I finally have the chance to hit a bit of traditional ZRC territory here, having Solidarity-ed myself out today at a reasonable time and gotten some chores done this evening, so let’s check back in with ‘Dead Island’, the videogame media’s darling, famed for its gruesome and unsettlingly Anti-Zombie trailer.

Which, as it turns out, has precious little to do with the game:

The little girl doesn’t die. She’s already dead.

Dead Island captured a lot of attention with a heart-rending trailer that showed in reverse the death of a little girl and her family during an outbreak on the island resort of Banoi. It’s an unsettling 90 seconds of video that makes promises on which the game may not be able to deliver.

That family and their sad voyage from happy vacationers to terrified victims of the undead isn’t going to be in the game, said Blazej Krakowiak, international brand manager for developer Techland.

…

But the game itself still needs to bring with it, in game play and Dead Island’s story, its own characters and emotions. And Krakowaik can’t exactly promise that.

He tells me that there will be emotional elements to the game, but that at its heart that’s not what Dead Island is meant to be.

“It is a zombie action slasher,” he said. “This is a game where you will be killing zombies up close.”

Ahh, a bait-and-switch. Classic.

The article goes on to discuss ‘Dead Island’ as compared to ‘Dead Rising’ in particular, and elaborates on its sandbox nature, though it relies on some cheap tricks to artificially limit the scope of that sandbox:

Because the game has some heavy role-playing elements, and your character can improve skills and become a more proficient zombie killer, the difficult of the three sorts of zombies you’ll run into will also scale.

So if you were to wander back to that hut where the game opens as a high-level character, zombies would be a bit harder to deal with, Krakowaik said.

Videogame enemies scale. Sure, you *can* go anywhere you want, but if you try, we’ll kill your character. Open-world indeed.

This gets at something the ZRC has been trying to point out to people who think of themselves as ‘Zombie fans’ and play this sort of game, or watch similar movies, or read similar books: the creators of most of them don’t actually like you, or your hobby/interest. They’re cashing in. I can’t say for certain that this is the case with ‘Dead Island’; it’s certainly been in development purgatory for a long time. However, the exploitation, the bait-and-switch, the ‘sandbox’ with cliche barriers, the ambiguity about everything even at this late point in development, all speaks to a certain, mercenary scrabbling for your Anti-Zombie dollar.

These days there is a lot of competition, after all.

Unfortunately.

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, March 6th, 2011 at 12:30 am and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.