Dead Island

[Tale]

Possibly the greatest game trailer ever made: http://www.ign.com/videos/2011/02/16/dead-island-announcement-trailer

Hope they can deliver something as good as that looks.

[Ingmar]

I'm so very, very sick of zombies.

[K9]

It's a nice trailer for sure, but otherwise I have to agree with Ingmar.

Fuck zombies. We have more than enough zombie games; there are no new angles to take. Time for something else.

[Tale]

It's not just a nice trailer, it's a work of art. I'm just appreciating it.

[Morfiend]

I'm so very, very sick of zombies.

I so agree.

It's not just a nice trailer, it's a work of art. I'm just appreciating it.

I think thats taking things a bit to far. Its a decent trailer, but nothing super fantastic. I was even a bit annoyed I didnt get to see the second half in forward motion.

[Fabricated]

Wow, dead kids? That's never making it stateside.

[Teleku]

.......?

It seems like I've been stabbing little zombie girls in the face for the last decade now in video games. 

[Ingmar]

Maybe he means out of stateside? The Euros are the ones with all the rules about kids in video games.

[JWIV]

That trailer is promising something that there is no way that the game is going to deliver on.    Expect insane nerd rage.

[Velorath]

I'm so very, very sick of zombies.

I love zombies.  Video game trailers with no in-game footage, not so much.  Or at least not as a way to get me excited about the game (I can enjoy them on their own merits).

[NiX]

How is this an announcement trailer? There's a video from 2007 for it.

Either way, damn good trailer.

[Furiously]

The score to that was amazing.

[Fabricated]

.......?

It seems like I've been stabbing little zombie girls in the face for the last decade now in video games. 

I can't remember the last game where you could kill kids in a brutal fashion. I guess if you count the baby things in Dante's Inferno?

[Tebonas]

Wasteland?

[Ookii]

Fucking amazing, although I'm not a fan of something called 'Dead Island' that opens a bit too much like Lost. I guess I'm a fanboi to the end.

Anyway, reading up on it, it's a FPS without guns that has RPG elements. Maybe it's a better, brighter version of Condemned?

[Samwise]

I'm going to guess this game is way too ambitious to be any good.  I would like to be proven wrong.

[Hayduke]

.......?

It seems like I've been stabbing little zombie girls in the face for the last decade now in video games. 

I can't remember the last game where you could kill kids in a brutal fashion. I guess if you count the baby things in Dante's Inferno?

They used to censor non-US versions with kids in them.  US versions of Fallout 2 had killable kids, for the EU version they just removed all the children NPCs.  Fallout 3 skirts the issue by making the kids invincible for all versions.

So yeah nobody really does it, but it's not because of US puritanism.

[Ookii]

Choice quotes from a preview:

Your character has found himself holed up in a beach hut surrounded by zombies with other survivors fearing for their lives. One of the survivors begs you to go assist a lone person fending off the horde outside. The player then picks up a pipe and goes out to bash in some heads.

Aside from the fact that the main four characters are immune to the zombie infection for some reason, they're all just normal people. So swinging the pipe will come off sloppy and wild at the start of the game. As you progress, though, your character will learn how to handle weapons better. Part of that comes from the skill tree system where you'll be able to learn new skills and upgrade abilities, such as learning the dash attack. The skill tree system wasn't shown off during this preview, but we'll have more info on how it works soon.

While there are guns, the main focus of Dead Island's combat mechanics are the melee weapons. You'll be getting your hands on pipes, machetes, shovels, bats -- even a freaking tree branch can be used as a weapon. The weapons do degrade over time and will eventually bust, so you'll have to find another weapon, or you can get it repaired at various locations on the island. Additionally, you can't simply go around swinging constantly at enemies. After a few swings, your character will be out of stamina and must catch their breath before attacking again.

As well as:

Of all the features Deep Silver showed off, they seemed the most excited about how we'll be able to kill zombies. The main thing they want people to take away from Dead Island is all the gory ways you'll be able to kill the walking dead. You can chop a zombie's legs and arms off and just watch him as he flops around trying to gnaw at your ankles.

As for the zombies themselves, you'll have the standard slow zombies and the annoying running class. On top of that, there will be the special class zombies which will remind you a lot of the special infected from Left 4 Dead.

[Malakili]

I'm still waiting on Dead State

http://www.deadstate.doublebearproductions.com/about/

[Cadaverine]

Interesting trailer.  Reminds me of Cibo Mato's video for Sugar Water.

Game itself gets a big yawn, though.  I love me some zombies like no other, but it's been done to death already.

[UnSub]

Of all the features Deep Silver showed off, they seemed the most excited about how we'll be able to kill zombies. The main thing they want people to take away from Dead Island is all the gory ways you'll be able to kill the walking dead. You can chop a zombie's legs and arms off and just watch him as he flops around trying to gnaw at your ankles.

That trailer doesn't deserve to be linked with the above quote.

EDIT: extra quote tag

[Azazel]

/agree

That trailer was beautiful, in a horrible way.

The game has no chance to be as good as the trailer.

[UnSub]

Looking at Dead Island on YouTube, it looks like the first tech demos were released in 2007. Plus every second video about it is a rickroll, probably because it went silent for so long.

From Destructoid:

Imagine Borderlands set on the Just Cause 2 island with the Left 4 Dead style of zombies, featuring a quest system similar to Fallout 3 and the weapons system of Dead Rising 2. Blend all of that together, and you get Dead Island; or, as Deep Silver likes to refer to it, a "first-person zombie slasher action RPG".

Curious to see if Dead Island can survive that length of time in development and the ambitions of its developers, who read like they've bolted on parts from a number of popular games for this title.

[Azazel]

That Destructoid synopsis makes it sound interesting and playable. Still has no chance to be as good as that trailer, or even any right to be attached to that trailer.

[schild]

Weird, forgot to tag it, anyway, gallery of screens.

[Yegolev]

The screens do more for me than the trailer.

I do think everyone wearing a necklace is funny, though.

[NiX]

At least they're releasing it this year.

[Goreschach]

Yeah, this is just what videogame advertising needs, even more pretentious, 'artistic' bullshit that tells you absolutely nothing about the product it's trying to sell you.

Thanks a lot Gears of War.

[NiX]

Yeah, this is just what videogame advertising needs, even more pretentious, 'artistic' bullshit that tells you absolutely nothing about the product it's trying to sell you.

Thanks a lot Gears of War.

[Azazel]

Yeah, how dare those bastards dare to be artistic in a cutscene!

[Tale]

Here's the trailer and then the trailer backwards (in case you didn't pick up what happened): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52oPsO_RX2c

[Vaiti]

Dead Minecraft [Dead Island Spoof Trailer]

[Jeff Kelly]

"The main thing they want people to take away from Dead Island is all the gory ways you'll be able to kill the walking dead".

Cue the inevitable 'censoring' and follow-up discussion about 'grown-up' games.

I like that we're now at a stage where gameplay did become so formulaic that the only way to differntiate is not great game mechanics or great stories but "most creative, brutal, graphic and gory ways to kill virtual enemies".

I know exactly who the target group for such games is but I'd not call them 'grown-up' (more like perpetually adolescent exactly like the developers making those games).

I also like how some developers still seem to realize how questionable that is, which leads to such absurd consequences as trying to find a story-driven way to justify the carnage, like in Dead Space where you somehow have to cut of the limbs of the 'aliens' because for arcane story puposes this makes them easier to kill.

I'm in Ingmar's camp on this. Im so effing tired of Zombie games and I'm even more tired that all you seem to get today is 'games' where you have to shoot things that then die/explode in imaginative and graphic ways. It's like if Hollywood only ever made splatter movies and even the occasional comedy would be an experiment.

I'd like some grown-up games with moral ambiguity, sex and believable storytelling where curb-stomping enemies or breaking bones with the help of tire irons is hard to watch and not the only marketable feature of your game.

Right now it feels as if my only choices are the brightly colored candyland that is platformers where the Princesses are perpetually in other castles or jacked-up versions of something that's basically 'Duck Hunt' with bigger guns and more perverted death animations.

[Mrbloodworth]

 

[Lantyssa]

I couldn't watch it at the first link.  Now that I can, two related periods of action, cutting back and forth between them, both played backwards.  And definitely trying too hard for edgy with the kid.