Xbox Addict

First State of Decay patch out, but is it working?

State of Decay developer Undead Labs team member "Undead Jeff" has offcially addressed the problems surrounding their game’s ongoing issues with bugs and the "Title Update 1" patch that was released on Friday in the following post on the undeadlabs.com forums:

"Hi fellow survivors. Here’s the deal:

Almost as soon as the update went live on Friday night, we started seeing reports the infestation bug ("Too many infestations!", even if the infestations were on the other side of the world), at least, was not fixed. DJ (our QA director) and Sanya immediately started gathering reports, and the entire Undead Labs team started investigating. 

The issue was somewhat confused by many people reporting improvements to the infestation issue. However, reports started coming in that other bugs we had verified internally as fixed were apparently not fixed on the live version of the game. It began to look as though the people reporting improvements simply had good luck, not a fixed game.

I called Sanya at 2:30 PM PDT (5:30 PM EDT/10:30 PM GMT) on Sunday to let her know we had determined beyond a doubt the update was being downloaded, but not applied. 

First, I want to apologize. This is not acceptable, and you deserve better than this.

Second, we’re on the phone with our publisher right now getting everyone mobilized. There’s nothing we can do at UL to fix this problem. Once the update has been handed off, the process of getting it to you is something only the Xbox people can handle. So, we’re calling in the troops to get going on solving this problem immediately.

Third, although we can’t directly fix the problem, you are OUR players, and we’d like you to know we’re exploring ways to express our appreciation for your patience.

In the meantime, see "first." 

I wanted to let you know what was going on as soon as we had it nailed down. We don’t have an ETA on a solution (see "second"). Stay tuned for more information as we get it.

Thanks to all of you who’ve been reporting issues and working with us in various threads this weekend. The information you provided was invaluable as we worked to track this down."

We here at Xbox Addict concluded that at release, State of Decay merited "only a 7.0 in its current form...[but] without these issues, the game could have easily been an 8.0 or better".  We immediately went back and played the game since the release of Title Update Patch 1 to verify whether or not there had been any improvement, and while we found that our existing gamesaves showed no improvements whatsoever, starting a brand new game provided better results, with the "Too Many Infestations" bug in particular no longer popping up when there were no actual infestations or infestation-related missions in the vincinity of the player’s home base.  We reiterate that while our review of the original product stands, State of Decay is still a highly enjoyable game, and while there clearly oustanding issues with gamesaves created before the release of the patch, our experiences with our gamesaves created post-patch far more approximate what one should expect.