State of Decay 3 development didn’t properly ramp up until 2022 or 2023, according to Undead Labs head Philip Holt, despite the game having been teased several years earlier.
In an interview with TheGameBusiness, Holt explained that a small team had been working on State of Decay 3 since around 2020. However, the project didn’t enter a more active stage of development until several years later.
“I don’t think it’s taken that long, actually,” Holt said. “If you measure it from when State of Decay 2 shipped, yeah, we’re approaching eight years. If you measure it from our first trailer with the infamous zombie deer, that’s also a long time. I got myself in a little bit of trouble by saying we didn’t really have a team working on the game at that point, which wasn’t entirely true, we had a very small team. We’ve had a small team on the game since maybe 2020. But development didn’t really pick up until 2022 or 2023.”
State of Decay 3 was first announced in 2020, two years after State of Decay 2 launched. The sequel has since spent several years in development, with Undead Labs continuing to work on the project.
State of Decay 3 is currently targeting a 2027 release. The game is being developed for Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC and PlayStation 5, with a planned Xbox Game Pass launch.
The game is expected to expand on the series’ open-world survival formula with deeper survival systems and four-player cooperative gameplay. It is being developed using Unreal Engine 5.
