State of Decay: Breakdown DLC in Pre-Certification, Challenge Tweaks Overview

The folks at Undead Labs have announced that the Breakdown DLC for State of Decay is currently in pre-certification testing at Microsoft, which means multiple QA teams will be playing the title looking for bugs to squash and offering general feedback to the developers. Furthermore, it looks like the actual certification process should (and I will stress, should) start by the end of next week:

So what happens from here?

First, our excellent QA team at Microsoft will spin up multiple teams on two continents for around-the-clock testing. Most of these guys were involved with State of Decay, so they are not only able to find bugs which is always an essential task but also help us understand where we are and are not hitting the mark for the survival experience we’re working hard to create. These guys are hard-working, passionate badasses, and we’re glad they’ve got our backs.

Through next week the QA teams will be playing Breakdown, logging any issues they find, and sending feedback to the development team. We’ll spend our (probably quite long) days reviewing, prioritizing, and squashing bugs, and incorporating the design feedback from the QA teams, members of our publishing team at Microsoft, and of course our own developers here at the Lab.

The plan is to have all that wrapped up and submit formally to certification testing at the end of next week. As we’ve said before, we like to be transparent about our plans, but things could change. Our test team could turn up some huge game-screwing design flaw next week. We might make a mistake in the packaging format and fail certification. The government shutdown could close down the internetz. Anything could happen. But, assuming no catastrophes, we plan on getting Breakdown into your hands by the end of October.

There’s also an update explaining exactly what the DLC does to raise the game’s challenge, which seems helpful to veterans of the title and newcomers alike:

Vulnerability
The first mark of great skill is how well you avoid mistakes. Thus, one of the best ways to test your skill is to ramp up the consequences of those mistakes. As difficulty rises in Breakdown, the damage you receive from zombie attacks increases. It is up to you to stay out of their clutches.

Attrition
The zombies’ great advantage in State of Decay is their tirelessness. You experience fatigue. They don’t. As difficulty rises, it takes a little more effort to bring down each zombie, which requires you to manage your stamina more carefully.

Speed
In a typical horde, you have a large pack of lumbering slow zombies, and a small handful of fast-moving crazy dudes. If you want to flee, all you have to do is kill the crazy dudes, and you can outpace the ones that fall behind. But now, as difficulty rises, the number of fast zombies in the population will get higher and higher.until it gets kind of ridiculous.

Freaks
Do you ever get that feeling that you haven’t seen a Feral in over four hours of play? As you progress through Breakdown, that feeling will very quickly disappear. (At one point, I did a brief test where I made one out of every six zombies a Bloater. It was a very different game. Don’t worry, I scaled them back.a bit.)