Dead Island Message Board

I got a beta code for Dead Island:Epidemic. I didn't love Dead Island. I couldn't get into DOTA 2. So I didn't expect to enjoy this game at all, but it's actually a very accessible version of the biggest competitive games in the world.Read more...

Now this...this is how you make a dramatic video game trailer. Read more...

Did you know that the costumes the Alliance soldiers wear in the Firefly episode The Train Job were originally used in Starship Troopers? That sort of recycling happens all the time in movies and TV. I’m a person of limited imagination, so when I first spotted Techland’s Dying Light, it appeared to me that they had swathes of zombie material lying around from Dead Island and decided to reshape it into a game about free-running past the undead. I still kind of stand by that. Whatever its inception, the fleet-footed zombie dodger is coming out pretty soon, and there’s a wee teaser trailer for you below. … [visit site to read more]

When you look at the success of stuff like The Hunger Games, Gravity and Orange Is The New Black, it's safe to say this was a pretty good year for the depiction of women in media. Just the same, though, it hasn't all been peachy this year.Read more...

Remember that haunting first trailer that Dead Island released two years ago? The reverse-time, slow-motion reveal of a zombie child thrown to her death by her father, and the tragedy preceding it all? That thing won an award at Cannes.* Now someone's gone and shot it in live action.Read more...

Hellraid is the next violence-mare due from the e’er unpredictable Techland stable, and it is some manner of first-person sword-stabbing game. Whether it would join the ranks of the vanishingly few effective first-person melee games was something we were due to find out in the few remaining weeks of 2013. No longer! Techland have pushed it back to next year, in the wake of mixed tester feedback. In other words, they want to make the knob bits not-knob.

(more…)

Here's a 12 minute gameplay demo of Dying Light, Techland's free-running zombie survival game. It looks impressive, every bit the Mirror's Edge-meets-Dead Island thing that Stephen talked when he first saw the game earlier this year.Read more...

More Dead Island is on the way, but this time the zombies are going free-to-play and only on PC.

Deep Silver announced a new game in the Dead Island universe today, Dead Island: Epidemic. As a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game, Epidemic has three teams of players battling one another for survival while facing the hordes of undead that inhabit the series.

Dead Island: Epidemic will come to PC at an as-yet-unannounced date, and will be free to play. Deep Silver said it will have more information on the game at Gamescom this month.

We haven’t mentioned before now, but the current Humble Weekly Sale is a clutch of Cliffski’s Positech games, which have already netted over $100k, with a day and a half to go. Beers are on Cliffski! (Just don’t mention piracy.) And now a new fortnight-long Humble Bundle proper has launched, this time showcasing the products of the decidedly not indie Deep Silver. Four of their games (including Saints Row 3!) for pay what you want, two more for over the average, and the rather average Dead Island Riptide if you throw in $25.

(more…)

Get a good look at that clip up top, Australians, because you won't be seeing it on your TV screens ever again. Following complaints from members of the public, Australia's Advertising Standards Board has banned the advertisement for Dead Island: Riptide, mostly on the grounds that it uses "images which are strongly suggestive of suicide". In defending the clip, local publisher AIE said: The cinematic implication of violence in the advertisement is intended to convey the desolate terror afflicting the game characters, and I believe is contextually relevant to the product being advertised, as it conveys the hopelessness of the games’ characters as they are faced with the overwhelming horror and violence of vast numbers of zombies hunting them, without actually depicting the violence of zombie vs character interaction in the game. The final scene of the advertisement shows the logo of the game, which consists of a silhouetted palm tree, signifying the island in the game title, a silhouetted zombie hanging by the neck from the palm tree, signifying the dead in the game title, placed to the left of the title ‘Dead Island Riptide’ which is written in dark dripping red to appear bloody. But the ASB were having none of it, deciding: The Board noted the fantasy content and the stylised nature of the advertisement and considered that the issue of suicide is a depiction of violence which is not justifiable even in the context of an advertisement for a computer game aimed at adults. The issue of suicide is a very significant community concern and considered that the use of images which are strongly suggestive of suicide is not appropriate in the context of a television advertisement for a computer game. Good thing they only had to handle complaints about the ad, and not the game itself. Case Report [ASB, via Mumbrella]

ZOMBIES ARE EVERYWHERE. In the schools, under your refrigerator, buried deep within the collective cultural conscience. Especially that last one, which is probably why a new zombie game gets announced every 0.4674 seconds. That brings us to the current undead re-deadifier du seconde: Dying Light. It comes from Techland and takes place in a balmy, bloody tropical setting, but it’s not part of the Dead Island series. The main differences? Fleet-footed, Mirror’s-Edge-esque parkour and a Minecraft-like survival element. Don’t worry, though: you can still make an electrified machete.

(more…)

The first few details of Techland Hellraid have been revealed to Eurogamer's Polish site. The game is a horror/fantasy-style first-person RPG using Techland's Chrome Engine 5 to portray melee and spell-based fights with various demons, skeletons, and other bad guys. Just like Dead Island, the game will have four player archetypes that can work together, though they'll be classes rather than characters: Warrior, Paladin, Mage and Rogue.

The game will be influenced by older games like "the first Quake, [and the] second Hexen or Diablo," says producer Marcin Kruczkiewicz. Hellraid's maps will be less open than Dead Island, and the experience system will be simpler, with skill trees that unlock as characters level up.

Techland is currently looking for a publisher for the game, which it expects to have out this year on the Xbox 360, PS3, and the PC.

It's like the universe was trying to tell them something. This week, some British gamers found that the retail Steam codes they redeemed for Dead Island: Riptide instead unlocked Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. The jokes really make themselves, don't they? It's easy to say, "Hey, you're better off! One of those games is kind of a dud while the other is commonly held to be one of the greatest games of this generation." But really, it is pretty annoying not to get the game you paid for, regardless of its quality. Deep Silver's community manager hopped onto the Steam forums to explain the mix-up, and promised that "We are aware of this mixup by whoever printed these codes for a completely different game from a different publisher, and are working on a best possible solution to help affected players and retailers." In a subsequent update, he said they've got it worked out: We've worked with Steam to resolve this issue. If you are getting your retail copy of Dead Island Riptide today, the code will work properly. If you had redeemed it and received Dark Souls instead, please contact Steam support. They are aware of the issue and will make sure the correct game will be attached to your account. Or, you know, you could not contact Steam support and just enjoy playing Dark Souls. (Via Matt Lees)

Should you buy Riptide or just stick with the original? See what the critics are saying! (For more episodes, visit: go.ign.com/mixd)

Dead Island: Riptide isn’t just one of the most tastefully marketed games of 2013, it’s also the semi-sequel to one of the best-selling games of the last couple of years. Yes, Dead Island was an absolute smash hit, because everyone wants an open-world zombie survival game. Or wanted, at least. Hmm.

Here’s wot I think.(more…)

About to jump into Riptide? Greg's put 30 hours into it and has five tips to simplify your Trophy/Achievement hunt.

Just because Deep Silver apologized profusely for Dead Island: Riptide's rather tasteless "Zombie Bait Edition" premium—a severed, bloodied, big-boobed bikini-clad torso—doesn't mean they actually pulled it from distribution. The statuette is still included in special editions sold in Europe and Australia. Back in January, when the offer came to light, Deep Silver all but disowned the item, saying "we sincerely regret this choice," that they were "deeply sorry" and "committed to making sure this will never happen again." Still, the statement did not explicitly say the premium would be removed. Amazon listings in the UK continue to show images of the bloody torso up (it arrives in that market on Friday.) Some have already received their special editions and are posting images of the torso on Twitter. Yesterday, I emailed a representative of Koch Media, parent company of Deep Silver, with questions as to why the publisher went forward with this premium despite its professed embarrassment and the public ridicule the statuette caused. I received no answers. CNET's Australian edition quoted a statement from Koch Media, Deep Silver's parent, saying "an extremely limited quantity of the Zombie Bait edition has been made available to some retailers for those customers who wish to purchase it," in Australia. Image via @AussieGamerChic

In Dead Island, the first-person hack and slash RPG, you went around a tropical island, punching, kicking, maiming and shooting zombies. In Dead Island: Riptide, you do the exact same thing. For some, this is enough—but not quite for others. Bashing zombie heads in is fun. Collecting all kinds of loot is also fun. But glaring bugs, tedious combat, and an awful feeling of déjà vu blight what should be an enjoyable zombie-killing romp through the jungle. Let's have a look at what reviewers are saying. GameSpot It starts promisingly enough: a mad dash off a sinking ship, a military coup, and a zombie horde just aching to be shown the business end of a shotgun. And then, just like that, the promise is taken away. Dead Island: Riptide teases far more in its opening minutes than it ever manages to deliver across its lengthy campaign. There's no drama, and little excitement. Instead, there's a rehash of old ideas, combat that's fun for all of five minutes, and a seemingly never-ending slog of repetitive missions filled with characters that have the emotional depth of a wet sponge. If there were ever a video game equivalent of smacking your head against a brick wall, Riptide would be it. VideoGamer It’s been described as a spin-off of the first game, which is a good call on the part of Techland and Deep Silver because if they called it a sequel they’d have been taking the piss. Riptide is basically the first game in a different location: as before, the survivors of a zombie apocalypse band together to explore their environment, looting and shooting their way to a potential escape. The same four survivors are back, joined by a new Australian guy who specialises in hand-to-hand combat and snarling machismo. Polygon Listen. I'm an American. I hate zombies too. But killing Riptide's zombies isn't fun. Lopping off a head or the occasional arm? Great. But there's no depth. No strategy. No blocking even. Run up to a zombie and hack it to death. Got a stronger zombie? Run around it and keep hacking. As you develop weapons that let you paralyze zombies, even this much strategy isn't necessary. Eurogamer Different enemy types complicate the battles—exploding Suiciders, acid-spitting Floaters, bulldozing Rams—and your surroundings come into play. Sometimes you're clambering onto caravans so you can rain down Molotovs; other times you lure zombies into shacks and mine the doorways so they blow up when they follow you out again. Your weapons are glued and taped together - and don't fall to pieces as fast as they did in Dead Island—while you're constantly scavenging for more parts, and you frequently run out of stamina or room to manoeuvre, which sends you diving into the inventory for inspiration to improvise. Guns are available but you often end up favouring blades and cudgels. Played alone, it's an authentically scrappy way of fighting for survival. IGN One failure that can't be ignored is that the world still doesn’t look that hot. Textures pop in, screen tearing persists, and missing frames aren’t uncommon. Performance is worst on the PS3 and best on the PC, but no version is unplayable or perfect. But what’s so crazy is that once again, this stuff really doesn’t matter. Your quest log brims with story missions, you run into side quests wandering the sun-splashed island locales, and Techland tosses in new team missions that make the survivors at your bases more helpful in battle. Just like the original Dead Island (that's a phrase I'm saying a lot today), RPG gameplay saves Riptide from its narrative mistakes and lackluster graphics. Game Informer Despite the additions, Riptide suffers from the same bugs and blemishes as the first game—and then some. Enemy behavior is erratic, but not in a purposefully scary way. Zombies spend minutes tearing at a barricade, only to wander away the moment it falls. Foes phase through obstacles, glide up walls, and land hits from improbable distances. The mini-map is geographically barren, and objective pathways flicker on and off, requiring you to frequently pull up the full map. Even worse, your treasured and customized weapons can inexplicably disappear from your inventory—a rare but frustrating problem. Kotaku I enjoyed the first Dead Island game for what it was, despite its many flaws. I’d suggest playing the game if you were looking for a something to play with a group of friends, which also involves some pretty neat melee weapons you can craft on your own. I never expected Riptide to be a sequel, exactly. It always looked more like an expansion, and I always hoped it’d be a more polished version of the original. Somehow, things went in reverse. Riptide feels like it could have been the first in the series, simply because it is an absolute mess of a game. Top image courtesy of Tina Amini.

There are so many things so wrong with Dead Island: Riptide that I’m not even sure where to begin. Sometimes you have to dig and climb your way through a game before the payoff hits. If you’ve ever played a lengthy RPG, this might be a familiar feeling to you. In the end, you won’t remember that game by its many tedious moments, you’ll remember it by its better ones. Unfortunately for Riptide, those are at best few and far between. For the first (roughly) 10 hours of Dead Island: Riptide, I just wanted to put the controller down. Finally, finally I got to a place in the game where the story started to pick up. It wasn’t all “hey you seem able, go to this place and grab me this thing” anymore. It finally started to come together to some sort of progression. It finally started to feel like a story at all. And not exactly a very good one! Just one. I enjoyed the first Dead Island game for what it was, despite its many flaws. I’d suggest playing the game if you were looking for a something to play with a group of friends, which also involves some pretty neat melee weapons you can craft on your own. I never expected Riptide to be a sequel, exactly. It always looked more like an expansion, and I always hoped it’d be a more polished version of the original. Somehow, things went in reverse. Riptide feels like it could have been the first in the series, simply because it is an absolute mess of a game. Let’s just run through some things, shall we: 1. You are never just fighting two zombies at a time. You might start off fighting two zombies at a time, but before you know it the flesh—scratchers? These things don't really bite—are all around you, spawning from invisible places. Some areas are actually constantly, completely swarmed because at some point someone decided infinite spawns in an otherwise exploratory area was a good idea. You’ll spot an area with four potential zombies, but while you’re in the thick of it you’ll be fighting more like eight of them as they come rushing in from who knows where. Meanwhile, if your co-op buddy dies, they might get spawned far off in some desolate area for whatever reason. 2. The excessive difficulty I mentioned in my first point here could have something to do with the fact that I imported my character from the first game. Every enemy matched my 30, 40-something level character. But I found Riptide to be unbelievably unforgiving for the majority of my time with it. This isn’t the kind of difficulty that is challenging. It’s difficult in a way that feels unfair and unbalanced. Zombies push me harder than I can push them. They’re faster than I am. They have more stamina than I do. I constantly found myself out of breath and energy (with such a tiny and slow-loading stamina bar to work with), which is insane considering the mass hordes of these things you’re often facing. It’s really, really easy to die. Too easy. Zombies can take me down in just a few hits, but it takes me about five times as much to get them down. I don’t need to feel like a badass just because that seems to be the video game standard, but I certainly don’t want to feel like I’m always at a disadvantage. Not fun. Not fun at all. 3. Let’s forget about the fact that this game might have the most clipping issues I’ve seen in some time. In the midst of the friggin’ hundreds of zombies you’re always surrounded by, at all times and at all angles, the frequent lag I experienced was unforgivable. Anytime the game was tasked with any kind of animation—like the face stomp animation that takes you far too many seconds to recover from—my screen would freeze up on me, throwing me in an even more vulnerable position than I was originally. You can also jump on zombies from an elevated height for an execution move, which can often result in a one-hit kill, or at least weaken them down enough for a single extra hit to do the trick. But I’d reserve how often I did this, because it would always leave me staring at my feet for a few seconds while getting attacked by the other zombies, helpless and paralyzed. Feeling like you’re paralyzed might be the most frustrating thing I’ve experienced in a video game yet. This really needs to be patched (but even a patch won’t change how *crag*ing stupid you look when you jump). 4. A video game has never made me feel nauseous before (I haven’t played Mirror’s Edge, in case you were wondering). So Riptide’s drastic motion blur and insistence on swiveling your head obnoxiously with every ladder climb caught me off guard. Maybe not a technical problem exactly, but certainly a nuisance. 5. I thought the idea of having a boat would be neat. Back in the first game, I was always the driver in my group of co-op friends. I’m good at navigating, good at driving, and good at hitting every zombie on the way to our destination, too. So I figured a new vehicle would be great. After the first boat ride in Riptide I was already done. It can be fun to drive, but the natural maze of a river is completely incompatible with the god awful mini-map. The mini-map is completely dark, only indicating your location, friends’ locations, and points of interest around the perimeter. There’s no terrain. If you’ve got a friend around, they can help navigate, but you’ll have to let them know when a zombie has clung onto their arm and is about to pull them off of the boat and into the water since they’ll be focused on the game’s main map screen to help you get from point A to point B. Now imagine having to navigate, steer the boat, AND tackle the constant swarm of zombies that are in the water, trying to climb up onto your boat. The infected living in the water—Drowners, as they’re called—are also more tough than your standard walkers. They are feisty—charging you faster than most other zombies—they almost can’t be knocked down, and they swing hard. And they come in numbers, as is standard for Riptide. I avoided the boats as much as I could. 6. I wouldn’t say the original Dead Island was the gold standard for seamless co-op experiences, but it was certainly better than Riptide. If you’re not on the same chapter as a friend, you can go along for the ride, but your actual saved progress won't include those quests your friend is on. That seems a little silly to me, but maybe that was a developer judgment call. Ok, fair. But even when you have met the standards the game asks you to, they often spawn your friend far, far away from your location as I mentioned before. So you spend the first 10 or so minutes of your social interaction simply finding each other. 7. Characters you meet in the game often feel robotic. Their animations are at best awkward, and they often stand there and repeat the one line they were programmed with as you walk by them. But, hey, the Aussie accents are neat. Hi Luke. These are all technical and combat issues. Just by virtue of these I already don’t like the game enough to suggest you stay clear. But let’s talk about Riptide: The Fetch Quest Game That Never Ends. Those first 10 hours I talked about earlier—the 10 hours that made me look longingly out the window as if I was being held prisoner there, tethered to my Xbox—feel like an album stuck on the same track. Go here, get this thing. The lights are always off, the path is always blocked. Once you’re done figuring all that out, now here’s another fetch quest where you get to do it all again! But unlike those games that follow their tedium up with an amazing, rewarding story and experience, Riptide never grants you with that reward. There’s no redeeming moment to make you feel like every boring thing you just did wasn’t totally boring after all. There are some areas that at least manage to switch up the pace from the long stretches of island you spend most of the game wandering helplessly. The laboratory, for instance, introduces new zombie models of mutated undead who were once scientists. They’re tough, some of them can throw stuff at you. I’d note the military base as another change of pace, but there’s always a goddamn military base isn’t there. There’s also an intermittent fortification/hold-out sequence interspersed throughout the game. These were...kind of more fun? You at least had tools to work with—fences, explosives, even a mini-gun. With a friend, running back and forth in circles around each other to contain the spread of zombies into our camp, it can be enjoyable. You finally feel like you have some amount of power you can wield over these things. You’re not totally vulnerable anymore. You even have the NPCs holding some zombies off. But it’s sad to think that this was, again, just part of another formula. Fetch quest, lights, new route, come back again, hold-out sequence. Rinse, repeat, tear your eyeballs out. The last five or so hours won’t redeem the game, but the combat does at least get tolerable. By this point, I had my favorite weapons crafted and rooted in my inventory. I’d swap out for an explosive here or there, but a shock-inducing rifle and pistol, a flaming shovel, and an electrified katana were my perfect go-tos. You’re still surrounded by a never-ending stream of zombies spilling out of closets like zombie clown cars, and you’re still dealing with a ton of lag and animation screw ups, but at least you’re not always seconds away from dying. You can almost hit as hard as those zombies now. The other compliment I must pay the game is the sheer terror that is invoked by some of the new elite enemy types. The Butcher may be one of the most terrifying enemies I have ever faced. The flesh from his forearms has been taken clean off, exposing spiky bones that he uses to rapidly slash at your face. He’s fast, too. Then there’s the Screamer, who is a cross between scary, annoying, and a little like Left 4 Dead 2’s Witch. She (I actually think it’s a he but it feels more fitting to call it a she) shrieks loudly, distorting your view and throwing you on your back. She can run faster than the Butcher, and is usually (surprise!) surrounded by lots of zombies. Side quests—though many of which are boring fetch quests—can sometimes feel like in depth adventures in their own rights. You’ll have entire areas to explore—basements or other dead zones. Unfortunately, even by the 10ish hour mark when things start to get more tolerable, the last five or so hours never get good enough to excuse the rest of the game. The story starts to come together into a, well, story, and the combat doesn’t feel like you’re slapping people with a fish while they shoot rockets at you, and you may even have some extra missions to explore, but it’s never fun. And it’s still almost always broken.

Need a shortcut to the level cap? A little spare change? Check out our Dead Island Riptide exploit.

Greg reviewed the game for IGN and then took to Twitter to answer your burning questions.

Greg stops in to say hello to Ryan Clements and Ryan actually interviews Greg about Dead Island Riptide.

Counting both retail and digitally distributed copies of Dead Island, total sales for the weird zombie action-RPG have surpassed five million units globally, Deep Silver announced today. In meaningless, arbitrary statistics, that shakes down to about 402.18 units sold an hour since the game was originally released in back in September of 2011.

By December 2011, Dead Island had shipped 3 million units worldwide, with a fourth million added to that total after another eight months. Today's figure, however, is our first look at how the game has actually sold, since shipped figures count all units sent to retailers, while sell-through/net sales only count what is actually purchased by a consumer. We're sure those Steam sales didn't hurt anything.

Deep Silver walks us through a mission in the zombie apocalypse that is Dead Island.

#art Anytime something shocking or awful is done by the video game industry, you'll have people chiming in that we should leave it alone because it's actually art and so it has a right to exist (because apparently being art means the ability to exist without criticism and any criticism is actually the equivalent of censorship!) It seems apparent that Deep Silver had similar thinking—looking at how the controversial special edition of Dead Island: Riptide is marketed, they say that it's an "an iconic Roman marble torso sculpture." More »

Deep Silver has revealed the Zombie Bait Edition of Dead Island Riptide and people are losing their heads over it.

After discovering that sane people are universally disgusted by its foot-tall statue of a mutilated human torso in a bikini, included with the Europe/Australian Dead Island Riptide Zombie Bait Edition, publisher Deep Silver issued an apology today through its Twitter account.

The company said the statue was inspired by the violence in the game: "a decision was made to include a gruesome statue of a zombie torso, which was cut up like many of our fans had done to the undead enemies in the original Dead Island."

Deep Silver said it "sincerely regret[s] this choice," and that it is "committed to making sure this will never happen again," which is as simple as not doing it again.

What isn't clear, however, is whether it's still happening this time. The apology note makes no mention of pulling or replacing the offending item from the Zombie Bait Edition.

#deadisland Following today's firestorm of negative reactions, game publisher Deep Silver has apologized for the ridiculously tasteless zombie torso statue that they planned to include in one of the collector's editions for Dead Island Riptide. More »

#gender If you are a severed torso fetishist or serial killer, you will undoubtedly be ecstatic to know that one special edition of Dead Island: Riptide comes with the above statue. More »