State of Decay 3 Is Being Made with Unreal Engine 5 and Help from Gears of War Devs

It's been a while since we heard anything about State of Decay 3, the third installment in Undead Labs' open world survival horror game series. Speaking on Xbox's Major Nelson podcast, however, Xbox Game Studios Head Matt Booty revealed some tidbits about the game.

We have a structure in place, we just call them summits, where we get subject matter experts together for one or two days. We've had animation summits, UI summits, Unreal Engine summits, physics summits, etc. I think we did in the last year close to 25 of these. That's our main mechanism for teams to share technology back and forth.

You mentioned Undead Labs, they're working with The Coalition up in Vancouver, our Gears of War studio, using some of the technology around Unreal Engine 5 and some of the stuff that's been in Gears of War before to bring that into State of Decay 3.

Last week before last, we spent all day at Undead Labs in Seattle, which was great, getting the update on State of Decay 3, which has really got some cool stuff, in addition to the fact that State of Decay 2 just continues to grow its user base. It's kind of this stealth thing that just keeps growing, and it was cool to get an update. I think we hit eleven million lifetime players on State of Decay 2 now, which is pretty cool. All of that, the things they are doing there, are really the testbed, the proving grounds, for all the stuff that's going in State of Decay 3.

State of Decay 3 was formally announced over two years ago. At that time, developer Undead Labs said the game was still early in pre-production. However, five months ago, a report suggested that there were development troubles keeping the game still in pre-production, alongside issues of sexism.

In the interview with Major Nelson, Booty also pointed to inXile's next project as something very exciting that's coming up. He even said Phil Spencer got to play the game for a while during a recent visit. Rumors point to inXile's next game being a Steampunk-themed RPG led by former Arcanum developers.