While Heartland will “inform a lot of future franchise plans,” the developers are going to be leaning on the sandbox and randomly generated structure moving forward. Heartland, an expansion based around a structured narrative and pre-made characters, was a “good exploration,” and a chunk of State of Decay 2’s audience dug the more rigid structure.

Image: Undead Labs / Microsoft Mission statement State of Decay 2 will now set clearer expectations from the start, to avoid the initial overflow of information and investment. Their open-world adventure seems to have turned into a base-building, community management simulator. When players find their base, get settled in, and are asked to build an infirmary, many of them choose to log off and try something else, Goffin said. One of the things we realized is we have a pretty steep drop-off of players who get into the open world.” “We can see where they aggregate, how many people reach what parts of the world, where they spend time, where they shoot bullets.

“We have a lot of player telemetry,” says Goffin. The tutorial previously covered combat and exploration in a small squad, but those lessons weren’t very helpful once players got into the open world. Thus, Undead Labs has gone through and cleaned the experience up for new players. “Players had a really hard time understanding the scope of the sandbox and how they should play with it.” “One of the biggest problems we had with explaining to players is that it wasn’t quite a linear campaign, and it wasn’t quite a daily grind,” Henry Goffin, product lead at Undead Labs, told Polygon. Co-op players don’t need to worry State of Decay 2 is still cross-platform across different stores and consoles. State of Decay 2 (with its Juggernaut Edition update) is also coming to Steam it had been exclusive to the Windows 10 Store on PC and the Xbox Game Pass. The Juggernaut Edition addresses both of those weaknesses. The current game has a great premise, but struggles hard with onboarding and end-game variety. Other new details, like a new weapon class, new events, new variables, a new map based in the Pacific Northwest, and weather effects like fog, make the game a “ State of Decay 2.5”, according to developers. The Juggernaut Edition also packs in previous expansions, including the side campaign Heartland, and makes them free to everyone, too. In addition, there are numerous other changes aimed at improving the game’s quality of life, from the tutorial (which is now expanded significantly to make the base-building elements clearer), to cleaning up combat, and smoothing out the pacing of legacy runs.

State of Decay 2 is getting a big, free update that veers closer to a No Man’s Sky-style overhaul than a run-of-the-mill content patch.ĭeveloper Undead Labs is calling the update the “Juggernaut Edition,” and it’s a wide-ranging remaster of State of Decay 2’s graphics and audio.

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