Dead Island

String · 16-02-2011 8:27pm #1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg

16-02-2011 8:40pm

Wow, that looks excellent!

KilOit · 16-02-2011 8:50pm

Wow what a trailer, whatever the game is, it looks like it's holding nothing back.

landsleaving · 16-02-2011 9:01pm

Hmm... another zombie game, meh. Pointless emotional weight added by dramatic music and dead child is just a bit cheap as well. I'll wait to be convinced by some actual gameplay footage, these cgi trailers never really give anything away about the game.

johnny_ultimate · 16-02-2011 9:30pm

Well made trailer. Structurally interesting.

But I agree with landsleaving. Another zombie game? Don't we have enough of them?

Zero-Cool · 16-02-2011 10:02pm

Loved the trailer! L4D is one of my favourite games but I really want to play it on the PS3. Hopefully, this will be like L4D and not Dead Rising.

What a trailer!

Kiith · 16-02-2011 10:08pm

Regardless of what the game is like, that was a brilliant trailer.

gizmo · 16-02-2011 10:17pm

I remember seeing a preview video of this back in 2007. It looked seriously impressive back then so hopefully things have been progressing since then. The only thing that's worrying is that its original release date was 2008 so I wonder what happened to it in the meantime.

pixelburp · 16-02-2011 11:01pm

My understanding of the game (which btw, I figured to be vapourware!) is that it's going to be more realism oriented, in that there are no machine guns or convenient chainsaws with ammo strewn everywhere; that it'll be about survival any way you can, while avoiding the hordes, as opposed to being a 1man army. When you think about it, no one has ever done a "real" zombie game, really pushing the fear and terror of the concept, instead they usually just descend into OTT run'n'guns. I always found it funny how you can be chewed to pieces by zombies in the Res Evil games, but never actually turn.

The trailer was quite well done though, felt more like a film trailer & it was nicely put together.

GTR63 · 16-02-2011 11:25pm

landsleaving wrote: »

Hmm... another zombie game, meh.

What do you expect Crab People.Craaab People,Craab People. Walk like crab,talk like people.Aliens,Orcs & Zombies have been done to death though.
Playing Red Dead Undead Nightmare at the moment its a real slog, its just clear a village...then Clear a Graveyard.Does it change does anyone know.

Zero-Cool · 16-02-2011 11:30pm

pixelburp wrote: »

My understanding of the game (which btw, I figured to be vapourware!) is that it's going to be more realism oriented, in that there are no machine guns or convenient chainsaws with ammo strewn everywhere; that it'll be about survival any way you can, while avoiding the hordes, as opposed to being a 1man army. When you think about it, no one has ever done a "real" zombie game, really pushing the fear and terror of the concept, instead they usually just descend into OTT run'n'guns. I always found it funny how you can be chewed to pieces by zombies in the Res Evil games, but never actually turn.

The trailer was quite well done though, felt more like a film trailer & it was nicely put together.

Even though L4D threw weapons at you, it still was a hectic case of 'leg it to the safe room' Wouldn't be much fun if they went the way of a stealth game where you are trying to avoid the zombies most of the time. Def interested to see more on this.

Zero-Cool · 17-02-2011 12:02am

Hey lads,

the official dead island facebook page announced IGN has first reveal details. Can't open it in work, can someone copy and paste the details from the link below please?

ps3.ign.com/articles/115/1150440p1.html

Massive thumbs up if ya do

Kiith · 17-02-2011 12:10am

IGN wrote:

When the axe sinks into rotten flesh, it buries deep, spraying gore with its impact. The blow cripples the shambling beast, buying precious seconds. But the strike, like its predecessors, is also costly. Repeated contact with ligament and bone has blunted the scavenged weapon. It will need repair soon, and if none can be made, it will be tossed aside in favor of something shiny and new.

This is the brutal combat of Dead Island, a world overrun by infected humans. They're aggressive beasties with superhuman strength and a taste for the red stuff. Like other zombie games (and there are many), the players are the last holdouts against the tide of a shuffling undead mob. And while it would be convenient to provide them with a magical room full of firearms with which to dispatch the problem, the makers of Dead Island have settled on a different approach.

The Royal Palms Resort is perched on the remote island of Banoi in Papua New Guinea. It's a tropical paradise turned tourist magnet, remote and exotic. Not the sort of place you'd expect to find scattered caches of weapons, boxes of grenades, rocket launchers leaning against walls, and mounted machine guns. In an effort to preserve that reality, Techland, the developers of Dead Island, have stripped those handy gaming conventions away, leaving a stark reality in their place.

Rather than run-and-gun their way through a meat maze, players will be forced to scavenge for objects and use them to beat their undead foes into submission. There are precious few firearms scattered around the island (and even less ammo), so the majority of the combat will be intimate. Knives, machetes, bats, broomsticks, pipes – these are your defenses against the horde of infected monsters. It's survival horror with a melee action twist, and it's disgusting.

Publisher Deep Silver and developer Techland recently showed me an early build of Dead Island, and the zombies were horrifying in their varying states of decay. With each blow, their already sloughing flesh fell away in sprays of blood, revealing layers of muscle underneath. The publisher describes Dead Island as dark, twisted and gritty, and the tiny sliver I've seen seems to support those claims. This is not the campy world of Dead Rising.

Dead Island's developers call it a "first-person zombie-slasher/action-RPG." That's a mouthful, and it's still unclear what the balance will be among those descriptors. Players will be able to choose from a cast of pre-set characters, including a former rapper named Sam B (the only character revealed so far).

If you have any doubt about how serious the Techland developers are about the setting and storyline they've created, watch the chilling Dead Island trailer. We watch a lot of video game trailers at IGN, but few cause crowds of editors to gather and watch in silence. This was one of the exceptions.

The player is cast as a guest vacationing at the posh hotel. When the zombie outbreak occurs, he and a handful of other guests remain uninfected. They set out on a mission to escape the island, but along the way, they'll uncover the secret behind the mysterious outbreak. Although Dead Island is a story-based experience, it's built for co-operative play, and Deep Silver says up to four gamers can drop in and out of the game seamlessly. But if you don't want to play with friends, you can also play through the game alone.

Although the player starts out as a simple tourist with minimal zombie-killing skills, his traits will improve along the way, thanks to a mini role-playing system built into the game. Although Deep Silver isn't spilling all the details yet, we know there will be a leveling system and a skill tree. As the player progresses, his stats will increase and he'll gain access to new combat abilities and animations.

If Dead Island sounds familiar to you, then you have a good memory. It was originally announced in 2007, but no publisher was officially attached. Techland worked on other projects in the years since, but Dead Island was slowly shuffling along in the background. Now, Deep Silver is on board, and the game seems likely to see the light of day. It's scheduled for a 2011 release on Xbox 360, PC and PS3, but no specific dates have been revealed yet.

Dead Island's concept is striking. Place players on a tropical island; surround them with zombies of varying shapes, sizes, speeds and abilities; place only found objects at their disposal; degrade their weapons over time; and set the whole adventure against a backdrop of mystery and drama. But will a first-person melee combat action game with RPG elements really work?

I've seen so little of Dead Island that it's impossible to make that call yet. The idea of an all-melee zombie game is great on paper, but when the baseball bat hits the bone, will it be exciting enough to sustain an entire game experience?

Will the constant hand-to-hand combat wear thin, or will the collectibles, storylines, environments and tense moments make up the difference?

I'm hoping to see a lot more from Dead Island in the months to come. I've been following its development for years now, and it should be fascinating to see how it turns out. Regardless, it's great to see a developer taking the zombie genre in an entirely new direction. Here's hoping the folks at Techland and Deep Silver are as good at making games as they are at making trailers.

There you go.

Zero-Cool · 17-02-2011 12:16am

Thanks man! Excellent, sounds like a mix of L4D and Condemned. I like the sound of the levelling up system as well.

Zombrex · 17-02-2011 1:26am

great trailer, loved the bit where they use the backwards in time to show them pulling apart, even though they are actually moving together.

I wouldn't be under any illusions though that great trailer = great game.

landsleaving · 17-02-2011 1:45am

GTR63 wrote: »

What do you expect Crab People.Craaab People,Craab People. Walk like crab,talk like people.

Yes. Moar crabs!

It's not the zombies that have become stale really, it's the fact that the games don't really do much with them. It's almost become an excuse not to program AI.

Dead Nation looks a lot more promising than this, in terms of concept anyway

Zero-Cool · 17-02-2011 2:49am

Awesome!

The trailer in reverse (main bits)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWmpGAE3MDQ

pixelburp · 17-02-2011 10:10am

Wicknight wrote: »

I wouldn't be under any illusions though that great trailer = great game.

Correction, a great rendered trailer, so it wasn't even in-game. So for all we know, it wasn't even done by the developers, it could have been some 3rd party studio that did it ...

humanji · 17-02-2011 10:18am

I really thought this had been cancelled. Great to hear that it's back in action and that they're trying something fresh with it.

For those who haven't seen it, here's the vid from 2007 that shows how they're trying to layer the bodies of the zombies. So every hit with an axe will be new and exciting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1tl-X8fEE

(Not sure if that vid is showing up, so here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1tl-X8fEE )

Oh, and I also like how when I looked up Dead Island on youtube, one of the suggested links was Enda Kenny's Election ad.

Aldebaran · 17-02-2011 10:36am

That's an amazing trailer by any standard.

17-02-2011 10:39am

Jesus, that games is going to be gruesome. Cannot wait!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwtr_-4vz6g

This is the whole trailer played out in chronological order.

Gunmonkey · 17-02-2011 11:31am

Huh, missed the guy wailing on the zombies with a bat behind the girl after she fell out the window.

While the video doesnt give much of an impression of how the full game will play, its done its job by getting people talking about the game.

Grumpypants · 17-02-2011 12:09pm

Ah not another game with people in it, people games have been done to death.

Just because Zombies have become fashionable lately is no reason to stop making zombie games.

Mr Freeze · 17-02-2011 12:24pm

Good to hear this game is still alive and might come out, I feared it was canned as there was no word on it for ages.

Trailer looks interesting, will wait and see what the actual game looks like and for reviews, cause if its another left4dead, I will probably pass, I seem to be the only person who wasn't a fan. But if its more of a Condemned take on it then it could be cool, there would have to the odd gun scattered around the island though, to keep and only use when you are overrun or cornered.

PaddyBomb · 17-02-2011 1:38pm

That trailer is excellent, the music really makes it. I'll be looking forward to seeing some gameplay videos of this.

String · 17-02-2011 1:38pm

I can never get enough zombie games/movies so I am looking forward to seeing some gameplay. If the in game cinematics are like that trailer the storyline should hopefully be great

OmegaRed · 17-02-2011 1:52pm

anyone know the song?

penev10 · 17-02-2011 3:22pm

Great trailer. Open-ended, 4 player co-op could be very interesting or could be a disaster. Freedom can be a double edged sword in games and can often lead to boredom if things aren't structured right