When a game is announced, it’s common to witness CGI trailers that don’t accurately represent what you end up playing. If that announcement is closer to a tease than a full-on reveal, one can reasonably assume that the game isn’t ready to be shown or is still early in development. In those cases, I wouldn’t blame anyone for wondering if there’s really much of any game at all behind the scenes. But it’s pretty rare for a studio to just come out and say that their hands were kind of empty when a game was unveiled.
According to Undead Labs studio head Philip Holt, such was the case for the 2020 announcement of the Microsoft-exclusive zombie game, State of Decay 3. In an interview with Sunny Games, Holt spoke about the game for nearly an hour in an effort to promote the upcoming playtests for the co-op survival game. During this exchange, YouTuber Sunny Games brought up the announcement trailer, which suggested State of Decay 3 might incorporate gameplay involving zombie deer or camping. But a couple of years after the reveal, a report by Kotaku stated that Undead Labs was not ready to announce the game in 2020. The report further claimed that the studio was pressured to show off the game early by Microsoft.
Now, nearly six years after that first announcement, Holt is openly discussing the snafu.
“There really wasn’t a game or a game team when we were working on that trailer,” Holt said with a laugh. “Like it was so early and there were, like, four or five people. The game was in a Word document.”
The reveal trailer was pre-rendered, meaning that it did not contain live gameplay. Holt said that the footage “represented a concept, our thoughts at the time of what might be cool to explore in State of Decay 3.”
The original Kotaku report detailed what seemed like a pre-production nightmare for the Microsoft studio that was precipitated in part by the trailer. There was allegedly conflict over deciding what would be in the game, what fans expected from the game based on the trailer, and what management wanted in the game so that it looked good to Microsoft. This, among other issues detailed in the report, led to staff turnover at the studio.
Holt’s most recent comments seem to reinforce some aspects of that report. Holt said that the teaser “represented a concept, our thoughts at the time of what might be cool to explore in State of Decay 3.”
Practices like these are unfortunately common. Games will get announced through showcases like The Game Awards only to then go MIA for years. Later, fans will point out elements in the initial trailer that did not make it into the final game. Some of this discrepancy reflects the fluid nature of game development. But in other cases, a gap between what’s in a trailer and what’s actually playable could be indicative of a publisher pushing a studio to show off a game so that it can appease shareholders and satiate fans. While the animation studios that go on to make these trailers seek input from publishers and studios, depending on how far along the game actually is, those outsourced artists are sometimes given leeway to come up with ideas out of whole cloth.
But as State of Decay 3 proves, even scenarios where a CGI trailer is made with input from major stakeholders can still lead to discord. In this case, Holt cautions that while some of the elements in the teaser will show up in the final product, one thing definitely will not.
“We’re not doing zombie animals,” Holt said.
