State of Decay

Played the heck out of he first game. Looking forward to it.

Looks interesting, but I will have to wait for some reviews. I hope their mechanics/designs have caught up to 2018. I mostly enjoyed the first one, despite all the jank, but even some of their core design seems 5 years old or older. It reminded me of GTA3 in how the world reacted to your character.

Also, it seems like the focus is still on the zombies moreso than other people which is a bit of a disappointment.

I'll wait to buy it even if it is good. I didn't really like how they put game play fixes in paid DLC for the last game. That stupid product placement was turnoff also.

Price point has me wondering if it's shallow and long or dense and short-ish. Hoping for the latter, as I kind of fell off SoD1 late in the second act or so (in two separate playthroughs) if I guessed the beats correctly.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

game play fixes in paid DLC for the last game. That stupid product placement

Can someone please summarize for me what happened to SoD 1 after the launch version? I played it for weeks and weeks when it was new, then lost track of it waiting for a DLC price drop and never came back.

Keithustus wrote:

Can someone please summarize for me what happened to SoD 1 after the launch version? I played it for weeks and weeks when it was new, then lost track of it waiting for a DLC price drop and never came back.

I only played through it once. I will try to sum up the whole game in bullet points.

- two dudes arrive at a ranger station after being on a secluded fishing trip where they had absolutely no contact with the civilized world.

- oh no! zombies!

- fight zombies, collect gear and weapons, try to get a car running to escape the campground.

- arrive at second game area. join a group of survivors, go on supply runs, do base building stuff, learn how to manage the game's janky systems.

- some fellow survivors contract zombieism, bigger badder zombie types attack and destroy the camp, move to third game area.

- game gets harder, stakes get higher, internal power struggles ensue between the survivors.

- game falls into a wash rinse repeat cycle of finding survivors, collecting supplies, base building, resource management.

- meet the military camp of army soldiers, get blocked by them as they stand in your way of reaching the only road out of the area. it becomes clear that there is an end game you’re working towards. you need to get past that military blockade.

- big final battle against the military camp, there’s thousands of them and only 3 or 4 of us, hooray we did it!

- find a giant impassable wall. it’s the only thing keeping us from crossing over to the United States from Mexico.

- collect explosives, set up an overly complicated array of explosives, blow the wall into a pile of rubble, gather what’s left of your team and cross over into whatever it was behind the wall... this is it... this is the big finale... oh man this is going to be so satisfying...

- game over. thanks for playing.

Now that’s a fairly cynical and vague take on the game. What I left out was all of the great little moments and feels that the game let you discover as you went through the paces. I thoroughly enjoyed this game. It was far from perfect, but still a satisfying experience from start to finish.

It’s almost as hard as Dark Souls. In fact, some might say that it’s the Dark Souls of zombie games who’s gameplay bears a strikingly similar resemblance to GTA.

I would have enjoyed less busy work and grinding and more of those environmental story telling scenarios. Oh, and some sort of ending or epilogue other than “thanks for playing”.

Hmmm, I meant what happened to the game, with whatever updates and patches happened after the launch version I completed? If

Haha. Whoops. Sorry.

I may well be talking my partner and teenage sons to play this with me. I’m really looking forward to it, having never really done co-op anything before Fortnite.

Also may get them into L4D(2) depending on how big a pain that’ll be.

Destructoid posted a review of SoD2, and it’s pretty glowing. It’s also a bit scant, as they don’t really discuss the coop experience. Still, it sounds like the parts of the first game I loved are in place on the sequel.

My household is pretty excited for next Tuesday. It's a little tempered by the co-op described as being more like Far Cry 5 or Fable where there's a host player and any other players are tethered to that player within the game world. The limit of that tether appears to be pretty high; I read one bit that said it didn't impact play really. There is also the fact that only the host's story progresses.

I don't really think that's a big deal, honestly. I can't wait.

State of Decay 2 Review "Buy, Wait for Sale, Rent, Never Touch?"

So should I boot up my 360, pick up the DLCs, and give them a shot? Haven't played since the original launch, but loved it.

Other reviews are a little less glowing:

Polygon
IGN
EuroGamer

It's a budget title so I guess a few bugs are to be expected. Would love to see one of Microsoft's exclusives come out and just be God of War level great but just doesn't seem to be their jam.

Think I'll wait on this one for a while, will maybe "rent" it for a month on Game Pass once they get it good and patched.

Nooooooooooookay.

I'm wondering how this is actually going to run minimum specifications. It's built in Unreal Engine rather than the their proprietary engine from the first game, so there's that. I just realized I'd need to temper my enthusiasm for this game because I'm on an older i5 and a GTX 950, and one of my sons is on the same i5 and a GTX 770. I'm afraid it's gonna be too rough for us to really enjoy playing, unfortunately.

Might make getting Project Zomboid for my boys that much a better fit.

muraii wrote:

Might make getting Project Zomboid for my boys that much a better fit.

That game is really good, take it. I prefer Project Zomboid over State of Decay for sure.

setrio wrote:
muraii wrote:

Might make getting Project Zomboid for my boys that much a better fit.

That game is really good, take it. I prefer Project Zomboid over State of Decay for sure.

I’ve been playing it for weeks!

So - I REALLY loved the first state of decay, and even though I have game pass for Xbox, I decided to get ultimate edition and play today.
Its - really janky. Lots of weird stuff happening like things vanishing from sight.
The tutorial acting is really rough, and there are akward pausing between every character constantly.

The gameplay itself is...well, its exactly the same as the first one. There isn't really any difference, except for the UI as far as I've seen.
I think I will probably enjoy it, once they patch out all the jankiness, but I must admit - 3 years after the first one, I kinda expected more than a reskin and a new map.

Razgon wrote:

So - I REALLY loved the first state of decay, and even though I have game pass for Xbox, I decided to get ultimate edition and play today.
Its - really janky. Lots of weird stuff happening like things vanishing from sight.
The tutorial acting is really rough, and there are akward pausing between every character constantly.

The gameplay itself is...well, its exactly the same as the first one. There isn't really any difference, except for the UI as far as I've seen.
I think I will probably enjoy it, once they patch out all the jankiness, but I must admit - 3 years after the first one, I kinda expected more than a reskin and a new map.

Well, it seems that all my fears with the sequel came true

Of the 3 exclusives that Microsoft had this year (assuming Crackdown actually gets released), this is the one I had the highest hopes for. Le sigh.

Well maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that they seem to be stepping away from exclusives. Almost everything not named Forza Horizon has been pretty mediocre. But love what they are doing with backwards compatibility! And I’m serious, that is not a snarky comment.

Razgon wrote:

I must admit - 3 years after the first one, I kinda expected more than a reskin and a new map.

But the first game was released in 2013.

Does it really just feel like a reskin, given they switched from a proprietary engine to Unreal? Actual question; I don't know. It's reviewing as more of the same with some systemic improvements, in some cases.

Well looks like I forgot to cancel Game Pass. Since everyone is speaking so fondly of the original and the updated XB1 version is included, think I’ll take it for a spin.

Keithustus wrote:
Razgon wrote:

I must admit - 3 years after the first one, I kinda expected more than a reskin and a new map.

But the first game was released in 2013.

wow - its 5 years ago? I think I read that they have worked on this for 3 years, but I could be wrong. They did work on some cancelled...moba, I want to say in between, so perhaps thats where my mind picked up the three years from.

muraii - it does feel like a reskin. Thats not automatically a bad thing, and I ADORED the first one, and spent months in it, but - I do feel gaming has moved on quite a bit since the first one was released, and there is still plenty of room for improvements, and of course, less jank, errors and so on.

For instance - I get three achievements at the same time, all three popping up with sound and icons, making it impossible to both see and hear what the doctor tells me to do, and why. So weird - then, I am told to do one thing, and its not possible. In the tutorial.

The game feels like an early access game with tons of little stuff that adds up.

Docjoe - the first one is great! Have fun!

Is this an Xbox exclusive? Can't see it on the Playstation Store.

Yes, I believe it’s Xbox One or Win 10 only.

The one thing that worries me about Win 10 games is will they run on Win 11.

muraii wrote:

I'm wondering how this is actually going to run minimum specifications. It's built in Unreal Engine rather than the their proprietary engine from the first game, so there's that. I just realized I'd need to temper my enthusiasm for this game because I'm on an older i5 and a GTX 950, and one of my sons is on the same i5 and a GTX 770. I'm afraid it's gonna be too rough for us to really enjoy playing, unfortunately.

Might make getting Project Zomboid for my boys that much a better fit.

I've got a GTX 680 (4gb) and it's running okay for me so far.

It does feel like mostly more of the same, but I'm okay with that given that I played the heck out of the first one.

I was looking at this for co-op play with my wife but being tethered to the host player and only the host player getting benefits for their settlement sucks pretty hard.