State of Decay 2 is shambling toward release, and it’s getting closer. The developer has released the minimum and recommended specs for the game. So if you’re worried about being able to run it on your specs, Microsoft has your back.
Here are the minimum system requirements:
- OS: Windows 10
- Architecture: x64, X64
- Keyboard: Integrated Keyboard
- Mouse: Integrated Mouse
- DirectX: Version 11
- Memory: 8 GB
- Video Memory: 2 GB
- Processor: AMD FX-6300 | Intel i5-2500 @ 2.7GHz
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 | AMD Radeon HD 7870
If that matches your PC rig, you’re all set! That said, Undead Labs is recommending the following setup for State of Decay 2:
- OS: Windows 10
- Architecture: x64, X64
- Keyboard: Integrated Keyboard
- Mouse: Integrated Mouse
- DirectX: Version 11
- Memory: 16 GB
- Video Memory: 4 GB
- Processor: AMD FX-8350 | i5 4570 @ 3.2 GHz
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 | AMD Radeon R9 380
State of Decay 2 also supports Xbox Play Anywhere, which means you can play the game’s co-op mode across PC and Xbox One systems or use th same save file across platforms. The finished game will launch on May 22, 2018.
Being a survival game, you not only have to worry about your own survival, you’re also concerned with maintaining the community of survivors that’s been built over the course of the game. And it’s also a good idea to keep that community going as any character within that community can be played by the player. And as one would expect, each character has a selection of stats that reflect the things they’re best at. Overall, it’s a very depthful game that includes a lot of refinements over the original State of Decay.
There’s also a major focus on four player co-op that is all about teamwork. An interesting choice is that the difficulty in terms of zombie spawns or health doesn’t increase linearly with the number of players. But, the more players in a game, the more noise those characters make when moving and exploring, so the more zombies they attract overall. It’s a fascinating way to address co-op difficulty spikes, but we’ll have to wait to see how it all pans out.
One thing that does worry me is the jankiness of gameplay footage that I’ve seen. The original game had a lot of issues with AI pathing and collision detection in relation to level geometry, and what this caused was a lot of weird bugs where objects and characters didn’t interact properly. And it unfortunately seems as though some of that has made the jump to State of Decay 2. Even worse, those same issues were magnified in multiplayer games. A lot of lag could cause even more issues that make the game near-unplayable on co-op. And another minor annoyance with multiplayer in the game is that players are tethered to one another. This means that the host and the other players can’t really split up and tackle a problem in vastly different ways.
While there are good and bad things to say about the current state of the game, I hope the developers are able to sort out some of these issues and deliver on a satisfying game at release.
Check out the trailer below, as well as a short official quote about the game.
“Discover some problems, find the one you want to deal with in your base by looking at your community and looking at things that are going on with your morale – [then], with the available resources you have, determine a course of action, execute that course of action, then deal with the penalties of what you chose.”
