When a game is announced, it’s common to witness CGI trailers that don’t accurately represent what you end up playing. If that announcement is closer to a tease than a full-on reveal, one can reasonably assume that the game isn’t ready to be shown or is still early in development. In those cases, I wouldn’t blame anyone for wondering if there’s really much of any game at all behind the scenes. But it’s pretty rare for a studio to just come out and say that their hands were kind of empty when a game was unveiled.
According to Undead Labs studio head Philip Holt, such was the case for the 2020 announcement of the Microsoft-exclusive zombie game, State of Decay 3. In an interview with Sunny Games, Holt spoke about the game for nearly an hour in an effort to promote the upcoming playtests for the co-op survival game. During this exchange, YouTuber Sunny Games brought up the announcement trailer, which suggested State of Decay 3 might incorporate gameplay involving zombie deer or camping. But a couple of years after the reveal, a report by Kotaku stated that Undead Labs was not ready to announce the game in 2020. The report further claimed that the studio was pressured to show off the game early by Microsoft.
Now, nearly six years after that first announcement, Holt is openly discussing the snafu.
