Xbox Live Arcade title developer Undead Labs confirmed that their hugely successful State of Decay will be making its way to South Africa and New Zealand next week – although no specific date has been given.
“New Zealand/South Africa: We’re being told as of the daily meeting with Microsoft that we should all plan on next week for your version,” Undead Labs tweeted last night.
The game sold more than 250 000 copies in its first 48 hours of release to the Xbox Live Arcade and, as of the middle of June, the game has sold more than 550 000 copies.
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While the zombie hunting title has been well received by fans, there is a distinct lack of any multiplayer, which Undead Labs said unfortunately is not going to happen.
“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. That retrofitting would have extended to the multiplayer support as well, and we estimated it could have delayed release of the game by as much as half a year. It [cutting multiplayer] was a painful decision, but a necessary one given the realities of our team size and project budget,” explained executive producer Jeff Strain in a statement.
“We know co-op is the most requested addition to State of Decay, and we’ve also continued to hope it might be a possibility after release. Unfortunately, after re-evaluating it over the past few weeks, we believe our original estimate of six months is optimistic; the actual time is probably closer to nine months.”
But Strain confirmed that a follow-up title will definitely have multiplayer or a co-op element. “We want to see a multiplayer State of Decay as badly as you do, but it’s not feasible to retrofit it into the existing game. I can say definitively that co-op multiplayer will be the absolute heart of any future State of Decay games”.
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
