T w e n t y S i d e d
Zombie month continues with Dead Island, a game that isn’t just disappointing, it’s famously disappointing. For a late entry into the zombie craze, that makes this game something extra-special.
Link (YouTube) |
Here is the Dead Island trailer we were discussing at the start of the show. I know the whole discussion of the trailer vs. the game is really familiar territory to anyone who followed Dead Island at release, but it’s pretty hard to discuss this game without the topic coming up. And in case some of my points sound a little familiar, here is the half-assed review I did of the game when it was new.
At the nine minute mark: How can carboard boxes possibly block a fire door and prevent you from using the stairs to exit the building? Since this floor of the hotel is clear of zombies and the outside isn’t, what idiot barricaded us in? What is it about the zombie apocalypse that caused the elevator cables to snap? How did you survive such a huge drop? If the cables did indeed snap, then what brought the elevator to a stop one floor short of the bottom of the shaft and hold it there for a second? What videocamera is our mystrious helper using to see us? How is the videocamera still working when both the power and the elevator have failed? How is it that the still-glowing light fixtures in the elevator aren’t giving off any light?
Around the twelve minute mark: I was complaining about how the game doesn’t explain why you’re immune to zombie-itis, when I should have been complaining about the nonsensical relocation. You lock yourself in a room, get ambushed by a single zombie, and pass out. Then you wake up in a bungalow far from the hotel.
How did a single zombie knock you out in one punch? Why did that zombie not subsequently eat you? How did the other survivors reach you? How did they transport you? Why did they bother? Why did they bring you into their safehouse and lay you out on the bed when you’re obviously covered in bite marks?
(Yes, there’s a tiny bit of a fig leaf on some of this later when it makes it clear that Mr. Radio Guy somehow knew you were immune and asked Sinomoi to come get you, but that raises more questions than it answers. More on that in a minute.)
This one moment is such a snarl of strange contrivances, and none of this was needed. All the writer needs to do here is introduce the world and get you to meet Sinomoi and the other survivors. That’s not difficult to accomplish. This is possibly the laziest, goofiest, and most awkward way to accomplish that. It’s the classic AAA blunder: Why does this story feel like it was written by a child? And if the story doesn’t matter, then why was so much money spent scripting, writing, animating, and voice-acting these cutscenes?
At the fourteen minute mark: The dialog here is atrocious, even by cheesy videogame standards. Let’s take one line from Simonoi:
I have many sick and injured here, mate. They’re crazy with fear. Tell me where you are… Where are you?”
Let’s take it apart:
- “I have many sick and injured here, mate.” No you don’t. You’ve got a bungalow full of healthy adults in the prime of their lives. Every single one of them has a beach-ready physique.
- “They’re crazy with fear.” Which only highlights the question of how they saved the main character[s]. If these people are too sick and scared to escape by sea (which ought to be pretty damn effortless, given that they’re sitting on the beach) then how did they ever manage to storm the hotel, fight through the undead, and drag our protagonists – potentially all 4 of them – all the way back to the bungalow?
- “Tell me where you are… Where are you?” Seriously? This went through writer, director, and voice actor and nobody noticed how this is completely redundant? This is super-basic stuff. Trim your dialog. It makes the scene cheaper to produce, more interesting for the audience, and it wastes less of their time.
- “Where are you?” Hang on. Sinomoi doesn’t know where this guy is? You would naturally expect this guy to be at the hotel, since he had access to the hotel security feed. I don’t actually expect that to be the case, but I would expect Sinomoi to expect that to be the case. It’s just… how did this question not come up earlier?
The whole game is like this. Whenever people are talking, they’re usually telling us what we already know, contradicting stuff the game has shown us, or highlighting plot holes and contrivances. It’s really hard to critique this thing because every line feels wrong or off and by the time I’ve untangled one nonsense line of dialog, four more have come and gone.
I like at the end when a single bungalow contained every videogame cliche from the turn of the century: An audiolog, a radio narrating exposition, and a keycard to open a door.
Here is the Homestar cartoonman show what Rutskarn made mention of.
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Awww,you skipped the intro cutscene.Its the best.It reeeeaaally makes you instantly dislike the character you are playing.But it does give context to why you wake up fully dressed.And the song has a nice beat.
Oh man, that’s hillariously awful. Who the hell thought it was a good idea?
The song was kinda catchy though.
I bet this episode will be loved by the down under crowd here.Especially the not chakotay lifeguard.
The way to make a leveling system where enemies will always be about the same threat is to not upgrade the players health and damage,but rather let them choose new skill things as they level up.For example,wolfenstein new order allows you to learn various new techniques(like dual wielding weapons) that make some stuff easier,but a single enemy remains about the same threat all the time.
I share Ruts’ tabletop background and his skepticism about skill systems. Haven’t played New Order yet, but your example sounds interesting. In general, skill systems are best when they empower player choice, which is what all good game design should be about. Give me the choice between bashing my enemies up close and personal or blast them away with magic. Ideally, make it so that both are valid ways of going through the game, but so that different types of enemies create different level of challenge depending on which skill choices I’ve made. And don’t be Skyrim and make it just so that these choices are just different but equally bland damage-delivery systems.
That’s actually what the leveling system here does in essence, even if it doesn’t seem obvious from the start. The weapons you find also level with you and their damage scales the same as the zombies’ health. While they do get harder to kill after the early start, they eventually reach their peak, so to speak, and stay relatively same for the rest of the game. It’s definitely not the best ever designed system, but having done two playthroughs (one solo, one co-op), I can say it’s not that difficult to stay ahead of the bell curve as long as you keep upgrading and updating your weapons.
Leveling up and investing your skill points is where you eventually become more powerful. The only shortcoming with it really is that the game doesn’t really tell you early on where to invest. I wouldn’t say the game’s impossible if you end up making a sub-par build, but the differences can be pretty significant. The skill trees all have their uses, but the combat tree is by far the most important. Survival is also decent. Fury is not.. bad but not really worth investing in early on beyond unlocking the class ability.
Not quite.First there is the added clutter of increasing health and damage.But more importantly,the constant change of weaponry and gear youve mentioned ends up being just another hassle to stay current.Like Tizzy mentioned,the point of skills is to expand player choice,and having to constantly be bothered with updating stuff just so you can remain even is the opposite of that.
This is what you originally wrote:
“The way to make a leveling system where enemies will always be about the same threat is to not upgrade the players health and damage,but rather let them choose new skill things as they level up.”
And my argument was that it’s essentially what the game does. Besides the start, the zombies stay the same relative to your ability to deal damage. It just so happens that it’s tied to your having weapons that require maintenance. As you level up and invest in skills, you’ll eventually unlock new abilities which in fact do give you more choice. The stomping ability in the combat trees (all characters have access to it) alone is somewhat of a game changer, since it gives you the ability to dispatch zombies without having to use your weapons. It’s not too OP, but definitely comes in handy.
“the constant change of weaponry and gear youve mentioned ends up being just another hassle to stay current”
If compared to Wolfenstein, you could argue that things like having to maintain ammo and health are also “just another hassle to stay current”. If you’re really bad at it then I’d presume you’ll be dying a lot and constantly out of ammo. The difference and main fault of DI in this regard I find is that is just doesn’t seem to teach any of this “core gameplay” in a way that (at least as far as the SW crew and people commenting on this blog are concerned) would help them intuit the systems more easily. Which is why I concluded “not the best system ever”. A lot of the things on gameplay alone that I see people critique and complain about just seem to be because of a lack of understanding.
I speak as someone who’s clocked 74 hours in this game and that’s roughly the two playthroughs I’ve done (solo and co-op). All I’m really trying to is say that there is in fact a game here to be enjoyed. Even if it can be hard to see. Reason I personally bought the game was because of watching Let’s Play videos of it. Doing a little analysis on the side I had some idea how the game works and just went from there and had a good time.
Bolded for emphasis.I specifically said from the start that increasing your stats but keeping the enemies relatively the same threat is a bad idea.So no,the game does not essentially just give you skill points as you level up,it gives you skill points with extra clutter of stats going up on both sides for no reason.
You could,if not for the fact that ammo can be gotten from everywhere,while you require a specific crafting place in order to repair weapons.The way fallout 3/new vegas does it is better because you can do it wherever,and the weapons degrade slower.And once you find a suitable weapon,you can keep it forever,you dont have to level it up as soon as you and your enemies ding.
“it gives you skill points with extra clutter of stats going up on both sides for no reason.”
Which, again, have no significant effect on the gameplay besides the start. The skills are what make the practical difference, assuming you’re well versed with the game mechanics.
I’m not claiming that it’s the best system out there, but practical experience just proves it’s nowhere near as broken as people think it is.
So two things:
1. Yes insinuating that there’s no difference between Aussie and Kiwi is offensive in the same way that Canadians are the same as Americans.
2. As an Australian DEAR GOD THE ACCENTS IN THIS WERE TERRIBLE. I found it so goddamn distracting.
So what youre saying is that aussies are all gun totting maniacs and kiwis are all polite maple syrup drinking doormats?
Ha,managed to insult 4 countries with a single sentence.Beat that.That’s pretty close, the manners are right but Australia is more of a pitchfork wielding type country and New Zealand makes more cider than maple syrup.
There is no excuse for the bad accents. No excuse. What, you can’t find voice actors who have some actual familiarity with the accent they are trying to imitate? Or, maybe, who actually have this accent naturally? Give me a freakin’ break!
Apparently you cant.Why else would gtaiv hire a guy from the bronx instead of any of the thousands of ex yugoslavian immigrants.
With on screen actors its even worse.They have to hire englishmen to play frenchmen,scotsmen to play russians,and americans to play englishmen.
On screen is different, because you get to see the person as well. So I give them a bit more of an excuse there, even if it’s funny to have a Scotsman playing a Spaniard and a Frenchman playing a Scotsman in the same movie (Highlander).
Same thing with gtaiv, because casting a voice actor who will be performing in something else than their native language is trickier.
Actually its a scotsman playing an extra terrestrial pretending to be egiptian,pretending to be spaniard.
and you get plenty of British actors playing Americans! (because Brits are cheaper I guess?)
Wait, accents aren’t fungible commodities?
How come there is still no dead island trailer with who do you voodoo song playing over it?Can someone please edit that,because that needs to exist.
I’m more frightened by the jelly marshmallow from the wrestleman cartoon than any of the zombies. Which pretty much says it all.
I know it’s not competently put together, but I actually really like this intro and even the concept behind the game. I think they had a lot of the right ideas, but just didn’t fit them together
1) The intro is relatively short and gets you into the main game much quicker than most games do. You were out into the open world in quarter of an hour, lots of games aren’t done with the tutorial in an hour.
2) I like the way you wake up in the aftermath and wander around a hotel wondering what was going on. That feels quite powerful to me and they allow you to wander around a _little_ more than the normal tutorial corridor.
3) I like the ammoral beach holiday setting. This game was made when grey-brown was still a thing, and it was nice for them to break out of it. It’s also just a fun place to have a fun apocalypse, like Dead Rising before Dead Rising 3.
Technically this isnt quite the open world yet.The switch base a few quests in,and thats when the game proper starts.
An explanation of the strange bathroom ladder-thing at the start; it reminds me of a thing we (my family) used to have in our bathroom, which was basically a heated-towel rack. It functioned as both a radiator and a towel-rack, as such, not each of the bars was meant to be used for a towel.
Though its a bit of a strange spot to place one IMO, but yea, thats the closest explanation I can get to.
Thats what it is,but the gap between the bars should still be wider,and there are too many bars on it in the first place.
Not necessarily, if you put the towel on the top bar, then the other bars are for heating/drying the towel, they’re not actually meant to carry a towel.
Can we please play a game you folks enjoy next time?
They are going to do batman next.This is just a month of zombies,because why not.So four terrible zombie games(an oximoron),then something good.
I would say it’s a tautology.
Damn ti!Serves me well for leaving comments on multiple sites at the same time.
I kind of like Dead State. Though not because of the zombies. More because of the “eking out an existence after the end of civilization” angle.
I’m thinking the next game we have planned for Zombie Month will be more positive. I’m not gonna spoil it, but it’s way, way better than either of these two games. I can’t promise it’ll be 100% cheer and roses but it should be way more “Oh hey that’s a good decision”/”I really really like what they did here!” than this week’s episode.
I mean, Survival Instinct is pretty well known as a bad licensed game that suffers from a small budget/short development time. And Dead Island is on a really short list of games I actively loathe. I actually don’t dislike that many games, but I really really detest pretty much everything about Dead Island.
You should have Josh play Day Z just to hold a betting pool on how much he swears when encountering other humans.
There can be another pool as to how many strokes Shamus has at watching players working against their own self-interests in surviving a zombie apocalypse.
I’m sort of hoping for Lolipop Chainsaw to make an appearance. At the least, y’all wouldn’t run out of things to talk about.
If nothing else,Shamoose can always ask “But what does your boyfriends severed head eat?”.
And I thought positivity was Dead! I rather like it when Spoiler Warning is negative myself, but others may not, so it’s nice to hear the level of positivity may be Rising.
Typing of the Dead, perhaps?
Well that pretty much confirms it’s Plants Vs. Zombies.
I thought you were going to play Dead Rising after Survival Instinct!
“should be way more “Oh hey that's a good decision”/”I really really like what they did here!”
Thank you, Chris, that was all I needed :)
15:30 to 15:40, look at the couple in the background on the left:
That animation makes no sense, nor do the poses, and the guy’s arm clearly goes right through her neck. Someone must have been pressed for time, really hard…
You know, I wish there was a zombie game that featured more classical zombies. Ones not created via an infectious disease, but by voodoo magic. You wouldn’t have to waste any time explaining why the protagonists and survivors are immune to bites, and you could mix in human enemies a la the Samedi in Saint’s Row 2. There’s a lot of room for flavor and style, there.
Well there is voodoo in this game.
It’s been awhile since I played this, but wasn’t the outbreak in this game started by a Voodoo Witchdoctor… because cultural sensitivity was a high priority or whatever they were smoking.
Seriously…? Voodoo zombies are completely different! Ugh.
Well, I’m not going to reinstall it just to check… but, that’s what I remember.
EDIT: I just looked it up, sadly, I’m wrong. It’s weaponized mad cow disease.
So, can we talk about the ridiculously low durability the weapons have? The guy in the cabin doesn’t want to to even look outside until you pick up a weapon, but then the oar falls apart after a dozen zombies. Then Chris uses his fists and that is almost as effective as the weapons they give you anyway.
Hitting a bunch of people that hard would definitely break the oar,so that part is ok.What is ridiculous is that your punches are as effective,and that stuff that should be way more durable than a wooden plank,like a sledgehammer,are just as flimsy.
Id really like to see a game with durability that has metallic weapons like swords get duller over time and you have to sharpen them,but they never break,only get worse at dealing damage.
I would be ok with the low durability of the weapons if they felt like they made a significant difference in combat. Like if it felt like making a tough decision of risking breaking your weapon to take down a zombie faster, or having a longer, drawn-out fight using your fists.
As it is, I would just save up a good weapon to use in big fights or boss zombies, and used my fists or random weapons I found for everything else.
The paddles and sticks you see in the video aren’t really considered weapons proper. They’ve got fixed damage values (meaning that they don’t scale like the rest of the weapons) which means they’re only effective in the early levels and you can’t even repair them. That being said, the sharp weapons (anything with a blade and/or a pointy end) pretty much fit the bill. Most damage, quickest and easiest to break. You get around breakage by upgrading your weapons which gives them more durability.
Fists are sadly completely fucking useless in this game since their damage doesn’t scale. Though they did fix them in Riptide.
That’s what Monster Hunter does. Each weapon has a sharpness meter that depletes when you hit wyverns. Weapons have different curves so maybe one sword has decent sharpness for a long time, but another one has super good for a few hits and then tapers off. Sharpness is also important because the different areas on the wyvern require different sharpness levels to penetrate. You also get bonus damage I think for chopping into something while your weapon has a higher sharpness level than the area requires.
So you need to pick the weapon with the sharpness curve that fits your playstyle, start the hunt, and then when your weapon gets too dull to damage the wyvern you need to pull back and sharpen it before going back in.
While we’re on the subject, it’s even more ridiculous that you punch at the same speed that you swing weapons. The oar is a great example here. Ever hold an oar? I mean a long one, like the one in the game? Sure, you can probably do a lot of damage swinging it. But it takes a LONG time to get a good swing up.
I get not wanting to throw the player’s timing off every time they switch weapons. But then, that would make a nice mechanic – you pick up weapons, and the combination of the weapon’s length, weight, and balance determine both how fast you can swing and how much damage you do…
That always drove me crazy in the Dead Rising games, where all the weapons seemed to be made of balsa wood. I get that something like an oar or a pool cue will snap pretty easily, but there’s no reason to have a sledge hammer or a fire axe break, which are made for hitting hard things, break.
On a related note, I’ve never seen a fire ax in my life (unless it was being carried by an actual fireman). Was there ever really a time when buildings had axes in glass cases next to fire extinguishers?
Axe Museums do that all the time.
Back when I first remember auto-leveling being a new shiny thing, I don’t remember it being presented as “look, you can go anywhere and do whatever you want.” It was more like “you know those annoying times where you’re moving through a low level area and enemies keep wasting your time when they aren’t any challenge and are worth no XP? We fixed that.”
The benefit I saw in auto-leveling when I first encountered it wasn’t that it made whole world easy, but that it extended the life of areas that lost interest when I would normally be over-leveled for them. It’s still meant to give the player more freedom, but it’s freedom to dick around in the area they like without being bored to tears.
I think there are problems with most auto-leveled systems, but I think there’s something to be said for the potential benefits–in Borderlands 2, for example, there are quite a few quests that require one to backtrack through lower-level areas, and the hike always sucks.
There are much better ways to do that.Stick a boss monster or two in an area,then have the satisfaction of finally being able to kick their ass.Make vastly weaker enemies run away and beg for their lives instead of blindly charging at you.Introduce new enemies that come to old areas and purge them of old enemies.Etc,etc.
Have all the small enemies merge into a bigger enemy. (Works well with slimes. Is awesome with wolves.)
Or have usable items/triggers that increase enemy power in an area.
Or, y’know, don’t level up the player and just do a Zelda thing where all your extra power comes from items.
EDIT: And I just realized it could actually be pretty cool to have autoleveling, but have certain optional (possibly repeatable) bosses you can fight to lower the level of all the other enemies. And then the enemy levels have a bit of rubber banding (or maybe they always level faster than you) so they catch back up and you have to find the next optional de-leveling boss.
I think you’re actually understating the value of all your solutions. Each of these things would be relatively simple and quick to implement but would make the game world seem that much more alive and interesting. All of these are great methods of environmental story telling that are simply ignored in most cases. Hell I would say that it’s just cheaper to give the enemies bigger numbers but making them flee a powerful player couldn’t really require that much effort to implement could it?
I don’t know about “much better.” I think auto-leveling mechanics can work well, if they’re properly designed and implemented with a purpose. Take Guild Wars 2–the auto-leveling in that game doesn’t automatically upgrade enemies, but rather down-levels players who move through lower level areas, reducing their stats but letting them keep all their skills and abilities earned. This lets player keep feeling a power progression as they level up (what’s the point of a leveling system otherwise?), but still rewards them and challenges them if they backtrack to play with friends or explore the world.
The problem isn’t auto-leveling, it’s the naive lack of understanding on the part of developers about why they even want to include a level system to begin with, let alone why they might want to auto-level enemies. Watching this SW, I get the sense that Dead Island has RPG mechanics because that’s the popular thing to do today. They subsequently negate the leveling mechanics through auto-leveling because they weren’t really interested in making an RPG, they just wanted to check the box so they can sell the games.
It’s crude and it’s dumb, and it makes for a dumb, crude experience, but that doesn’t mean there’s no appropriate application for auto-leveling systems in a broad sense. There’s just no merit in implementing systems without deliberate purpose beyond moving product.
My favorite fix for combat that wastes your time has always been: make combat skippable. Challenge too easy? too hard? Either way is a waste of time, but I won’t care so long as I can run away from the fight without any ill effects.
Do that, and have just a few key areas that have bosses that, for story reasons, need to be beaten to a pulp. That’s enough to give an incentive to level up, and leaves players with the choice of exactly how much challenge they want. Do they like steamrolling bosses? Or do they enjoy when they just barely beat them?
Also, I wouldn’t mind if weak enemies simply recognized it and avoided any engagement. I really really really hate combat used as filler. I don’t have that much time to spend on games to begin with.
I think that having those low level areas stay low level is an excellent thing in games that actually make things challenging at the start, because when you go back through them at a higher level you can suddenly wipe the floor with enemies that gave you trouble when you first started, which can feel very satisfying if done right. Not many RPGs seem to do a really good feeling difficulty curve these days, which kinda sucks.
I love how the games tells you to loot straight away. You wake up with no ideawhat’s going on, and you start rummaging in abandoned suitcases. Classy…
Edit: Oh. And of course, the cast actually addresses this in the video, if only I’d waited one more minute before posting…
But also, I can add something: I’m amazed at the sheer number of places to loot. Let’s start the game with some busy work (or skip looting and worry that you are putting yourself in an unwinnable state).
erm… why?… Is it really necessary?
If done consistently, the making everything in the world lootable really adds immersion. Take the Bethesda games: say what you will, but the fact that you can loot and pick up anything in the world adds a lot of believability (that the conversations then throw away again, but that’s another issue). The fact that there is too much stuff in the world to loot gives an impression of reality.
Games where you can only interact with designated ‘interesting objects’, such as many bioware games, end up feeling like they restrict player exploration and constantly remind you that you’re in a game. Everything you find is a reward for the player looking, not something that’s just in the world because an NPC might want it. (And why the Dragon age games still bothered with vendor trash, I’ll never know…)
This game of course doesn’t do it right, as is demonstrated by the un-takeable axe and the unopenable door Chris pointed out.
You’re making a good point, though I’m not that fond of the everything is lootable philosophy (if only because it increases the burden on the game engine, my own preference is usually for a more streamlined and abstracted experience, and saving those cpu cycles for another part of the experience).
But this game does not seem to come even close to everything is lootable. It’s: most of the loot is in containers, but there is a lot of them. Bioware games seldom have more than three containers in a room. How many lootable suitcases were there on that one cart? Six, maybe?
I guess they were trying to give the impression that there was lots to loot by spreading it out into many containers even though each contains a tiny bit of loot?
There must be something skinnerboxy about that, I’m guessing?
You know an interesting mechanic for the enemies also leveling up could be that the enemies are actually leveling. So you could fall behind the enemies levels or you could outpace them. That sound tricky to balance, but might give some urgency to a game.
Shadow of Mordor kinda does that. The bosses engage in plots and schemes against each other to grow in power, and the player can intervene to stop them from leveling up/pick which one levels up.
Say what you will, but that Nemesis system is really cool.
As long as you are dying it is.If you break the combat system(which isnt hard to do),you end up with having your nemesis be the orc that youve killed a bunch of times before.Its still fun,but also hilarious.I dont think that was the intent,but Im glad it can play out like that.
Though leveling up your own mooks is also a nice touch.
This would also make difficulty levels easy to implement: just scale up or down how quickly the enemies level up.
I hate modern difficulty systems which made it so counter-intuitive to understand where the appropriate difficulty to select is. (As in: having a hard time keeping enough ammo stocks? Try a harder difficulty, it’ll be easier of course!)
Also, when Josh mentions at the 26:50 mark or so, the problem of wandering into an area which is way beyond your level… I just never ever saw this as a problem. You get one-shotted by something and reload… so long as you’re not stuck with your choice of location, you get the message and go somewhere else. Problem solved… I remember games that left you very free to go anywhere, with just hints as to where was the appropriate place to go, like Baldur’s Gate or Fallout. That level of freedom and free-form discovery was actually quite enjoyable: Oh… eventually I’ll be able to come back here and see more than the entrance to this super-secret mutant base. Cool, I can’t wait!
And, whatever choice you make for a game, it certainly shouldn’t be constant challenge. Things can get easier, they can get harder. Either one is fine, but constant challenge is a recipe for boredom.
No it shouldnt.Having a breather,whether in a safe location or in a place where you can stomp around anything,is a good thing.Games should have quiet moments,otherwise you get overloaded by too much action.
For reasons unknown to me, after watching this, two things:
1) I can now not get Dolores O’Riordan’s voice out of my head…zombie, zombie….
2) Apocolypse? Now?
Clearly, the zombies chewed through the elevator cables. You know how it is when you let an infestation take root…
I still can’t believe how difficult it is to find booze in that place. The guy is locked up in a bar and can’t even find any? Boiy, these guys party hard!
wait is Sam B voiced by the same guy who voiced Lee? I couldn’t tell
Nope, it’s Phil LaMarr in one of his many, many voice acting roles.
Seriously?They got Phil LaMarr for this crap?
Holy shit!They got him for all of the dead islands!Man,he should really be more careful when signing contracts.
Hey! Leave Phil alone! Let him pay the rent however he wants. Everybody knows that video games don’t count: as bad as the finished product is, it can never hurt his reputation.
And rightly so, if you ask me. Voice acting is where actors have the least control over the finished product. Most of the time, they cannot be faulted for how it turns out.
Sam B was Phil LaMarr, and Lee was Dave Fennoy, although frankly the biggest shock these days is that they weren’t both voiced by Troy Baker.
…or Nolan North, Robin Atkin Downes, Steve Blum, Liam O’ Brian, Yuri Lowenthal, Jason Marsden or…Jennifer Hale, somehow.
I wonder what the ratio of video game elevators that have something go wrong as opposed to ones that don’t
Well there’s Mass Effect…
It used to be a lot better back in the era of Quake, Duke3D, Jedi Knight etc. Elevators everywhere, and they worked!
I think it might have been Half Life that started the trend of them breaking?
My 2 cents about Dead Island (haven’t watched the video yet):
I was playing through, not having much fun, when I stopped and thought to myself “Why did they put a leveling system in here?”. If you’re level 4, have a level 4 weapon, and are fighting a level 4 zombie, it takes just as many hits to kill it as if everything was level 8. There’s no progression, so why include a progression system. After thinking about it, the answer I came up with was that the leveling system exists to make lower-level weapons useless. Your level 4 weapon, when you’re level 8, won’t be anywhere as good as a level 8 weapon. You need to continually search for and upgrade weapons in order to keep up. This has a couple effects:
1) It acts as a money sink.
2) It creates a disincentive to engage in combat.
That last one is nasty, and I think why I wasn’t having fun. If I’m moving along and see a bunch of zombies to the side, I have a choice of fighting them or ignoring them. If I fight them, not only am I expending resources (repair costs, health, etc), but that brings me one step closer to leveling up, which will make everything that much harder. It feels like the game is punishing me for engaging with its core mechanics.
So why do the weapons break then?
To be fair, in an apocalypse survival game, maybe avoiding combat should be a valid first strategy.
Of course, this game doesn’t look like it embraced that idea properly if that’s what it was going for.
Well, it’s true. Playing the game involves a constant cycle of repairing, upgrading, and switching your old weapons to new ones. The thing is though, money is relatively easy to come by. Looting like there’s no tomorrow and selling all the crap and weapons you don’t need is the simplest way. Upgrading your weapons also gives them more durability. The damage bonus also makes them last a level or two longer as viable weapons. A thing to learn is when you really should bother to do which.
White weapons are dime a dozen and not really worth holding on to. A couple of them upgraded early on is a decentish investment until you get your first greens (uncommon tier), but that’s about it. You can get the higher tiered weapons as random drops, quest rewards, from vendors or from chests, some of which are locked and need a character with points in lockpicking (the higher the difficulty tier, the better chance for rare/epic/legendary weapon.)
For the combat: You’ve got that kick button for a reason. And always aim for the head. The game could be a bit more clear about it, but kicking is your best ally if you want to avoid damaging your weapons. Kicking (and blunt damage in general) drains the zombies “stamina” and when they run dry, they get knocked down. Normal kicks aren’t that effective, but by combining it with a well timed jump, you can knock down most regular zombies in one shot. Then just swing at their head, or, if you’ve unlocked the skill, just stomp their heads.
Gotta disagree with ya Josh. To me, the idea behind auto leveling comes off like a natural progression from the inherit laziness of including a stat-based design in a realtime game system. Just a stats allow for numbers to replace mechanics as a representation of progression, auto-level’n allows for open world design without the need to put any effort into designing that world around that concept of progression. It’s just another shorthand used to keep from having to put real work into your game.
To make auto-levelling work, the important thing is to get rid of the 1-1 scaling. Instead of facing Level 1 zombies at Level 1 and Level 50 zombies at Level 50, give each encounter – either a location or a roaming enemy – a few variables: player base level, minimum level, a level multiplier and a level cap. When you are below the player base level, the encounter either shows up at its minimum level (for location encounters) or doesn’t show up at all (for roaming encounters). As you gain levels, the encounters level with you, but not necessarily at the same rate as you. And once you reach the level cap for that encounter, it stops gaining levels. So some enemies might keep pace with you for the entire game, some might start out more powerful than you but slowly be overtaken, and some will have hard caps on their minimum and maximum power.
I think him repeating the “where are you?” question. Efficiency over everything dialog would be pretty boring.
It’s very … upfront and helpful on how to skip all the cutscenes and all the dialogue, isn’t it? Insistent, almost.
Oh, and boxquote:
I actually really agree with Ruts on skill systems. I feel like a lot of games aren’t doing them right. I often get the impression that the skill system and leveling is usually added as an afterthought rather than being part of the design process from the start. Like the characters are designed with all their abilities and then later they are separated into different tiers for the purposes of leveling. Until I reach the max level I often feel like I am playing an incomplete character, or I’m sitting here thinking “oh man, I can’t wait until I have this skill, that will be so cool!” It just makes everything up to that point a grind and then the skill is usually a letdown anyway which may or may not have something to do with making me wait so long to get it.
PayDay2 is an especially egregious offender of this. Metroid Prime may not have a skill system, but you never feel like you’re playing with an incomplete character (which is ironic because you literally louse all your abilities right at the start of the game).
I interpreted Ruts differently (though maybe I’m wrong).
I see “skill” systems in too many games act a lot more like the different new abilities from Metroid – they’re less about “you’re able to do a new cool thing!” as they are “we’ve given you a key that will let you open all those previously locked things you’ve been seeing all game! Now you can backtrack and replay all those areas so you can open all the things!” They’re not really about a character skill as much as they’re about an arbitrary content unlocking mechanism.
Heh, I actually haven’t seen too much of that recently, clearly Ruts needs to clarify, although he did only get to say a single sentence on the topic.
In any case I actually brought up Metroid not because it was an example of doing skills well but because it was a good example of doing character progression well. The way I see it, the entire point of adding an exp bar and skill points is to evoke a feel of character progression. However as I stated before, a lot of games I’ve played recently seem to not be designed with progression in mind. Until you get to the end of the game you always feel like you’re playing an unfinished character. Despite the fact that you’ll always need to get back all your tools in every metroid game, I never get the feeling that I’m unfinished, but I do always feel like I am progressing and getting stronger.
After seeing so many recent bad examples I am really struggling to think of a game that has a skill system that I really liked. Diablo III gets pretty close but there is something that I find lacking about that game that I can’t quite put my finger on. I really need to get around to playing Transistor, I bet that will be the example I’m looking for. Ranking up your soldiers in XCOM (TLWmod)would count if there were more than just 3 skills you could pick from at each level. Ranking up has the impact on gameplay that you’re looking for but not really the variety that you need to allow for any real creativity, at least not where a single soldier is concerned.
Skills and crafting are superfluous in most of the modern games.They exist simply because “every other game has it and we have to have it as well”.
Everybody’s names float above them. This is exactly the same for both NPCs and enemies. I was about halfway through the episode before I figured out why there were so many guys named Walker.
That was the plot twist in Spec Ops wasn’t it?
And then they were all martin walker,and they killed konrad using rosebud,which was his assault rifle.
I learned everything I needed to about the game from one “loading screen” message at about 11 minutes in.
“The best weapons can be found in metal chests.”
This single message tells me:
* The game is going to have a tedious “search for weapons” mechanic be core to what I’m doing (otherwise it wouldn’t be worth mentioning).
* The game will feature arbitrary weapons degradation (otherwise, I wouldn’t have to find “the best weapons” often enough to be told where to look.)
* The game world will be lazily built around repetitive tropes that don’t make any damn sense other than “we couldn’t think of an interesting way to do this.” (There’s no damn reason the “good stuff” will always be in the same kind of box and ONLY this kind of box otherwise).
* The game will feature a ton of very arbitrary locks that make no realistic sense, which I’ll probably spend most of my time trying to open. (I’m betting “it’s in a metal box!” means I’ll need some special metal-box-opening tool or key to get “the good weapons,” even though I’ve never seen a metal box that could stand up to the fire axe I’ll likely be carrying around).
Disclaimer: I haven’t played the game, or even seen a lot of gameplay (I paused at 11 minutes to write this), so I could be wrong. But I doubt it. :/
“The best weapons can be found in metal chests.”
Well, besides quest rewards, all loot is random. The chests are a more reliable way to get better weapons, but not a guarantee. Many of them are locked which requires an investment in the lockpicking skill. It’s possible to farm them though since all the chests reset between game sessions.
“The game is going to have a tedious “search for weapons” mechanic be core to what I'm doing (otherwise it wouldn't be worth mentioning).”
Not anymore than any other game with similar progression really. You’re always on the look for new, better weapons, but I never really had to go out of my way to hunt for them. A decent drop fully upgraded and modded can last you a good a while.
“The game will feature arbitrary weapons degradation”
Only in the sense that as you gain levels and the zombies gain levels, you need to eventually get new weapons. While you can break a weapon by wearing its durability down, you can still always fix it. This is not encouraged however since the repair costs rise exponentially the more damaged the weapon is.
“The game world will be lazily built around repetitive tropes that don't make any damn sense other than “we couldn't think of an interesting way to do this.” ”
Well, there’s the rubbing money on your weapons to make them better (it’s how I like to imagine it works anyway…just for the giggles) but not anything else that would have really stood out. The story is not that great, but not the worst thing ever either.
“* The game will feature a ton of very arbitrary locks that make no realistic sense, which I'll probably spend most of my time trying to open.”
Besides a few plotdoors keeping you from travelling between zones, not really.
All-in-all, if you can live with the hilariously stilted animations and writing, it’s some of the most fun melee zombie fighting you can get. Dead Island:Riptide improves the combat even more and makes it a bit less rigid overall. Dying Light is probably the only real contender and I’ve yet to play it.. but it looks like fun.
Honestly I found the weapon degradation to be a massive pain. It wasn’t so much as to make crafting a good weapon useless but it was enough to make you not want to use the weapon you just crafted. It really kept me from enjoying the game when I constantly had to remind myself not to use my good weapons so they wouldn’t break all the time.
“…How is it that the still-glowing light fixtures in the elevator aren't giving off any light?”
Stuff like that always gets me in games (or movies and TV series).
It always grabs and and a voice in my head goes “Look, it makes no sense!”
If it was a bug I’d kind of understand but many of these cases it was just designed that way.
Holy shit, I’m actually getting nauseous from the motion blur.
I actually have to look away for a minute now and again to avoid feeling sick.
There is blur when moving, turning and swinging and it to stack when fighting.
Combine this with blur from encoding etc and *urg*.