State of Decay 3 Is Being Made in Unreal Engine 5 – and Gears of War Developers Are Assisting
News on State of Decay 3 has been about as rare as a pleasant day in a zombie apocalypse, but Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty has just revealed that the upcoming game is being made in Unreal Engine 5 with the assistance of Gears of War developer The Coalition.
As reported by Wccftech, Booty appeared on Xbox’s Major Nelson podcast and shared some interesting behind-the-scenes details on the development of State of Decay 3.
“You mentioned [State of Decay 3 developer] Undead Labs, they’re working with The Coalition up in Vancouver, our Gears of War studio, using some of the technology around Unreal Engine 5 and some of the stuff that’s been in Gears of War before to bring that into State of Decay 3,” Booty said to Nelson.
“Last week before last, we spent all day at Undead Labs in Seattle, which was great, getting the update on State of Decay 3, which has really got some cool stuff, in addition to the fact that State of Decay 2 just continues to grow its user base,” Booty added. “It’s kind of this stealth thing that just keeps growing, and it was cool to get an update. I think we hit eleven million lifetime players on State of Decay 2 now, which is pretty cool. All of that, the things they are doing there, are really the testbed, the proving grounds, for all the stuff that’s going in State of Decay 3.”
Booty also discussed how he and the team handle learning from the teams about the progress of their games and how these studios share technology back and forth, and it all happens at various summits.
“We have a structure in place, we just call them summits, where we get subject matter experts together for one or two days,” Booty explained. “We’ve had animation summits, UI summits, Unreal Engine summits, physics summits, etc. I think we did in the last year close to 25 of these. That’s our main mechanism for teams to share technology back and forth.”
The Coalition is one of Microsoft’s studios on the front line of Unreal Engine 5, as it announced in 2021 that it was moving to UE5 for “multiple new projects.” Back in April 2022, The Coalition even showed off some Unreal Engine 5 experiments.
As for State of Decay 3, it was announced at an Xbox Games Showcase in 2020 and we only caught a quick cinematic glimpse of a lone woman in the wilderness and a wolf corpse being eaten by a zombie deer.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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