Dead Island has had possibly one of the worst game launches in roughly... ever. Can anyone be objective about it at this point?
It was with great trepidation that I fired up Steam this morning. I was hopeful that, after a rather... torturous review code cycle, that I would finally be able to get to playing Dead Island, the game that everyone’s talking about, but for all the wrong reasons. There it sat, going through a validation cycle that seemed to stall at around 39 per cent. It was still waiting on that figure when we left for work, and we have the lingering suspicion that if it has managed to validate, it will then download the game. Again.
For about the third time. Maybe more – we’ve kinda lost track.
I’d usually consider it pretty poor form to go into the details of just how poorly executed even the review side of Dead Island has been, but the truth is it seem indicative of a rather endemic lack of, well, anything resembling a clue at not only Deep Silver, the game’s publisher, but also Tech Land, the game’s developer.
We reported two days ago about the dev-code debacle that saw the entire wrong version of the game made available on Steam, and if that wasn’t bad enough, even after two large patches the game’s still being reported as buggy and broken in the extreme. To make matters even worse, there’s a report over at Kotaku (which is essential reading) of some rather indelicate language buried in that dev code.
Long story short, it seems that during the dev cycle a skill that was meant to be re-named to Gender Wars (which allows the character Purna to do more damage to male NPCs) was in fact called Feminist Whore. Now, some of my best friends have been feminist whores, but somehow I doubt that there was any kind of empowering angle to the coder's linguistic choices at Tech Land. The official line is that it was a lone coder and no-one noticed, but negligence, in our opinion, is small defence at best.
I kind of expect to be called femi-nazi myself (again!), but this is flat-out unacceptable.
What now? So, after all of this, the pain of downloading about 20GB of mostly wasted files, the endless bug-cycle, the code debacle and the stupid misogyny of at least one of the game’s developers... how the fuck do I stand back and look at this game in anything resembling an objective manner? I don’t believe you can actually have such a thing (games are art, and so on), but in the case of Dead Island there’s already a huge stock of negative points against the game before I’ve even had access to working code.
If this were a court case, it’d be declared a mis-trial, because in all honesty there’s such a huge level of bias that the game will need to be made of gold-plated cocaine for me to be excited about it anymore.
Questions of taste and quality aside, part of the reason we’re feeling ‘meh!’ ahead of ourselves is the relative dissonance between the initial trailer, which went viral back in February, is massive. The actual game is horror action, more tongue-in-cheek than anything else; that first trailer seemed to suggest something else entirely, an emotive struggle for survival in a world gone topsy-turvey. It was a massive success as a buzz generator, that trailer, but as an actual indicator of the game’s tone, an outright falsehood.
Where does that leave us, now, though? Sometime over the weekend we’ll be sitting down to review a game we already immensely dislike, for a whole raft of reasons; this will be... interesting.
So, out of curiosity, who here’s managed to get the game going? What are your first thoughts?
Issue: 137 | June, 2012