State of Decay is currently engaged in a second round with the Classification Board, after its original attempt failed to pass muster. If you were holding out for the game and in particular, the promised co-op multiplayer, you should probably know that developer Undead Labs has decided not to go ahead with the feature.
The announcement was made by executive producer Jeff Strain on the game’s official forum a few days ago. Strain prefaces the bad news by confirming the game has “done well” and that Undead Labs has been able to channel these funds back into development. Unfortunately, due to a combination of time and technical difficulty, it’s been forced to dump its plans for multiplayer:
As many of you know, we had originally planned to offer co-op multiplayer in State of Decay. However, we had to make the decision to cut it during development … the reasons were mostly technical, as we were up to our eyeballs trying to retrofit our game engine to support an open-world sandbox game rather than the FPS style games it had been designed for … Unfortunately, after reevaluating it over the past few weeks, we believe our original estimate of six months was optimistic; the actual time is probably closer to nine months.
Strain goes on to say that implementing multiplayer would require the efforts of the entire team and would “preclude our ability to offer any other kind of support”, with updates and DLC being primary victims. He finishes on an upbeat note — future State of Decay games will have multiplayer as the “absolute heart”.
Good on Undead Labs for playing it straight. I’m sure it had the best of intentions with multiplayer, but better to recognise it’s not going to happen and tell the fans, rather than leave it hanging in limbo or, worse, spending all your time and money trying to implement it, only to come out of it with nothing.
Update on multiplayer [Undead Labs, via Edge]
Comments
10 responses to “State Of Decay’s Co-Op Multiplayer Has Been Permanently Shelved”
Im ok with this. As long as it gets good dlc. Looks like a fun game. Hope it gets through!
Ditto. First thing’s first: the game needs to be released so we can actually play it in any way, shape or form. 😛
just make a US account on live, http://www.pcgamesupply.com/ go here to buy some MP points, and baaaam, playing in Oz.
But then how will I whore myself out to the achievement pimp? 😛
(Thanks for the tip, I think I’ll go do that.)
Once its on your Xbox you can play with any account
Ah. I see. Thanks for that.
I admit I am a little sad about this news, but after playing the game I think this might be the best idea. As fun as it can be, the side missions and even main staple gameplay gets very repetitive very fast.
They have shown us they have the ability to make a good game and I think they will have no problem finding funding for future games.
So it’s essentially like Assassins Creed. Repetitive as shit but its got a good solid first game to build a much better second game from?
That’s a shame. No hard feeling to the creators, the game looks great, but I won’t be buying it. I can’t wait for them to make something with multiplayer however, I’ll be first in line.
Dead rising 3, not long now 😀
Ya had me at zombies, you lost me at no multiplayer coop. I know 6 of us that aren’t jumping on board. I’ll just have to wait for DR3.
The game is good bu t it is short. I’d there was an online free mode this would be the best zombie game ever made. I loved the game and would love to play online with friends. They could make some much money if they would co-op mode.
I agree they would probably make enough to hire a bigger team to make more epic the next installation of sod… why the hell didnt you make this co op maaaaannn!
I really had my hopes up…
*The Dead Rising Franchise sucks now.
The idea of Massively Multiplayer anything seems to always fall short when implemented. We will see a lot of MM-Shooters over the next year, so hopefully some company will get ballsy and scrap the whole Gta-style open world system and come up with something a little different.
I’ll be checking out “The Division” with the hope of a Tom Clancy title bringing the right amount of structure to the current OWS.
Sod was fun for the price point and I hope Undead Labs will keep at it.
They really have to notice every nor and I mean every one wants multiplayer we don’t care if there is bugs till it releases no ones playing your game on Xbox and most of PC it’s became a joke good job ul you blew it in my opinion
Lol multiplayer there idea of multiplayer was not coop it was more of deathmatch capter the base type multiplayer no wonder it was canceled that would have pissed everyone off more lol these guys are morons
These idiots already have multiplayer in the game you can look atvthe gamedata scripts they have network and multiplayer scripts already in the game but cancel cuz dum asses was making the wrong multiplayer no one want capter the base in thisbtype of game they want the single player type game play failed company thats what you get for being gay and multiplayer is not hard to implant in this game only lazy nerds thats think it is you must be a noob to think it is.
If this game have a co-op I think it will be the best zombies games ever!!!!!!
They really screwed the pooch when the original released people asked for multiplayer.The devs said they would deff have multiplayer on Xbox one version . Y would I want the same game just better imo like it should have been on 360 i could handle it no problems im sure even with multiplayer. Your just pocketing money and reselling already made games as new