Dead Island Goes Gold With New Co-Op Vignette

[IronicBeet]

The main reason I got interested in this was because of the focus on melee combat. As long as they keep that in I can deal with it being less emotional than the announcement trailer showed it to be.

There's also how as you kill more zombies, your character gradually gets desensitized to the gore and violence and delivers more calm/collected one-liners. It's the little things like that that make the game for me.

 

[IronicBeet]

I love how they started making the characters and the first idea they had was 'I know, let's make a punk rocker and the blackest person ever'.

For all the people claiming it's a disappointment: This is why you do not use CGI trailers as good examples of game quality. How can a zombie apocalypse game be heartfelt and realistic? Take it for what it is; a L4D-esque zombie game but with much more visceral physics and more RPG elements. Don't keep looking at the FIRST TEASER and saying that it's nothing like that.

A CGI trailer may not be an indication of the actual gameplay, but it damn well shows what the studio is aiming to do, at least most of the time. Some people compare it to the original Gears of War trailer, but at least that trailer showed you guns, explosions, and monsters. The Dead Island trailer showed a little girl getting eaten alive and then killing her parents. If a developer puts that out, and then backtracks going "Oh no no no, it's not like that, it's a fun, happy, crazy kind of game!" then I don't blame people for feeling toyed with.

To pull a bait-n-switch that severe, toying with the audience's emotions to get them initially interested in the game only to provide them with something completely different (and quite frankly, from what I've seen, pretty blase except for the setting) actually turns me off the game to the point where I don't think I want to support Deep Silver/Techland at all.

I don't think it would actually be that hard to make a darker, more heartfelt take on a zombie apocalypse. Make it about survival, about trying to get out of the hellhole. Avoiding conflict, trying to get every and any resource you can, just knowing that spending too long in the apartment could cause you spending more resources getting out than you would getting in. Fight other survivors for resources, maybe they can't trust anyone, or try to rally them up even if the rations will go thin (thereby causing more chaos). In an apocalypse of any kind, it's survival of the fittest, and in the end the worst enemies are humans. Instead, this game is about popping caps in heads, slashing up whatever is in your way, leveling up so you can continue fighting some more, and generally just go nuts.

Let me be clear, that is perfectly fine. If you want a fun zombie game, and Dead Island interests you, I say go for it. I just feel that it's downright rotten to fool everyone into getting interested in your product by toying with their emotions ad severely as they did. I would say "Fuck off, Deepsilver/Techland" but really, I just have silent disappointment for them.

They've specifically said that it's not a happy, crazy game, though. It's not as dark and emotional as the announcement trailer implies, sure, but it's still going to be dark and serious (Aside from the comic relief, Sam B, of course).

 

[Cowabungaa]

-'I can find a dozen similarities between this trailer and Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, or even Romero's flicks dating back a half-century. When it comes to shambling hordes, there's just no new angles to explore.'-

I think the article could have ended there. I read the rest of it anyways, seems like a waste. This game is nothing like the first dramatic trailer showed. It's just more of the same. I guess it's selling point is that it's L4D and Dead Rising in one game. Yawn.

I was thinking Borderlands meets Dead Rising, which is a tad more original in terms of gameplay.

Still, it is not the emotionally mature and serious zombie survival game that I hoped it would be, which really would be a refreshing take on zombie games, which before have always been all about action and just slaughtering zombies. Alas, this still seems to follow that trend instead of breaking away from it as I hoped.

They've specifically said that it's not a happy, crazy game, though. It's not as dark and emotional as the announcement trailer implies, sure, but it's still going to be dark and serious (Aside from the comic relief, Sam B, of course).

Which means that they've played their cards horribly wrong, seeing as how the trailer was pretty controversial in videogame land. If they used it honestly it could've been a breakthrough for gaming, but it turned out to be a simple marketing ploy. This doesn't help their image, no matter what they actually said afterwards.

 

[Jumplion]

They've specifically said that it's not a happy, crazy game, though. It's not as dark and emotional as the announcement trailer implies, sure, but it's still going to be dark and serious (Aside from the comic relief, Sam B, of course).

From all the gameplay previews I've read and seen, people are constantly making comparisons to Dead Rising/L4D/Borderlands, with the Producer himself stating that it's more Borderlands than Heavy Rain [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108688-Producer-Says-Dead-Island-is-More-Borderlands-than-Heavy-Rain], along with such choice words in previews like "We want you to feel like a badass that can slaughter anything", with zany one-liners as you level up more and more, trailers like the one in this news post that hardly even attempt to look remotely similar to the original trailer except for the sombre piano music at the end as if they're trying to make some loose connection that it's still somehow the "dark, edgy, mature" kind of game they initially led us to believe...

...all leads me to believe that the trailer was just a slimy, scummy marketing tactic to get people initially interested in the game. Just think, if they hadn't released that trailer, it wouldn't nearly have gotten the hype is has.

If they're trying to make the dark, emotional game they led us to believe they were making, where's the marketing team from that trailer? Certainly doesn't seem like they're going that route anymore.