All right Rock8man, I was a little glib. I stand by my words, but let me clarify: it’s a loot chase, where you keep running not characters who send you out on fetch quests and give you incrementally better loot. There’s not much of an overarching story except get off the island. That all reeks MMO to me. Still, it’s worth $5 to find out for yourself. The first play area was cool, it didn’t really start to feel like a treadmill until I got out of the resort. So, your call, but I really didn’t dig the game and never completed it.
Frankly, I’m not sure I would characterize Tom as “liking MMOs”. He likes a couple of very specific ones and has been notably lukewarm at best about most of the rest.
And Dead Island’s joys come from the bloody, savage and intense melee combat, making new toys for said melee combat, and exploring a surprisingly well realized mostly-open zombie-infested tropical island, complete with little vignettes and stashes to find. The main plot’s pretty silly and forgettable, there are some weird physics glitches, and I find it amusing that the player characters run off energy drinks and snack bars and constantly find magnets and batteries in computers and so forth. But those things don’t really spoil the good bits, IMHO. Especially in multiplayer.
(Well, the physics glitches make playing the throwing character really irritating.)
I think that Dawn of War 1 GotY does include the wintery-themed expansion whose name I can’t remember at the moment, but doesn’t include Soulstorm.
Well, i’d personally say Tom is a SUPER huge fan of open world games and that is what dead island is, an open world game with all of the advantages and disadvantages the genre brings to the table.
Perhaps the only difference from other similar open world games is that the gameplay is actually fun instead of being something you put up with.
Pogue: Basically everything you’ve said applies to the whole open world rpg genre. An open world rpg not having a decent story is about as bad as a single player rts not having a decent story. I semi agree with you in that i’m not a huge fan of the genre as a whole (although i did like dead island), but many people do like them, especially on these forums.
I disagree, Murbella. The joy of a good open-world rpg, like Skyrim or New Vegas, is to some degree in the variety of options open to you, and the fun of discovery, whether that’s a new location or faction or spell or what have you. Dead Island is non-stop zombie killing and that wears out its welcome fast. And coming from a guy who loves zombies, I think that says something. You’ll do an incredible amount of backtracking doing Fed Ex quests for people who will reward you with a Rickety Pistol of Lightning, if you’re lucky. You’ll engage in no meaningful conversation. You just find zombies who are capable of taking incredible amounts of damage while your weapons steadily degrade. It’s not my idea of a good time, unlike Skyrim and New Vegas.
I already had the DoW Platinum pack, so I’m not sure exactly what GOTY includes. From the Gold version’s description on Steam, it looks like GOTY just had some extra maps. Gold adds the Winter expansion, and Platinum is Gold + Dark Crusade. None of them include Soulstorm.
malkav11
4627
I’m not sure I would define the zombies as “taking incredible amounts of damage” so much as “popping apart like hot butter”. But maybe that’s just Xian.
tgb123
4628
Dead Island lost me in one of the first quests, when you have to go back to the lifeguard shack for some maguffin or another. After minutes of dialogue with the people holed up in the starting location about how dangerous it is, yada yada, the A.I. never even closes the door after you leave.
Once I saw something so blatently stupid, I uninstalled and never looked back.
Looks like Assassin’s Creed 3 will be $33 all day on Amazon.com for 360 or PS3. They’re also tossing in $3 credits for the video store, Digital Games store and another $3 credit if you trade in a game sometime in the next month. Get it? Three’s everywhere!
intruder
4630
I totally agree. I played most of the first chapter alone as Xian (the Asian sharp weapon girl). It was ok but nothing to write home about until a buddy told me that he plans to jump in in a couple of weeks so I stopped and waited for him.
We started together (I got the melee guy this time) and we had a total blast finishing the game doing all side stuff.
The game really changed once I had a buddy on voice chat and we could laugh about the sometimes hilarious bad animations etc.
Story-wise the game is nothing special and unless you are a “loot rat” (which I’m not) there is not much to it. Once you saw the brutal killings a few times they get old, too (apart maybe from jumping on a downed zombie head and make it explode (finishing move further down the talent tree)).
Well the bigger shouting once are no joke at least in the beginning without good weapons (the “Thugs”). You cannot really avoid their aoe as it’s not timed / really badly programmed (he flails and then immediately does so again without a logical pause to re-center himself. Realistically he should simply trip over himself the way he does it).
With 2 people you can “tank” the front cone and the other can attack from the back but alone? Unless you can range him (throw your knifes maybe).
Dead Island is good, Pogue is confusing you! It has hubs and quests and levels, that’s the common thing it has with MMOs.
Giaddon
4633
Protip: the first… half-dozen(ish) or so thugs you encounter you can kill with one hit, if you use your environment.
Dead Island is worth playing just for Moresby. But it’s a good game, also.
Can I just ask how you found this deal Brad? I used to find deals like that so easily on Amazon on their Video Games Deals page. But about a month or so ago, they changed their Deals page so that now it’s a mishmash of weird stuff. There’s never a deal of the day on it anymore, or a trade-in of the day, or any of the stuff that used to be on that page. Buy you always seem to know what games they have for sale. Is there an alternate sales page they have for games that I can go to?
Pogue had successfully warned me off! Now the rest of you are confusing me! To be fair, the one defining characteristic of an MMO, to me, is the rote, almost non-existent combat gameplay. You select an enemy, and select auto attack, and every once in a while press a button to do a special ability. Or if you’re a healer, you keep an eye on the tank and heal, or of you’re a nuker, you use offensive abilities without drawing the enemy from the tank. I’ve done it, it’s rote and its boring, and I can’t stand it. Everything good that they might add on top of that hollow lair of unsatisfying combat gameplay is usually meaningless, which is why I’ve stayed far away from Guild Wars 2. It sounds like they’ve added a lot of cool stuff on top of the usual MMO combat gameplay, but that just makes me even more determined to only enjoy it from afar through the Qt3 games podcasts maybe.
But to be fair to Dead Island, it sounds like its foundations are in actual meaningful, potentially fun melee combat gameplay, which would make it quite different from an MMO. Recently I played through the original Borderlands, mostly on my own, but sometimes joined by a friend. And I was amazed at how much that game resembles an MMO and has so many MMO conventions. And yet, in that one key way, it was not like an MMO, and so all those conventions that I usually find so annoying were okay, since I enjoyed the fundamental shooting gameplay in Borderlands. At its heart, the gameplay is a first person shooter’s shooting things with a gun, so the MMO conventions like loot churn and meaningless fedex quests, etc. around that gameplay didn’t bother me.
Unfortunately Amazon doesn’t make it very easy. I can’t even remember where I was on Amazon exactly in this case, but an ad for the lightning deal on Tera for $5 caught my eye. When I followed that it took me to the Gold Box deal page which is all Videogames today. So I had no foreknowledge and just happened to hit the page right after it updated around 12:30AM PST.
With the download deals it’s a bit easier since I have an understanding of the schedule they operate on. IE, they do weekly deals that update every Sunday between 12 and 1 AM PST. They did a bunch of “Black Friday” deals this fall in association with a live stream on GameSpot, and those were always Friday at 2PM PST. Beyond that I mostly keep an eye on the forums at Slickdeals.net & Cheapassgamer.com and follow @Wario64 on Twitter. Tony, who manages Amazon’s Digital Game Store is an active poster on CAG and he’ll drop tons of hints and info on upcoming deals there. Slickdeals is good for finding instances where Amazon is price matching another store’s sale on physical copies.
Dead Island has one of the best melee combat done, totally direct and done by the player, so yeah, he is confusing you and it isn’t anything like MMO combat.
The Dead Island deal is over anyway, guys. Now $13 with coupon.
Fozzle
4640
AC 3 is on Gold box today for 33 bucks…
