{"id":26731,"date":"2015-05-14T06:43:51","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T11:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26731"},"modified":"2015-05-14T06:43:51","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T11:43:51","slug":"dead-island-ep-2-what-do-we-have-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26731","title":{"rendered":"Dead Island EP 2: What Do We Have Here?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CdJz_gRFqqY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=CdJz_gRFqqY'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><br \/>\nOnce again I fear Chris is going to take a bunch of crap for not following the compass. In his defense, that particular compass is kind of confusing and it&#8217;s not at all clear from the prompts what you&#8217;re supposed to be doing. Apparently you need to open up your journal, read your goals, then consult the compass to track down the zombies. The skull on the compass means &#8220;zombie here&#8221;, and the little arrow (that&#8217;s actually pretty dang far from the skull) means &#8220;the zombie is on the floor above you&#8221;. This would be somewhat more forgivable if the goal was something like, &#8220;Bring the Quest Item back to Bob Questgiver.&#8221; But here your goal is &#8220;kill all the zombies before you try to use the radio. Yes, even the hidden zombie that isn&#8217;t a threat to you and you don&#8217;t even know it exists.&#8221; It&#8217;s just more lazy, dumb, confusing nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s talk about the stamina meter:<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Rutskarn and Josh make a pretty good point, in that limited stamina seems to only exist to prolong your travel times and rarely matters in combat. I don&#8217;t have anything against them in principle. In fact, &#8220;running out of stamina&#8221; is often a major deal in zombie movies. A lot of tension comes from moments when a character is struggling to reach some sort of shelter before the horde overtakes them. That&#8217;s an exciting scene and potentially an exciting mechanic, but it serves no purpose in a game where you never have to run away from anything. In fact, it seems like you only run out of stamina <em>outside of combat<\/em>, just trying to get around. <\/p>\n<p>Skyrim did it better, in that stamina was a big part of your melee attacks. Also, it was possible to find yourself in a fights where you needed to run away. (The bear just outside of Ivarstead has run the legs off of me a few times when I went there at low levels.) But in Dead Island everything is the same level and all fights are engineered to be about the same difficulty. It&#8217;s impossible to run into a fight that&#8217;s too tough for you now but will be more manageable in a couple of levels. Moreover, enemies don&#8217;t seem interested in chasing you. <\/p>\n<p>Even in games where the stamina meter isn&#8217;t useless, it feels like it&#8217;s missing something. I think part of the problem is that you just have one meter for your whole body. In Skyrim, if you spend all your strength bashing on an enemy and barely make a dent, then it&#8217;s time to run away. Except you can&#8217;t, because your stamina is gone<span class='snote' title='1'>On the other hand, it&#8217;s not hard to jog away so that the AI gets stymied by level geometry and their pathfinding fails them. But that always feels like such a cheat.<\/span>. The actual system being abstracted by that simple &#8220;stamina&#8221; bar is ridiculously complex. If you run out of breath, then it makes sense that you can&#8217;t run away. But if you&#8217;re failing because your arms are spent but your legs are fresh then running away should be easy. On the other hand, I&#8217;m not very keen on the idea of having a huge bank of stamina bars for all your various bodily systems. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a complex problem. I still think there&#8217;s some sort of interesting fight-or-flight dynamic to be explored for whoever can figure out an intuitive way to convey things to the player. In the meantime, I&#8217;d love it if games wouldn&#8217;t use the stamina bar to prolong the pain of backtracking and item-fetching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) Once again I fear Chris is going to take a bunch of crap for not following the compass. In his defense, that particular compass is kind of confusing and it&#8217;s not at all clear from the prompts what you&#8217;re supposed to be doing. Apparently you need to open up your journal, read your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[421],"class_list":["post-26731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-dead-island"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}