Jeff Strain Explains Why State Of Decay 2 Isn't An MMO
When ex-Blizzard employee and ArenaNet founder Jeff Strain left ArenaNet in 2009 to found Undead Labs, the plan was to make a zombie-themed MMO. Known as "Class4," the MMO was planned to be one of the first MMOs to launch on Xbox One. It was later announced that a smaller, single-player title—then known as "Class3"—would be launched first. Class3 would become State of Decay, a single-player, open-world zombie survival game. Many expected that Undead Labs' next game would be Class4, as had been discussed previously.
Fast forward to E3 2016 and State of Decay 2 is announced. However, State of Decay 2 is not an MMO; instead, it is a four-player, open-world zombie survival game. You might be wondering why that is and, fortunately for you, according to WCCFtech, Strain recently appeared on the official Xbox Twitch channel to discuss the reasoning behind the change in plans.
Strain's explanation is as follows.
There’s a lot of excitement about the game after the announcement. I also think there was a little bit of relief and quite a bit of celebration that we were building a game that was exactly what people had been asking for and not necessarily something that we thought would have been fun four or five years ago.
You know, this industry changes fast. Gamers tastes change quickly, and so you absolutely have to put yourself in the position of being adaptive. The very best thing we can do is make a game that people are actually asking for and not necessarily something that we think would be cool.
I think the fact that it’s coop multiplayer, it’s something I think a lot of people are relieved to see. State of Decay 2 is not an MMO, it is not a free-to-play microtransaction based game…We want to give players the gameplay they’re expecting, deepen it, broaden it and make it even better.
This is not Class4, this is State of Decay 2. There’s a big difference. You know, Class4 was something that we wanted to do probably in Summer 2009. The initial plan was to build a smaller game with Class3, that game became State of Decay, and then from there take it into a large scale online world experience with Class4.
When we started development on State of Decay 2, that was still a plan that was in our mind, but again that’s not what State of Decay fans were asking for. Very few people were saying “Gee, I hope State of Decay 2 is kind of an online MMO type experience”. The thing that people were actually asking for was cooperative multiplayer.
At some point, we kind of stepped back and said “Look, do we build the game that we thought we were going to make in 2009 or do we build a sequel to State of Decay?” I think that’s what you have to do as a game developer, you have plans, you can look at the world the way you see it then and try to project what you’re going to be doing, but really what you got to do is be responsive to how people actually play your game and what they ask for.
So there you have it. State of Decay 2 is the evolution that State of Decay fans were asking for. The fanbase wanted cooperative multiplayer, rather than an MMO, and Undead Labs delivered it.
For those that are interested, State of Decay 2 is currently slated to launch in 2017 as an Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive.
