaker of this group of survivors and that caretaking relationship that you have with your survivors is what actually creates that emotional connection that you experience. When somebody dies and they die for real and they're gone, they don't come back. There is no save/restore --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: You feel it.

PHILIP HOLT: You feel it. It's a loss, and it's because we create a new sense of duty and responsibility to these humans that rely on you.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, that's so interesting because even in State of Decay 2, I do feel the emotional connection to my characters in my community more than I have in other titles. And I'm really excited to see how that evolves in the next game. Well, let's dive into the trailer a little bit. Obviously, we're just coming off the heels of Showcase. The trailer just dropped, and I think it's -- I'm not as creative as you guys are, but I do think it's a Herculean effort to put together a trailer that's going to captivate audiences but also show what the game is while still being artsy and interesting and cool, but you've got to show mechanics of the game and what you're actually doing. I'd love to talk a little bit about the development of that trailer and kind of how you made the decisions you all did.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, I mean, Showcase, I think is a unique moment in a campaign, and it has a set of requirements around a trailer asset that are just different from other types --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Sure, yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: You're in a show, and it's an hour or so long and you don't really know what comes before or after you. It's sort of -- there's this sort of spectacle of this industry event and then the trailer lives on its own on the web forever to be viewed by itself in isolation by your fans. So you, at once, reach this mass audience that really maybe doesn't know much about your game, and you're also speaking to your core, which is going to analyze every single frame of the trailer, right? So you have to think about, okay, how do we put these elements together to create something that's going to stand out within the context of the show? We got together over the fall, a few of us in the studio, and just started pitching ideas. We landed on the boom box as an opening kind of early.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Really early, surprisingly, like 15 minutes in.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, it was the first meeting, yeah. When I was coming up, there was a concert film called "Stop Making Sense" by the Talking Heads and it's considered one of the greatest concert films of all time. There's this great moment at the beginning of the film where David Byrne comes out on stage. It's a completely empty stage with a guitar and a tape deck, a boom box. He puts it on the ground, he pushes play, and he says, "I've got a song for you." It's the drum line from the song, and then he plays solo.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Cool.

PHILIP HOLT: It's an iconic opening to a concert film, and so I just, I sort of pitched this to the room of like, what if we have this cool device, this explosive device, it's a grenade strapped to a boom box. Like, what if we opened on that and a slow pull out to reveal the scene and everybody kind of loved the idea, and we kind of rolled with it.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, it just kind of worked, too, because one of the hard things about a game like this is it's not about any one individual, right? Who do you pick? What do you start with? A lot of the assets, like the boom box, are designed in a way that, if you see them by themselves, they say a lot about the game, so it's got all the right ingredients. It's got something familiar, the boom box. It's got grenades strapped to the side of it. It's got something written on the label, so it's personalized. As you see in this thing, it's an object, but it gives you an insight into the community and --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: And the world, the tone, the world, all of these things.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Just in that one thing, so it's just -- it was like a perfect start, really. We have a lot of other things designed like that, that are awesome, but the boom box in particular plays music.

PHILIP HOLT: It's so good.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: There's a kind of a fuse, as well, so it gives us a, you know --

PHILIP HOLT: Like a lit bomb, right, for the audience to like, when is this going to blow up? The other thing that happens in Showcase is people play the guessing game of what trailer is next, right?

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: You don't know right away, right? That's a perfect intro for exactly that.

PHILIP HOLT: It pulls you in. It's, like, what is this? You're trying to guess. There are glimpses, some shadows of zombies, and so the fans pick it up and --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Some will catch it quick, for sure, but I think a lot won't, and that's a fun -- yeah, it's definitely a fun guessing game. The boom box blew me away. That immediately -- iconic intro, loved it. It definitely feels like a great shot. It feels like the intro to a movie and less of a trailer, which I love. "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is the song that's playing, right? How did you guys come to choose that song? It fits the tone of the environment so well and the world so well, and it's like perfect New Wave -- I don't want to say it's "New Wave." It's almost like the birth of goth I think is what I read online. A lot of people consider it that. Was that the reason you picked it or --

WAYNE LAYBOURN: You know, I actually asked Alan last night. Alan is someone who -- an artist on the team.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, nice.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: He's been on there for a while.

PHILIP HOLT: It was his idea.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, shout out. That's awesome.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: So I asked, I asked him, actually, last night, because I thought it might come up. I was, like, why'd you choose that track? He gave a great answer. He said, "Because I was listening to it, and it seemed cool," which I, I love that because Alan and I were passing it back and forward this sort of boom box and playing with it and locations and panning out and speed and stuff, and we wanted to get it back in front of Philip. I went over and he's, like, oh, I put a bit of a song on. I was, like, oh, that sounds amazing. We didn't know that Philip is a huge fan of Bauhaus, too, so that didn't hurt, but it just really fit. Like it's kind of a bit grimy, a little bit gritty, unrefined. I mean, it's just kind of a perfect choice really. I love that answer because I think that's the way we roll a lot at Undead is people come to work, they immerse themselves in what we're building, and apply themselves.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: For sure.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: They sort of live in it, so Alan just picked this because he happened to be listening to it at the time and thought it fit and tried it. Then we got it in front of Philip, and then, I mean, he's got posters and all sorts of stuff.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: It's so Seattle, so Seattle.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, I grew up, and I mean, this was the song of my early teen years, and friends were huge Bauhaus fans. What's cool about the song, 1979, it was recorded, and the band had only been together for three weeks. This is the first recording session they had done. They did an EP, and this was the single they released. It's a 9-1/2-minute song.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, I was going to say a lot of instrumental in and out, which is kind of perfect for a trailer, just the environment.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, and the drum is the exactly the same pattern throughout the entire -- so you can kind of cut pretty easily from one spot to another pretty seamlessly. It worked mechanically for the trailer. The thing I love about the lyrics though, so I always thought that the lyric was, "I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead." No. It turns out we looked up the lyrics it's, "undead, undead, undead." That was kind of a happy accident.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah. Yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: The other thing, though, is just the meaning of Bela Lugosi in the lyric. If you don't know, Bela Lugosi is famous for playing Dracula, so famous, in fact, that when you imagine Dracula, you picture Bela Lugosi.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: You picture him, yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: When he died, he became immortal. He became undead because he will live forever as in this sort of cultural imagination of what Dracula is. That goes into a lot of what we think of when we think of Undead Labs as a studio is sort of tapping into those things that become everlasting.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: I love that, and I do love that you have -- you can feel the studio's -- the employees' personality kind of seeping into the game already. Someone is just picking a song that they love, that they feel it works, and in that, they've become, to your point, immortal. It is just you feel your passion and your team's passion in the game, and I think that's awesome. That is a way that we can live forever. It's like through the art that we make.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I think that's part of the secret sauce, as well, for Undead Labs, for the games they've made. There's always a bit of something in there, and I think it's just simply that. People put themselves into the game a little bit.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I don't think we considered -- we didn't look at other songs really, did we?.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, it just kind of hit. Well, we pushed it. We worked with a vendor to help produce the trailer, and they're like, no, it's a terrible song. There's no way you should use it. It's 9-1/2 minutes. It's from the '70s. Nobody knows it. Then the early cut of the trailer played the song over and they were, also, oh, it completely works. Then we had to approach the -- whoever owns the master at this point, the label, I guess, to say, can we license the song? They were into it.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Very cool. They're going to get that bump.

PHILIP HOLT: Eventually, we got it.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, I love it. Maybe we'll get a bump on the charts after the trailer drops.

PHILIP HOLT: I was, like, give me merch. I want some signed stuff from the band.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, exactly. Oh, man, I could actually just sit here, and we could turn this into a music podcast, which does happen a lot in these when we're recording XBOX Podcasts and we talk about the music. We always go deep, so thank you for sharing. That's really cool. Working through other aspects of the trailer, because obviously, the music, the intro, incredible. What are the gameplay mechanics that you wanted to be sure to show? Because again, like you said, the trailer has to be a minute. You don't have a ton of time. Did you have to make decisions there about what are we going to show? It's like a gameplay mechanic.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, well, our game is so big, and there's so many different elements that it's hard to compress it all into a three-minute trailer. We knew coming out of the Showcase '24, the last time we showed a trailer, that our community was just clamoring for gameplay. They wanted to see combat and locomotion and the basics of running around the world. We knew that we needed a gameplay reveal as part of the trailer. I think the couple of big ideas were untethered multiplayer co-op, shared world, and so we showed four characters. One of them is doing something that would happen in any session of State of Decay, which is they're out exploring on their own and they run into trouble and they phone home for help and their friends, you know, pile into a car and bail them out. That sort of encounter we talked about early, and then that was basically set the script for the trailer.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Totally. Well, and I think that's a good one because untethered multiplayer, obviously probably one of the most requested things coming out of the last title.

PHILIP HOLT: Well, it's really cool. Some of our -- we've had a Player Council that's been working with us for about a year.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: These are big fans of our game. Some of them are content creators. Some of them are mods in our community, and many of them are pretty dedicated single-player players. They're, like, no, this is -- I want to play with my friends now because this untethered shared world is the ultimate fulfillment of the fantasy of we are building a base together, and we're trying to save these survivors and keep the night at bay.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Right. There are so many conscious time decisions you have to make in State of Decay where it's like, I need meds, I need food, but I don't really have time to get one right now. I'm excited about the element of you get this, I'll get that, but you're doubling your risk of --

PHILIP HOLT: We're both out at the same time.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, exactly, double the chance to flip a car, end up stranded, someone gets mauled. It's just high risk/high reward, but you're doing it together.

PHILIP HOLT: Yes, exactly, and I mean, it's the way that we play here. It's the way that our Alpha community is playing with the game now.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, totally, totally.

PHILIP HOLT: We're finally delivering that experience.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, way, way more fun to do that stuff with your friends, like it just truly is.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I mean, we were talking about it this morning, weren't we, with some of the alpha players who have got like 90 hours in already --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, my gosh. For real? That's awesome.

PHILIP HOLT: Like, in a week.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: -- it's really positive.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Ninety hours in a week.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, the play time --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: That's awesome.

PHILIP HOLT: I mean, we haven't really talked about any of the numbers. We had a really overwhelming response from the Alpha sign up, and there aren't that many people in, so it's the first of several tests. I really encourage people that are interested in State of Decay to sign up for playtesting. They can hit our website stateofdecay.com and they can sign up there, and we will be hosting a second Alpha soon and then some beta tests after that on the run to launch in 2027 and so if people want to get in and give us feedback and be a part of shaping what this experience becomes on launch day, they should sign up for playtesting.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Heck yeah. You know, it's funny. I'm not the biggest survival game player alone, but as soon as you have some buddies, that is one of the best genres to just like go out and play in. I don't know what that is. I think, to your point, it's like, we're just community builders.

PHILIP HOLT: Hardwired that way, yeah, although I will say, you know, as much as we wanted to focus on that, we also started the trailer with just a single player because we want to signal to the audience that this is still a great game to play as a single player experience, and probably a majority of our players will play the game single player. It's great to play that way, but it's also really fun to play with your friends.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: You've got options.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, it's great to hear from the Alpha players that ones who want to play single player are saying that they're enjoying the multiplayer.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, that is cool.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I think because they can get away and do their own thing for a little while and circle back, as well, so it's really kind of exciting feedback to begin this early, I think.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: A hundred percent, and I think like in these kinds of games, you know, at least with our group, like there are things I like to do in this genre of game and there are things I just don't like to do that my friends do. The ability to kind of like, I'll go scavenge while you build blank or whatever. You do this; I'll do the other thing. I love that you can do that now in tandem, and it does almost -- like I said earlier, like it just makes the genre more interesting and different, way more dynamic in what you can do. Then you feel like you have a responsibility to the community. I have to go clear this Plague Heart. That's my job to do while someone goes and does something, else.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, exactly, and if, if you mess up, they've got to drop what they're doing and come --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: And come help you or not, it depends how good your friends are, but hopefully, hopefully, they're coming in that car, speaking of which, the SUV in the trailer looks awesome. We'd love to talk about vehicles a little bit and how they've changed in the new title.

PHILIP HOLT: Well, one of the things that we looked at in our player data from State of Decay 2 is how much people drive, and our game's kind of a sneaky driving game. It's about 20 to 30% of the playtime is in a car in State of Decay 2, and I think one of the unintended consequences of delivering a much bigger world in State of Decay 3 is you spend a lot more time in a car.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Sure.

PHILIP HOLT: We knew the driving experience had to be great and we wanted not just to put 200 different cars in the game. We wanted the vehicles to feel really distinctive and sort of utilitarian oriented. There's going to be a sedan that lets me go fast and has good gas mileage. There's going to be an SUV that is good off road and has maybe good storage capacity, but not the best gas mileage. There's a cargo van that's going to allow me to just load tons of stuff in it --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Nice, nice.

PHILIP HOLT: -- with terrible fuel economy.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Pick your poison, yeah. Cars are sort of a hero in the world just as much as the players are, and they're sort of your mobile base. This is your sanctuary when you're out in the world. If you get rocked by some zombies, you're hustling back to the car trying to make a dash out of there. We also show there's a little bit of mud accumulation on it. That particular one is skinned. Do you want to talk about the skin on that?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: At the time, when we were making the trailer, we started developing skins for the different vehicles, for the characters, for the backpacks, all the gear and stuff. That just happened to be one of the ones that we'd done as a test.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, nice.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: The hardcore, I'm sure if they -- if they're freeze-framing in and looking at it, they might see something that looks like Red Talon on the side of it.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, okay, okay.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: It's not like Red Talon is going to be like a big part, but it's just part of that same thing again.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: It's a nice nod.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, it's just like when we talk about stuff as artists and designers and stuff, we're just sort of like, what would be left over in this world? What if, oh, if we got that -- what if you -- and we just play in there. That was one of those skins that we had, and it looked pretty cool.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: It'd be interesting to see if people -- because you brought up earlier in the interview that people are going to watch it like a hundred times, a thousand times on YouTube after a Showcase, I'm curious between this podcast and the announce what people are going to catch in the trailer?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, I looked at it, actually, this morning again and just peeked, and there's a lot of mud on there, so they might not really -- but you can just see it on the hood, so I think some folks will notice, but the boom box, which is part of the placeables and throwables and then the weapon design, like the melee and the range are really, really good. The vehicles are sort of the grand finale of all that stuff. I think we've got a really, really good team on that stuff and the design of them. We've sort of gone deeper.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Nice. Well, if you don't look good doing something, what's even the point? I mean, that's my motto. With that in mind, I do want to ask, we talked about cars. Is there going to be awesome outfits again for your people? Can I play dolls a little bit?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yes.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Awesome.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, that was my morning this morning, just working on that stuff.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, that's so funny. Yeah, I love that. I love that.

PHILIP HOLT: We were really surprised, again, in our player data to see how many players went into the closet feature and customized their character appearance post-launch. It was like 30% of our daily active users would go into the closet and customize character appearance.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: We have this great pipeline for getting clothing into the game. Stacy is doing a lot of the design of, you know, costuming and it's very cool.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Thank you, Stacy.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, and it's wide too. If you're into military-type stuff, that'll exist. If you're into just sort of crazy fashion stuff, like, like there's just --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Seattle flannels probably.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: It's community, right, so it's just -- it should be --

PHILIP HOLT: Allow players to express themselves.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, so we sort of work less in real specifics and more in just sort of broad tones and stuff, and what's fun about that, too, is it lets each artist sort of bring a bit of themselves into it, and so we get this sort of variety.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: That's cool. Yeah, just a diverse, diverse amount of clothing, and it makes it fun for us because we don't get burnt out on it. We're not doing the same stuff all the time. It's just, you get -- we're playing in this world all the time. Nice.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, that's really cool. Well, and the clothing system has to work with our procedurally generated characters. Every character in the world is assembled, so there's really no two of the same.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: We design stuff that we like, and then we end up with things we didn't design that we like more. Cool, happy accidents.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, and I think the whole thing contributes to a look that feels pretty ownable to State of Decay. Something we talk about a lot is you should be able to see a screenshot from our game and be able to, without a logo on the corner of it, be able to know that it comes from State of Decay. Places like where all of this design touches characters or clothing or vehicles or weapons or backpacks is a way that we have an ownable and specific artistic expression that makes it identifiable as a State of Decay thing.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Obviously, in the trailer, you see a lot of different locations, contrasting locations, some really beautiful shots and really dreary ones. I would love to talk a little bit about your location choices as well as the settlements we're going to be staying in.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, I mean, one of the challenges of making a trailer is, you're building this out of a game in development.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: I never thought about that and the fact that you're developing this trailer while you're developing the game, right? I never thought about those aspects, especially an open-world game.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: You can't just say, oh, that bit's done. Don't work on it. We try to do that. Because it's all system based, if someone's working on foliage or a shade of change or weather change or an infestation, all these system things, they are going to make a change in that area.

PHILIP HOLT: We picked the chemical factory cause it was done, but also, it was the first one that was done for a reason. It's a cool place. It's big, and it's got this huge tower and with the plume that comes off of it, the miasma, the red cloud, so it's just this really dramatic setting. We thought it served the need of the trailer visually, aesthetically, and then we had a choice to make about a settlement to include. As the guy phones home and he needs help from his friends. They gear up at their home base, and there's a lot of bases to choose from the game, but we picked one. We picked this place called Windy City. It's up on a hill. It's got a wind turbine, and it was a former wind power generator. There's a settlement built around it now, and they get free power out of the settlement. It just shows that the settlements have -- many of them have a benefit from their prior life that now impacts the facility choices.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: It's not just aesthetic I have to worry about, it's also this benefit, what benefit do I want right out the gates?

PHILIP HOLT: Sometimes you pick a settlement based on where it is on the map and what you're trying to get done in the map. Yeah, so anyway, we made those choices pretty early on.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I think Windy City was a good aesthetic choice, too, because the chemical factory is sort of a bit deep and cavernous --

PHILIP HOLT: And dark.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: -- and dark, and Windy City is up on the -- it's sort of a bit of opportunity to show the expanse of the world a little bit too. I mean, we have a lot of different settlements with a lot of different personalities, but that one just sort had the right aesthetic for the trailer.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, the contrast between the two is smart.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: It's also aspirational looking just with the big tower and --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, it's hopeful.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, it's got that hope to it. So yeah, it was kind of a decent choice out of a bunch of good choices we could have made. I think that one sort of just worked for the trailer.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, it's a cool place.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I think we showed some -- I'm just thinking that other locations too. Caroline is in there, the town and --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, for the -- people have got to figure out who Caroline is?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Oh, yeah, right. Actually, it can be a person. It could be a --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: It's probably someone lost in the apocalypse, or maybe it predates that, but I do love that.

PHILIP HOLT: It could be a community.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: But it's sentimental, it's personal.

PHILIP HOLT: I mean, it's, it's on a bomb.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: True, true, true, yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: Somebody picked the tape for the bomb. They're blowing something up.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, vengeance with love.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: I didn't even think about that. Oh, man.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: We changed that name pretty close to the end, actually.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, we did. It went through a couple of different iterations.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: That's right.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, Caroline's a town?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Caroline's a town. Wyatt's a town. There's a shot where you're looking over a town. That's Wyatt. Then I think there's the Juno gas station, which is just outside of Wyatt, so there's those locations.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: It shows a bit of the greatest hits. It's almost like a quick montage of a day in the life of someone in this world, and it's not ideal. There's a lot they have to contend with, but it is stunning.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah. Yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: I think the other thing that we had to make creative choices on was time of day and its progression through the trailer. We also transitioned from a clear evening to a rainy night. We're showing weather for the first time.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: We've got weather. We've got time of day. We've got --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, is the weather going to impact things like more than just like audio and sound? Are we going to see it affect the world around us a little bit? Are we easier to see, be seen or I'm sorry, the opposite? Would it be harder to be seen in rain or anything?

PHILIP HOLT: Well, like everything in State of Decay, weather is built on a system, which means that it can interact with any other system in the world.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Okay, cool.

PHILIP HOLT: We can't really make any commitments about whether weather will impact gameplay in those ways at launch, but it's built in a way that it will. If it doesn't make it for launch, it'll make it later as we support the post launch.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: That's exciting. I mean, I love it. It's a breathing game, unlike the zombies, which we talked about resource gathering and vehicle customization, player customization, the sense of community and hope, but the one thing we haven't dove into yet a ton is what we're fighting against. The plague war, I'd love to talk about that a little bit. We saw some of the enemies in the trailer, but when you talk about like who we saw and maybe who we haven't seen, if you can tease that.

PHILIP HOLT: I mean, it's a zombie game, so there's a lot of zombies.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure, I'm going to guess.

PHILIP HOLT: What happens in our game because it's so systemic, is the story is really the player's journey. We don't have to impose a story over it because every playthrough is different. What you experienced is going to be different than I. When we play together, that's going to be different. One of the things you see is the difference between what we call an old zombie and a fresh one. We're years in and some of the zombies that were infected years ago are still around and they shamble pretty slowly, you know? They're slow and they're desiccated and then the fresh ones have more vigor. That's a difference. Then, of course, we highlight the Feral and the, especially the Bloater. It's sort of the Bloater's trailer almost in a way.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: For sure.

PHILIP HOLT: You know, there's this old expression that "a creature is a feature," and so you start to think about what does it do? What are its behaviors? Then how do those impact the other systems that are in the game? As an example, he spews out his bile, and if you have a Molotov, you can catch that on fire. Then you get these chain reactions of these pools of bile on the ground that are flammable. Then all of that has to get, I think, put into a package by the art team that conveys the functionality of this creature.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: You think about its behavior when --

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yes, its behavior, its balance. When you're in the infestation, it can be pretty intense just atmospherically and the colors and stuff. So getting the Bloater to stand out just color-wise, the animation team has done a great job of differentiating the poses, so if you're seeing it from a distance with a silhouette, you can see. It's sort of its intentioned from afar and stuff. It's just all those things. One of the really great things that's been happening, I think, is that our design team and our animation team are really tight on this stuff. The things the designers want and how their behaviors are coming together, it's been really good, and then the VFX team has just been wrapping a bow around that stuff. The Bloater, I think, is the first one where we're like, oh, there's the package a little bit. We were seeing sort of the Bloater do its behavior as we intended. This is the sort of exciting part about a game like this is you build all these systems and then they start to speak to each other. Then you get those moments where the bloater is spewing out its sort of gas and it's volatile. Then someone, like Philip said, has got a Molotov and it ignites. Then that ignites a zombie that's next to it, and you just get this chain of events that --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Beautiful chaos.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Beautiful chaos, yeah, and things like that start happening. It's just --

PHILIP HOLT: It leads to a really unscripted experience, very dynamic.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: In the moment to moment, the dynamic of that is the best part of these games. You make a memory, right, a clip, a memory, a moment with your friends that is -- yeah, did you accidentally set your buddy on fire because he happened to be covered in bile?

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, that happens.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, I was going to say, that's going to happen day one.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: The Juggernaut and the Feral and the Bloater and the Screamer, they all play off of each other really well. I mean, when they start coming together, it's just --

PHILIP HOLT: We haven't talked about the Plague Nest itself.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: In State of Decay 2, the Plague Heart was sort of the biggest/baddest thing that you would encounter. It's this giant meat pinata, I guess. You just bang on it until you get some spoils, but those are just nodes on this network that lead you to this massive infestation.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, so the size of these infestations is four or five, six times bigger than you can imagine from a Plague Heart.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: That's awesome.

PHILIP HOLT: There's blister nodes that will pop and blow up and spew gas and there's spitters and there's all these different elements to this gunk, this biologic mass that's trying to kill you, and it's sending its forces towards your door, so you can't just ignore it.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, it's a war.

PHILIP HOLT: I mean, the world will burn if you do not prevent it.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: So you've really got to work at fighting back this network.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, and I think the really cool balance is, am I strong enough to go take on one of these Plague Nests? Maybe I need to get a little bit stronger and get some better weapons and more firepower, but if I wait too long, this thing's getting stronger as I'm getting stronger. When do I -- I have to go take it on when I'm maybe not quite ready.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, just send your buddy to do it.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, well, so it's a little bit like a raid. If you're up tonight, we're going to go take out a nest.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: I love it. That's the fun part is we're building towards something, and what is that? It's to take on like the biggest threats in the game. You're going to need grenades or Molotovs. You're going to need ammo, a ton of meds, a getaway car, a friend that's not going to bail on you in the worst time --

PHILIP HOLT: Maybe you've got to pull out, maybe you can't take it down and go and you got to go rebuild, change out some characters and do some healing and get some fresh ammo.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: That's such the dance of State of Decay. It's like, oh, my guy's tired, but maybe one more building. Yeah, one more building.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Even if your best laid plan and if you sort of have a good idea of the layout of this thing, you still don't know what might happen, who's going to come through the door, or who's going to come around the corner and how they're going to mix with the other freaks.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, no, a Feral.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, yeah, everyone's I think is going to have a pretty different experience when they're playing these things.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, my God. I'm so excited, you guys. I genuinely appreciate the conversation today. As a fan, so looking forward to this game, so, so grateful to just get to talk to y'all today about it. State of Decay 3 coming to 2027. It's going to be available on XBOX Series X S and PC. It's Game Pass Day One and XBOX Play Anywhere, which is my favorite feature. I've got to ask you guys, what are you most excited for fans to jump in and experience in State of Decay 3?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I think my first thought is the things we haven't --

PHILIP HOLT: Anticipated.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: -- anticipated, yeah. This just flashed into my brain actually, which was ages ago, but this was when you're working on an open-world game for a long time, it's just taking from you and doesn't give you anything back because you just -- they're hard to build. It's like you're waiting for these systems to come together, and there was --

PHILIP HOLT: All of them, really.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, so it was just not working for a long time. There was a moment, I remember, when someone blew apart a zombie or something, and this might've been a bug, but its forearm stuck in the chain link fence. I was like, oh, that's so cool. It was just like this weird little moment that wasn't -- no one said --

PHILIP HOLT: Let's make that happen.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: -- let's make that happen. That's not a plan or anything, and it was probably a bug, but I was like, oh, that is so cool. The Lighting Lead, Adam, he often will send out these videos. They just have these amazing atmosphere. He'll have a fight. Remember that one he sent --

PHILIP HOLT: The Juggernaut in the swamp?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Yeah, it was in the swamp. It was misty. It was raining. He had Molotovs. There's a Jugger in there. There's water. It's just having this whole experience and stuff. I think --

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: All the mechanics coming together, like you said.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I think we try and sort of set the table and design stuff and create the circumstances, but then it's -- something is going to happen. I think folks are going to have their own adventures. It's the unknown as well.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, we'll put it through its paces, I can promise you that.

PHILIP HOLT: I think, I think it's a great answer. Just to offer maybe a different perspective, we were talking earlier about the shot of the train engine derailed and just this beautiful little moment. One of my favorite State of Decay experiences actually was several years ago, and it was with Joe. I was really trying to learn the game, and I would play with him a lot. He's got, I don't know, 5,000 hours in the game or something?

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Oh, yeah, yeah.

PHILIP HOLT: We would play together and he's like, follow me, and we climbed up on this roof and just as the sun rose and he's like, "This is my favorite spot."

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: I love that.

PHILIP HOLT: Yeah, there's these pockets all over the world that we still keep finding because the world's so much bigger than it was before, where you can sort of -- there is set dressing and there's this time of day and there's the story that plays out between you and your community of survivors, the story between you and your friend playing together, that has this whole other kind of emotional meaning that sits on top of the game.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: A hundred percent, yeah, you've got to find the beautiful moments. I love the game like Joe. That's exactly my space. I love exploring the world like that.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: One of the hard things about the trailer, actually, because it was hard not to be, like, "Can we show this? Can we do this?"

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, for sure. No matter how many set pieces you set up or things that you're, "This is the shot" -- I will say, especially in open-world games, sometimes you just make a left turn on a road and you're rolling into a town. Then it's like, oh, shit, this looks great, or, wow, I'm immersed. For me, it's always the places you don't expect, right? You just make a turn, and all of a sudden, wow, this is cool.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: That's the fun stuff, and again, it's sort of, I think, what makes it fun to develop. You don't run out of steam because you keep finding stuff.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: You keep coming to work and there's a discovery to it, which is sort of how the team rolls a little bit, which keeps the love in there.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: For sure. Well, any final parting words for the community before I let you guys get back to work?

PHILIP HOLT: I've said this before, I'll say it again. We just would not be here without our community. A community of survival is the way that we think about our game, but it's also a way that we think about the studio and our relationship to our audience. State of Decay 1 was a pretty humble game. It was XBOX Live Arcade and there was not a lot of, I think, understanding of what it could become. Here we are all these years later and built on the back of fan support. We just always have tried to hold onto that notion that we're here because we have an audience of people that love our game.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, anything to add?

WAYNE LAYBOURN: No. I mean, I think just with that, as well, is just we're listening to the audience, too, and we're going to be working on this for a while. It's going to be a live game just like State of Decay 2 did, if you look at it from the start to where it ended, it went through a lot of changes. Who knows where it's going to be?

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, totally.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: I mean, it's just, we've sort of, with where we're at now, I'm changing the narrative a little bit as a token of the team as, like, oh, we've got to hit this date and time. It's, like, that's not really the end. It's the start in the development of the game, and a big part of that is the community being engaged and seeing what they're liking and then investing in that, too, the same way we do.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, you've got me and so many community members joining the ride day one, I'm sure. Wayne and Philip, thank you guys so much for the time today.

WAYNE LAYBOURN: Oh, yeah, you're welcome.

PHILIP HOLT: Our pleasure.

ETHAN ROTHAMEL: That wraps up this episode of the Official XBOX Podcast. A massive thank you to the folks at Undead Labs for having us and for Philip and Wayne for joining us. State of Decay 3 will be available in 2027 on XBOX Series X and S as well as PC. It'll be available Day One on Game Pass Ultimate and supports XBOX Play Anywhere. I cannot wait to play. That's it for today's XBOX Podcast. We'll see you in the next one. [ XBOX sound ]