State of Decay

I dug around for a forum post on this game, and I couldn't find one.

State of Decay is a zombie survival game made by Undead Labs and available on Steam. The vanilla version is about a band of survivors who have to stay alive amidst the zombie apocalypse, fortifying their base and gathering supplies and survivors, with the overall goal of leaving their present circumstances. It's pretty dope.

There are two DLC's for it, Lifeline and Breakdown. Breakdown is a DLC meant for challenge play, where you start in an area with a broken down RV and have to survive long enough to repair it and escape, after which you restart with a harder difficulty and shuffled up resources on the same map, with a final score when you eventually die being tallied up.

The newest DLC, Lifeline, which just came out, is the one I initially wanted to talk about on here. Instead of starting as a ragged band of survivors and working your way up to being secure, you start as a military unit in a city toward the height of the virus. You start out with a well supplied base with lots of ammunition and weapons, with plenty of fire support and air drop support. As the infection worsens, you start to lose this support as more of the military goes dark and you lose contact with them, causing you to have to start scrounging and playing conservatively towards the end of the game, rather than in the beginning. Your job is to evacuate scientists who can help research a plague cure, with the alternative goals of rescuing stranded soldiers and civilians within the city itself.

As the zombies in your area cluster and intensify, your base will have to fight off a siege. After the siege, a helicopter comes and picks up any civilians or evidence related to the mission that you have brought back. The soldiers and reservists you find are the only folks who stay at your forward operating base, some of whom are playable and all of whom can accompany you outside the wire.

There are two types of endings other than everybody dying that end with leaving on the last chopper out, but I won't spoil the other details.

Heard good things about this game, especially since it's a much better polished version of Day Z. Only thing I didn't like though was how you need to constantly play it: if you leave the game alone for too long your survivors will begin to loose morale, food supplies will rot and your base's condition will deteriorate.

Did they do anything to fix that, or is it still the same Barkey?

You have to actually hit escape. The game continues if you are on the world map or something. If you go to the menu itself though, time does not progress. So when I want to take a smoke break or something, I just go to the main menu.

The thing I hate is how inconvenient save scumming works. You can't manually save, and death is permanent for your people, so if someone is about to die and I know I can't do anything about it, I have to either Alt+F4 or suck it up.

Well then they've definitely improved it somewhat. From what I heard in the original version, the game's internal clock was STILL active even if you turned off your PC or console, meaning that if you abandoned your colony for a month they'd all be dead.

It was, to some extent - but HUGELY HUGELY slowed down. And the longer you left it, the slower it went. After a week, it stops tracking, I think.

Basically, if you left your abse in good shape, when you went back in, it'd be fine: a few fewer meds, or food.

If you left after a bad session with people ill and so on, you could find your base under Total Party Kill (Though that was VERY rare)

It's pretty forgiving on that front. But overall, its one of the most fun Zombie games I've played and one of the most "authentic" in terms of measuring survivability and risk. Towards the end game, you don't explore as much and it does accelerate, almost ignoring one of the major urban areas. But otherwise it's one of the few games where you actually care about your party members (if only from a utilitarian perspective of making sure you have reserves)

And they keep them talking and having conversations, so there is an element of them being more than just "extra lives".

I ragequit after my favorite soldier got torn in half by a bigun and started over, with a different focus this time. Since NPC's don't use ammunition firing their weapons when they aren't being controlled, I started giving the survivors I don't like to take outside the wire grenade launchers, so that when sieges happen they wtfpwn zombies.

I'm fully committed to keeping my Special Activities Division dude alive, Sasquatch. I think if you finish his storyline he becomes playable, and his stats are pretty badass. Plus he has operator beard.

Yeah I struggled with that manually equipping of troops thing. I always forgot which weapons were best etc.

Also the base selection is a bit... well... frankly there's only one viable option for the second camp, if you're stocked on supplies. I never saw the point of half arseing or halfway housing things. I know that you can run out of supplies locally which impacts badly and forces you to forage further, but I always ended up doing the "outside-in" method, going further for supplies.

It is a great game to make you plan. But god dammit the specials... bloody screamers and brawlers were a pain.

And the fat guys... ugh hated them.

I found the ferals were much less of a problem as long as you had someone with you. Survivor ally can help keep em' off you and ferals actually ain't too scary once you've got two people swinging at them.

Or if you have a car, in which case they aren't a threat, unlike bloaters and big uns.

What I've started doing in lifeline is playing as Major Hawkes during the sieges, as she is the only troop I have who is sniper qualified, I specialized her in rifles and gave her Focus Shot. So I use an AWP and I get up into the tower and focus purely on sniping special zombies in slow-mo. Headshot insta-kills anything except a bigun, which takes about 8 headshots to kill unless I soften it up with explosives of some kind first.

The only firearms that are any real use normally are the assault weapons and semi-auto pistols, since they have good magazine capacity and can be suppressed.

Sasquatch's description ("Special Forces, Can kill with bare hands") is so great.

Man, it can be hard to keep everyone alive during the sieges. Once they get dogpiled, they're pretty much fucked.

edited 20th Jun '14 8:06:51 PM by majoraoftime

Shotguns are great for that. One good chest level shot into the center of the pile splits them up good, or at least gets them off the survivor.

Heard news of it being repetitive. I just want to ask how bad if it's true?

It is repetitive, especially once your survivors level up their melee skills and looting skills, since fighting zombies and scouting out things become a very simple sequence that you repeat all the time. Still, imo it didn't hurt the game too much because you're still given a lot to do, and even though many of the missions boil down to the same sort of things it still feels unique enough much of the time to be enjoyable.

I'd say you might still enjoy the atmosphere and the kind of things you do in the world at large, even if it the gameplay itself can get repetitive.

My only real complaint with this game was the special infected - that they were pretty much expies of popular special infected from other games (which isn't a problem), most of whom were originally designed as multiplayer threats and which imo aren't modified adequately for a single player experience (which is). The game was originally designed as a stepping stone to a MMO, which gives them a slight pass, but given that the game makes recruiting partners more of a hassle than it should be (IIRC you can't actually do it: you have to do a partner mission and then not complete it), it makes problems more often than it should.

That and the awkwardness of going down ladders.

edited 30th Aug '14 8:28:12 PM by KnownUnknown

"the game's internal clock was STILL active even if you turned off your PC or console, meaning that if you abandoned your colony for a month they'd all be dead"

I just booted up my save that I haven't touched for at least two weeks and rather then morale being a bit lower and some resources gone down it looks fine. Not sure about console version though.

" (IIRC you can't actually do it: you have to do a partner mission and then not complete it), it makes problems more often than it should."

If you're friendly with someone and spend some respect you can recruit someone to accompany you. I also grab my two best for the police department raid. Grab two big rifles and drive straight up to the front door. Once everything's dead we load up and are pretty much set when it comes to guns.

^ Is that something that was added recently? Cause it definitely wasn't possible when I was playing the game (about a year or two ago, maybe).

Probably, they do patches every now and then. You can actually put things in trunks now, including resource packs; no longer do you have to do six freaking runs to the grocery store.

Xbox One trailer.

The original thread was under it's working title name, Class3, and never changed. Perhaps someone should merge these two threads.

edited 21st Mar '15 7:34:08 AM by AnotherGuy

So, am playing State of Decay for the first time on Xbox One (I tried the demo on the 360 but never picked it up).

I'm starting to get into it. Zombie hordes.... :sigh:

Trucks, mang, trucks. And traps. Traps are fucking godly and honestly gas is never going to be an issue so just always have them active.

Really not into this. Not into Zombie Tamagotchi.

State of Decay 2's ESRB rating has been published. The developer says sometime in Spring.

May release date announced.

Loved the original. Is this a direct sequel? Anyway, 25 minutes of gameplay from VGN:

https://www.vg247.com/2018/03/08/watch-25-minutes-of-state-of-decay-2-gameplay/

It looks more co-op friendly... but with SP campaign as well.

Co-op gameplay.

edited 3rd Apr '18 9:02:57 PM by AnotherGuy

Finally finished the first one, definitely a fun game, only problem is it ending rather abruptly and zombies bugging around walls occasionally. Hope to play the sequel.