UL's core business model is providing games as a service, primarily via Game Pass. There are dozens of examples of open world survival games set primarily in non-urban environments that still have looting and base building integral to their experience.īig picture, my take is that while SoD2 put multiplayer as the biggest bullet point, SoD3 is putting the survival element as its biggest bullet point. Base building will still be a part of SoD3. It would be absurd for UL to discard its core gameplay loop. It completely changes how SoD will be played. The setting changes far more than just the looks of the game. A campfire only needs wood for upgrade material, and possibly leather for tents. Animals don't even exist in the current game, let alone provide usable resources. The core loop is: kill zombies guarding buildings, scavenge buildings, bring scavenged loot home, upgrade home, repeat. Not only does this mean we will be playing on completely different sorts of maps, but the core gameplay loop has now changed. The video showcases a snowy forest, with no buildings in sight. The only reason why it would be omitted is because of intentional design, not limitations to the engine or budget. A scoped first person perspective is still TBD - though my bet is that will come. The entire video was neither labeled as gameplay footage nor captured in-engine. When scoped, a first person perspective was shown - new to the franchise, however this is well within the scope of game cinematics. A crossbow bolt was being crafted by hand, without any facility - new to the game. TL DR: do not expect SoD3 any time soon.Ī scoped crossbow was the only weapon shown - new to the game. To make things worse, Undead Labs is based out of the Seattle area, one of the first areas hit. Undead Labs opened up a second studio in New Orleans in December 2019 - and then COVID-19 happened. Considering there were games with 2021 dates, this is very far off, more than likely 2022. There is no announcement date, which means this game is 100% not coming with the launch of the Series X or this year. SoD2's UE4 has prebaked lighting and the Xbox One just doesn't have the horsepower to handle dynamic weather, at least with UL at the reins. Bringing true dynamic lighting and weather to next gen hardware is completely doable with Unreal Engine 5. Dynamic weather is more than likely coming. It more than likely isn't yet planned, but this is a hurdle in SoD2 that will be gone in the next installment. If you can set a location on the map as a temporary base, you can set buildings as temporary bases, or large vehicles as temporary bases. The idea of having temporary bases extends far beyond simple campfires. Whether campfire placement is location specific or truly anywhere you want will be TBD. Considering UL's shift toward implementing community feedback into their development process, if you beg loud enough, they might build it.īeing able to craft a campfire also adds weight to deeper survival genre mechanics - and means we'll be able to have temporary bases of a sort, which is new to the franchise. This means the possibility of ridable (and killable) horses and pets and are now on the table. They left it open because the simply didn't have the budget for it, and now they do. This answers one of the game's longest standing lore questions: were humans the only ones affected. This also implies that there will be more in-depth hunger/survival mechanics, common to the open world survival genre. The character is seen hunting prey - and the prey bleeds, meaning this is dynamically generated in the world. Having more throughput will make SoD3 an open world game possible only because of the next gen architecture.Īnimals, both live and undead, are coming - thanks to the increased memory budget possible on next gen. This is why we can't have dense metropolitan maps. This is why we can't have hordes numbering in the hundreds or thousands. This is why the game has a low speed cap on vehicles. This is why we have limited animations and character models. This is the reason for the multiplayer leash. Virtually all of the limitations we experience now in SoD2 are because of CPU and GPU memory budgets. This specifically will benefit open world games like SoD in spades. This is not coming to Xbox One, so it will be optimized for next gen performance - most importantly, the high speed NVME drive and hardware decompression pipeline that provides throughput several times faster than any 2020 PC hardware.
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