Days Later. We wanted the world to feel real and the tragedy to feel palpable. People are losing their loved ones and they’re terrified and full of pain and afraid to go on, and the main characters are really their only hope. Dead Rising is more of a satire and Left 4 Dead is all about the action. Dead Island is full of action too, but it’s also about the people you meet in the world and what they will do to survive. You won’t have access to unlimited firepower. You need to use whatever you can find and that makes survival for everyone much more difficult and tenuous.
Sebastian Reichert: It will feel extremely intense to fight an enemy in Dead Island, as you are only cen- timetres away from him. Additionally, the unique com- bination of different elements will give you a unique experience. You know the four-player co-op from Left 4 Dead, but what happens if something like this is in a full open-world environment? You know weapon mod- ification from Dead Rising and RPG [role-playing game] elements from Borderlands, but in this game full of sur- vival terror it will become something new!
What were some of the specific elements you added to ensure that Dead Island stayed true to the very serious, realistic tone you were striving for? HO: Mainly, it was trying to stay emotionally true and keep the characters real. That doesn’t mean there isn’t gallows humour, because some characters need to do that to survive. I approached it as realistically as pos- sible and that’s how I directed the voice actors. We have a wide range of people in the world and many are terrified or stunned or emotionally damaged and trau- matized. If the people you meet in this world are feeling the horror and hopelessness and sadness of losing those they love, we’re hoping it will help create an over- all sense of danger, anxiety and despair. Some charac- ters, however, are taking advantage of the situation to help themselves. Others are using this chaos to exploit others. It’s about creating a fully realized world and then dropping the player into the middle of it.
Vincent Kummer: While trying to flee the island, you will run into several different NPCs who are scattered all over it, who either try to make it by themselves or have gathered in groups of survivors. While talking to these characters, you will find out more about them, how they lost family members, how they were attacked by their own spouses and how they are just in shock about their terrible fate. This sets the mood for our game; it is a former tropical paradise that has turned into an abomination overnight. We do not make fun of it, but instead try to show how such a place would look if such a tragedy hit.
SR: Everything in the game is designed to give you that realistic feel for survival terror. Stamina bar, breaking weapons, lack of ammunition. You will never feel safe. You could be attacked everywhere. Every fight could be your last.
Stamina – or rather the lack thereof – can make in- game confrontations very intense. Can you tell me a little more about how it works? VK: The basic gameplay is centred around quests, a main story quest line that you follow through from be- ginning to end and side missions, in which you help survivors who made it through the zombie apocalypse somehow. The stamina comes into play when you run and jump while exploring the open-world surroundings
F ZOMBIE STORIES ARE GOING TO SURVIVE IN POP CULTURE, THEY MUST EVOLVE OR SUFFER the death of stagnation. So, while Dead Island is going for an even more visceral, violent and immersive gaming experience, Telltale Games’ upcoming adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic book series is taking a very different, new approach.
“The game is about walking
around and talking to people, and working with people when the shit goes down,” explains cre- ative lead Sean Vanaman, while doing press for the game at this year’s San Diego Comic Con. “The zombies are omnipresent, obviously, but they’re not the main antagonist.” The game – expected to be out
early next year – is structured around the events of the comic series (not the TV version). Play- ers take on the role of Lee, a con- victed murderer being transported to the prison that fea- tures heavily in the comics. But then the apocalypse happens and a zombie causes the police car that he’s in to crash. If you can escape, it’s a new start in a very dangerous world. “You don’t know if he’s really
guilty or not,” teases Vanaman. “He’s a regular guy, a teacher who may or may not have committed a murder. That back story will un- fold over the season. ... The game
starts almost within the same air- space as the comics. You meet Glenn before he goes to Atlanta; you go to Hershel’s farm in the first episode and he fixes your leg, and you meet his son Shawn, who is the zombie in the barn when the comic goes there, but here he’s alive, just a kid.” The game, which has the look
of a colourized but desaturated “3-D version of the comic,” will be available on various platforms as an episodic, downloadable title. There will be four to six episodes per season, released a month at a time. Vanaman is adamant that it
can’t really be compared to zombie games such as Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead or Dead Island because, like other Telltale titles, such as Back to the Future and Jurassic Park, The Walking Dead is about building re- lationships with char- acters and making (often) dire choices to survive. There are
multiple ways for the narrative to unfold depending on your deci- sions. He notes that Kirkman em-
braced the company’s pitch to do the game because it’s so charac- ter-driven. However, Vanaman adds, this doesn’t mean that it won’t feature all the gore and brutality of its source material. “There’s blood, there’s amputa-
tion, there’s murder. Without giving stuff away, people stoop to really bad levels really fast,” he says with a smirk. “We’re not going to dial down any of that in- tensity because it would just feel like a watered- down version of The Walk- ing Dead.”
Dead New World: Lee on the lookout for zombies, and examples of some of the game’s Georgia-set locations.
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