State of Decay, Undead Labs’ excellent zombie game released last year on the Xbox 360 over Xbox Live to great acclaim, and then also on PC, has received a new update, which seems to be pretty far ranging in terms of what all it addresses and what all it fixes.
The changes to the game include tweaks to the graphics, the sound, the physics, the behavior of the zombies and the zombies themselves, the shooting mechanics, and more. It’s nice to see such a hefty update for a game released for free, instead of being worked into a paid DLC or expansion pack.
The full list of fixes includes:
Physics and Pathing
- Made vehicles less flippy
- Improved vehicle entry distances
- Added a physics test when a vehicle flips to avoid throwing you out of the environment
- Fixed glass failing to break properly
- Fixed potential crash when zombies try to path outside of the playable area
- Fixed zombies occasionally running in straight line towards target through collision
- Fixed zombies getting stuck facing each other
- Fixed dead zombies running in place
- Reduced instances of zombies walking through doors
- Radius is now proper on aggro range (fireworks, talking dolls, etc. now only pull nearby zombies)
- Hordes no longer target buildings they can’t infest
- Changed the floor height on industrial warehouses to fix pathing
Shooting
- Increased snap distance of all guns
- Removed rotation spread penalty on all assault rifles and SMGs
- Tuned aim friction
Graphics and Sound
- Smoothed framerate
- Increased range for the home base audio loading
- Fixed base environment audio preload
Zombies and AI
- Zombies prefer tasty NPCs (taunting, blazing, cowering NPCs)
- Zombies prefer tasty targets (fireworks, talking dolls, etc. over echos and disturbances)
- Cleaned up zombie distribution
Outposts and Resources
- Corrected the daily resource calculations on asset page of journal
- Capped the number of resources you can receive on subsequent offline days at 15
- New outpost resource model
- Each outpost costs 1 material for upkeep for the first day you’re offline
- All resource outpost types now correctly generate resources
- If an outpost contains resources it generates 3 of that resource
Cleaning up Under the Hood
- Fixed bug preventing the Steam leaderboard score from maintaining your highest scores
- Retroactively award Breakdown achievements for unlocked characters
- Implemented fix for crashes if an NPC is trying to enter a vehicle and you exit and continue
- Fixed an issue with button substitutions
- Changed main menu selection to support upcoming Lifeline DLC
- Fixed world-reset issue when switching from the base game to Breakdown and vice versa
State of Decay is due to get its next expansion pack in June on PC and Xbox 360. Meanwhile, Microsoft has tapped into Undead Labs to create a new exclusive game for the Xbox One. Presumably, it will be announced at E3.
