Xbox Game Studios lead can't say when State of Decay 3 will rear its head again, but he "will certainly see a lot more of it in the coming year"

State of Decay 3 has been fairly quiet since its announcement five years ago, aside from one brief trailer aimed at its zombie-infested open world in 2024, but the head of Xbox Game Studios has given us a small update on how the survival game's progressing.

When we sat down with Xbox Game Studios lead and former Rare boss Craig Duncan to talk about the publisher's multiplatform strategy and Developer Direct reveals, like the gorgeous deep dive on Fable, we took the chance to ask whether State of Decay 3 would rear its head again this year.

"I think the [PR] in this room will murder me if I give you the answer to that," Duncan said. "So, here's what I'll say: I have done a number of visits to that studio in the last six to eight months. I have sat and played the game with the team a bunch of times. It's coming on really well. We're very excited about the franchise and its potential."

Duncan then decided to tease the State of Decay faithful among us: "So I will certainly see a lot more of it in the coming year… is that a good answer to your question? [laughter]"

Developer Undead Labs hasn't solely been hammering away at its latest zombie survival, community management, action-RPG, genre mutant for the last few years, though. The studio had kept busy with a whopping 38 big post-launch updates for State of Decay 2, many of which released while the studio was also working on its still upcoming threequel. The company's also ballooned in size in the years since, with six times the number of developers it had for the first game in the series.

The Gears of War and Avowed studios are teaming up to help State of Decay 3's "much larger, truly shared open world"