I think this gets to the gist of the problem. Deep Silver was developing a multi-player co-op game intended to basically be a cash in on "Left 4 Dead" where, the player base has generally wanted a strong single player zombie apocolypse game with a lot of attention paid to the lore, horror, etc... The trailers implied the game to be more along those lines, where the reality was substantially differant.... even if you could determine that this was first and foremost a co-op cash-in game if you did a bit a lot of seperate reading about the product.
I DO hope that someone will pick up the torch after the trailers we saw, and we will see someone try and make a Zombie-based RPG game more in that vein than what we wound up getting. Dead Island is a good game, but not quite the game I, and a lot of other people apparently, really wanted.
One thing I will say is that the guys doing these games need to stop trying to make these games funny, either through the intended multi-player vibe, or through the material itself. We've see so many parodies of the genere via things like "Dead Rising" and the tongue-in-cheek attitude that is cultivated by Left For Dead, that we're rapidly not seeing any serious treatment of the material to draw a comparison with.
Reading stuff by developers over a period of time there seems to be a tendency for them to want to "lighten things up" when dealing with especially serious, or grotesque material, but really that isn't what they should be doing in a horror game, the should be looking at how messed up something is, and then once they hit bottom find ways to gradually make it even worse. The elation shouldn't come from humor, but at the very end of the game when you (or your character) survive despite all the odds and how bad things got.
Likewise I'd also say that attempting to humanize such situations through having a protaganists with a connection to family members or whatever that are present in the game tends to actually lower personal committment and association with this being "you". To be honest I think one of the problems with Chuck in "Dead Rising 2" was his focus on Katie through the entire game rapidly made it clear that I wasn't really the one adapting to the situation, rather I was following pre-scripted queues.
Ultimatly I think what someone needs to do to capture the essence of what "Dead Rising" was going to be in many people's minds is to create something like say "Fallout" but with a zombie apocolypse instead of A-bombs, and less cheeky, omni-present satire. Honestly a zombie apocolypse is the exact time you might see a lot of people becoming very sociopathic out of nessecity, and an alignment or "karma" system might actually make sense and be a way of tracking that if nothing else to see where it goes. None of the zombie games I see now really have a chance for you, the player, to wind up gradually becoming that survival obssessed maniac.
The interesting thing to also consider though is that in the spirit of such games, it's a good place to turn the normal quest dynamic on it's head. Normally in most RPGs it's a simple format of someone asking for help, you rendering it, and getting a reward. This is exactly the genere where someone might ask for help, you render it, and then they try and shoot you and steal your stuff. A few occurances like that and you might start seeing players get into a properly ambigious mentality for the setting. In such a properly presented enviroment remaining the good guy/white knight actually winds up meaning a lot more in a way the clear cut good/bad choices in most games do not. After all in such an enviroment given the unknowns involved what's "bad" and being a "maniac" could also just be considered being pragmatic. Most zombie movies do a bad job when it comes to the specifics here, but questions like that are in part what they are trying to be about (or were in the beginning).
