I am not shocked
I began playing State of Decay 2 when the game released in 2018. My intention was looking at the trailer to play this with my brother multiplayer. The advertisement for the game looked brilliant, however, reality soon hit. The multiplayer was nothing short of a disaster, the tethering just totally ruined the experience. Despite my disappointment in that as it seemed to one of the main themes of the trailer I continued solo. I probably logged around 500-600 hours between Xbox 1 and PC. I had a pretty enjoyable time, the game after the early buggy stages was remarkably fun. However as time passed with all games I got bored.
Fast forward to the announcement trailer for SoD3... Zombie animals, new features etc... it seemed pretty exciting. We had no idea when it would release but a conservative estimate for any new game recently announced would be around 2-4 years. Afterall SoD2 released 2 years after its initial announcement. After years of dragging their heels, online controversies, requirements for other developers to have to help Undead Labs where are we?
Well in my view all we have is a remastered copy of SoD2, yes it looks good on the surface. But beneath that it looks like the same game. Alpha or not I expected much more, I would have expected 6 years post announcement that Undead Labs might have actually conjured something worth looking at. Now on this reddit post I am reading people blaming Microsoft, claiming that they are the problem here.
I will caveat my next point by saying I am no supporter of Microsoft, I find large companies like them to be extremely lecherous. However, it makes no financial sense to continue backing Undead Labs when they have produced nothing in 6 years that looks remotely like a finished and new unique game. I personally was not expecting a reskinned SoD2. If that is what they intended on producing at the start they should have just made a remaster. Nice lighting and fancy graphics are not enough to impress me. I want content, new content that actually provides a new experience.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH!