State of Decay will be getting its Lifeline downloadable content shortly, but that's far from the end for the series. With a multi-title deal with Microsoft, Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain says they have more ambitious plans ahead--including yet another indication of multiplayer in State of Decay.

"We have long-term ambitions for the franchise," Strain told Polygon. "Wherever we take this, in terms of sequels, multiplayer will be built in from the beginning." To that end, he also hinted that the studio would "love to take advantage of" Azure, Xbox One's cloud infrastructure.

Strain said that having the backing of Microsoft will help them think through the business model on consoles and how some of the infrastructure choices need to change to reflect it. "We're going to have to have somebody who's a partner working with us on the technology to make all that happen," he said. "And so working directly with Microsoft is going to be a huge win going forward for that."

Undead has pointed to multiplayer hooks before, namely when ArenaNet co-founder Patrick Wyatt joined up and pointed out explicitly that he's known for "really big multiplayer games."