Ok, we’ve been playing the awesome new XBox Live game, State of Decay and it’s really an incredible game except for one major issue.

The game world persists while you are logged off!

Yes, you heard that right. You save and shut down and when you sign on a day or two later (maybe a week later). All hell has broken loose and your carefully groomed community is a disaster. People dead, ect…, etc…

It’s being touted as a persistent single player world. This is a fail in my mind. This is nothing more than the A.I. playing my game for me when I’m offline and has left many players resorting to old school NES style tactics of leaving their game Paused when they have to step away. Or worse, pulling the network cable and changing the system clock back to the time they logged out in order to keep the world stable.

Persistent worlds like this work in MMOs because you share the burden of holding down the fort with other players. If you don’t have a team, then you suffer the loss. At no point in time do I ever want the A.I. playing my game for me. This is like the embarrassment of the later parts of Gran Tourismo 5 where eventually you no longer get to play the game and just manage teams. Seriously? I buy a driving game to drive and a zombie survival game to test my survival skills. I really could give a rats ass about the A.I.’s skills in winning or loosing my game as this takes the control from the player.

In short this is a blatant case of the developers not respecting the players and really disappointing. People have lives. People have interruptions and they should never be penalized for not being able to sit and play your game for week straight without bathroom breaks!!!

You’ve been warned.