In the beginning there was… a pitch

With an end result of over 16 million views on YouTube and counting, how on earth did this journey begin? To start with, things didn’t look promising. Communication between departments sounded strained, as Borkel wasn’t working directly with the developers. Instead, he relied on a ‘design document’ to accurately pass on what Dead Island was going to be like. “We were working at the central publisher and the developer was sitting somewhere else so it’s kind of like you’re playing this game of telephone [a game identical to the Chinese whispers]”, Borkel tells me. “There’s the source of information and it then gets transported and has to get translated into German or English and then we’re trying to translate what that means for the audience”. When I asked him about whether they knew it was going to be a hack-and-slash game, he says that his team “didn’t have a specific idea of how big of a story there would be”. When it came to the playable characters, he (correctly) got the impression that “they were more like archetypes for players to just be like ‘I want to be a heavier guy that can deal out a lot of damage, I want to be a weapon expert’. There wasn’t really necessarily something that was very inspiring in terms of pure story”. 

His team got given a broad outline of the kinds of features that would be in Dead Island, among them the fact that “it was supposed to be very cinematic, very very brutal, and a focus on melee combat”. But the game didn’t exactly turn out as they imagined. “While all those elements are still very much in the final product, I think we all pictured probably a different priority maybe”, Borkel mentions, indicating how isolated his team was from the work being done by the developers. Yet in the brief there was one thing that stuck with Borkel and the feeling he wanted to generate with the cinematic trailer – the up-close-and-personal melee system. “One of the things that I definitely wanted to include is the brutal close combat, trying to survive, because from what I saw from the game, that was at the heart of it. It’s not like in other games where enemies are more like a shooting gallery. You have to take up a paddle, you have to take up a knife, you have to get in there. So […] we were told that was going to be a huge focus of the game”. Well, they weren’t wrong. 

Even with so many different channels to go through, it was clear that Dead Island needed to be put on the map. “Nobody knew the name Dead Island, it was a long-forgotten thing that was in development for I think even like six or seven years at the time,” Borkel explains, “so nobody had it on their radar – they were just wanting something that makes an impact”. We would have got a much more clichéd zombie trailer if Borkel hadn’t challenged the original pitch (in his own words, his feedback was “pretty harsh”). 

At the beginning it was going to centre on “gore and gruesome levels of violence essentially to basically shock the market in a sense like ‘here’s something new and exciting’”. Borkel wasn’t on board. “To me that wasn’t very interesting or appealing”, he says, as he “wasn’t really a fan of the horror genre nor necessarily the zombie as a genre”. He tried his best “to come up with a completely different spin that would be more interesting to me… and hopefully also for the gamers that have seen hundreds of horror games and hundreds of zombie games”. Borkel speaks the truth. We’ve seen fast zombies, slow zombies, mutated zombies that can smash cards, virus-infected zombies, undead zombies…finding something that would break the rather dry pattern would be a challenge. 

I love it when a trailer comes together

Instead of focusing on the glorious feeling of mowing down waves of zombies like Dead Rising or Left 4 Dead, the creative team decided to focus on what happens when things go wrong. When you’re not prepared for the eventuality of having to bury an axe in a zombie’s clavicles, what happens? Answer: the worst possible scenario. The parents in the Dead Island trailer weren’t exactly practised in hand-to-hand combat, so all the melee action was excruciating to watch. You could see the panic in their eyes, the frantic action as they tried to hold back the zombie horde all while their daughter was bleeding out on the bed behind them. In a twisted way, the trailer made it clear how little chance there was of anyone normal surviving in the world of Dead Island. 

Including the daughter and breaking the video game taboo of showing dead children was key to the message Borkel was trying to get across, mentioning that “the kid was like an angelic kind of creature to showcase how brutal and how raw this threat essentially is, to communicate that it doesn’t even stop at stuff like that”. By the sounds of it he had no idea what kind of discussions would happen after people saw a small girl not only get attacked, but also become a dead-eyed zombie herself. “I just lacked the experience to even grasp the scope of a conversation that could result out of a choice like that at the time”, he tells me. But what was most memorable about the trailer was its slow-motion segments playing in reverse, intercut with frantic action sequences showing the daughter trying to get to safety. Those time-twisting moments were always “the key to unlock how this can be different” in Borkel’s mind. It wasn’t what anyone was expecting. And that’s exactly what Borkel wanted. “It answered a void in my perception of like ‘I don’t want to see just another game trailer’”, he explained. “it’s closer to a melee short film almost than a straight-on trailer”. 

Read more

The 10 best zombie games (opens in new tab) you can play right now

He’s right. Starting off the trailer with a shot of the girl, already dead, extinguished hope immediately to show how the zombies were, in his own words, “more like a natural disaster, like when you see a flood slowly roaming over a city or something. Something that you cannot really argue with, that you cannot really defend yourself against and you will have to come to terms with the fact that there is no escape from this”. Just to drive the point home even further – and make viewers everywhere let out an involuntary sob – right at the end we see the family goofing around in their home video footage. Borkel tells me that earlier concepts had the entire trailer taking place on a camcorder, but that ultimately got scrapped and the residue footage was put at the end. Ultimately everything in the trailer was centred around the key idea that Borkel wanted to get across, one that kicks our protective instincts into gear: “players, when they jump into the game, are like ‘I need to prevent this kind of stuff from happening’”. He had no idea just how much of an impact three minutes and seven seconds of footage would have.

The world is watching

“This was so close to getting cancelled so many times!”, laughs Borkel when I ask him about what it was like seeing the response to the trailer, almost as if he can’t quite believe it himself. “I think maybe one percent of that reception would have been normal for what we had at the time”, he says, explaining that “the expectations were literally non-existent so it was very easy for us to do something that would feel like a success”. Before the trailer was released, it sounds like tensions were running high as there were clashes about whether anything else should be put out by the studio. “The last big discussion I had with the head of marketing was [them saying] ‘we should also put out a version that is in chronological order’”, recounts Borkel – he wasn’t having any of it. “I remember having a very very long fight, because I felt like if it’s good then people will do that for you and it’ll have a much larger impact that way, you know. [You shouldn’t be] spoon-feeding the information to your community, you should be fuelling the fire of your community to create stuff around it”.

He was absolutely right. Recreations and edits of the trailer popped up on YouTube, putting the events in the correct order, with someone even making a live-action version. Back then, he didn’t know it of course – all efforts were focused on getting it out in the open. “The head of marketing asked me ‘hey we’re trying to get this exclusive with IGN (which was a huge deal for us at the time) and they want to have a preview of the CG asset’”, says Borkel, “and you know, me as an artist or as a creative I said ‘absolutely not, it’s not ready’, and all that stuff. So I ended up exporting like a 640 by 360 preview shitty version of that video with like watermark and everything!”. The reaction at first showed just how few people knew of Dead Island, as no-one could guess what game the trailer was for. Borkel remembers it well. He tells me how IGN “went on their own forums and asked people ‘hey we have this amazing thing coming up – guess for what game it is?’ and they were like 50 pages of comments and nobody guessed the right IP”.

Then everything hit the fan. As the trailer exploded onto the internet, it quickly racked up millions of views and a maelstrom of attention that no-one saw coming. Caught in the middle of it in the early hours, Borkel was woken up by a colleague: “the marketing manager for the game at the time, he texted me at like 4 in the morning saying ‘you have to see this’, he was basically pressing F5 on the views and on the mentions and all that kind of stuff while I was riding on a subway to work”. Nobody knew it at the time, but the mind-blowing response was an early indication that great things were afoot for the trailer. Later it went on to win the Golden Lion at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity and was the talk of the gaming industry for months afterwards.  

The aftermath

Not all the responses were positive, however, with many feeling short-changed when they found out how different the actual game was to the trailer. Comments online flooded in from gamers who thought they’d be playing a very different game, and Borkel understands why people felt betrayed. “I saw a lot of people commenting about, you know, the quality of the game didn’t live up to the expectations they had from the trailer”, he tells me. “I’m a gamer myself; that’s a perfectly valid feeling. It’s just very hard to say ‘we should have made a worse trailer’!”. Judging by the sparse information his team were given – with the focus on melee combat and cinematic nature of it being emphasised – it seems like Borkel’s team expected a different, possibly more story-heavy Dead Island from the game that ended up hitting stores, although they were aware of the simple archetypes that gamers could choose to play. 

Although he doesn’t think the Dead Island trailer “drastically changed anything”, the fallout from the trailer was a clear indication of the changes that were taking place in players’ perception of the gaming industry. Now there’s “a heightened sense of awareness in the gaming community” when it comes to how trailers can influence and warp the public’s anticipation for a title away from anything studios expect. “No Man’s Sky (opens in new tab) is another case where the hype was basically so high that an indie developer never really had a chance to deliver a product that would be able to match that level of hype”, he goes on to say, comparing the reaction to Dead Island to the backlash against the world gamers thought they’d be exploring in No Man’s Sky when it was released after the trailers inflated expectations. I think I speak for gamers everywhere when I say that we’ve more than learned our lesson, and Borkel is of a similar opinion. “Gamers are better trained these days to be more wary of at what point [games are] at during the marketing campaign […] and be somewhat more suspicious”, he says. Cinematic trailers can be stunning short stories, but today the common belief is that you should measure your expectations until you get to see some gameplay. 

Dead Island’s trailer is probably never going to be forgotten. Even now people still go back to watch the trailer on YouTube. Looking at the comments proves how much of an impact it continues to make: people are asking in disbelief just why it works so well, saying how much of an impression it made, and mourning the fact that the game itself wasn’t more like Borkel’s short story of one family getting torn apart. There are other trailers which have racked up more views, yet that 7-year-old-trailer isn’t going anywhere and it’s certainly not budging from the place it has in gamers’ hearts everywhere. 

The post “It’s closer to a melee short film almost than a straight-on trailer”: The story behind making Dead Island’s ground-breaking trailer appeared first on Game News.

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Techland has released a new patch for the console versions of Dead Island, which the developer promises will improve stability and network performance while tweaking the gameplay for an optimal zombie-offing experience. Most of the fixes in the new patch are the same as those introduced for PC players last month, but being as that update gave players more to do and a smoother time doing it, that’s no bad thing at all.

Dead Island diehards will perhaps be happiest about the extra ten levels added to the game’s level cap, together with tweaks and boosts to the game’s XP allotments in general. There’s also new weapon mod blueprints and improved rewards to be found about the levels.

Here’s the complete fix list from Techland, which will helpfully fix enough so that the developer can start working on new content, instead of fixing the stuff that shipped sort of broken:

Gameplay improvements

• Level cap raised to 60
• New blueprints for weapon mods added
• Infected damage reduced
• Infected no longer interrupt player attacks
• A series of improvements to subsequent playthroughs implemented:
• quest XP rewards adjusted
• XP rewards for challenges adjusted
• in subsequent playthroughs XP is awarded for all quests completed in co-op
• Purna’s ammo carrying capacity increased by 50%
• Character state from a save game can now be loaded when using the Start from Chapter option
• New balancing option added: enemy levels can now be adjusted independently for each co-op player
• Players respawn with more health
• Picklock skill level required to open a lock is now clearly indicated
• Improved rewards in weapon crates
• All weapon crates now contain rewards
• Kick ability balanced, now requires stamina
• Items can now be picked up instantly; this is reflected in adjusted animations

Fixes and interface improvements

• Fix: players are no longer left without a weapon after dropping the equipped item and healing with a medkit.
• Fix: equipped items no longer swap mysteriously after drinking an energy drink
• Tweak: healing with medkits from inventory works better, makes smarter choices of medkits
• Fix: loot from dead enemies is now always identical for all co-op players
• Fix: Purna no longer finishes her Fury with fists equipped
• Fix: map tracking after death
• Fix: zone info in the quarantine zone (City of Moresby)
• Tweak: respawn point selection is now smarter

General

• Improved stability and network performance in co-op
• Quest and reward fixes implemented

Earlier this month, we started hearing rumors of a Dead Island sequel, with Techland registering the trademark for something called Dead World. Before work starts ramping up on this all-but-inevitable sequel, though, there’s still plenty of Dead Island left to go around, with the game’s first DLC, Bloodbath Arena, due later this month for any survivors still enjoying the cleanup on Banoi.

The post Dead Island console patch raises level cap and fixes everything except that nagging zombie problem appeared first on Game News.

All gamers are carnivores and savages. Oh sure, some of us rarely eat meat in real life, but when we’re in a game, the thing we most want to see is our enemies turned into meat, the more rare and bloody the better. There’s something almost primal about seeing your foe turned inside out – you didn’t just win. You ripped them asunder. And there is satisfaction there. So which game this year looks best poised to satisfy our not-at-all-unhealthy bloodlust?

The Nominees

Rage
Capable of delivering some of the most eye-wateringly detailed graphics on the planet, Rage nonetheless keeps the gore quotient realistic and grounded. However, this creates one of those “less is more” situations – when you see the spray after unloading a shotgun shell into a mutant’s stomach, or watch as an expertly-thrown wingblade cleanly pops an enemy’s head off his body, you feel like a true master assassin. Preview

Dead Island
Zombies come apart more easily than not-yet-undead beings, and nowhere is that more evident than in this open world splatterfest. But the appeal here isn’t just that you can chop your foes into giblets. It’s the creative ways in which you can do it. Taking a cue from the Dead Rising series, Dead Island enables you to combine things like a hatchet and dynamite, which results in the ultimate sticky grenade when thrown.Preview

Prototype 2
Another open world game, but in this one you are a living bioweapon capable of incredible acts of destruction. Your body is capable of sprouting massive tendrils of living flesh, your arms can turn into blades six feet long, and nearly everything you see, be it monster, machine, human or some combination of the three, needs to be hacked into pieces. And if that wasn’t enough, you can consume people – literally – to take on their appearance.Preview

Rise of Nightmares
There’s no sense beating around the bush: Rise of Nightmares is not the prettiest game on this list. But it makes up for its lack of graphical detail by using Kinect to forge the most tangible connection between the player’s motions and what’s happening onscreen. It doesn’t quite come through in video, but here’s the point: It’s one thing to twiddle a controller stick to hack at a zombified face with an axe. But when you’re making the actual motion to press a chainsaw into a brain-eating ghoul and watching it rip through their rotting torso, it feels just a little bit more empowering. Preview

BloodRayne Betrayal
It may be the sole 2D representative on this list, but that doesn’t mean BloodRayne Betrayal is even remotely shy about letting massive gouts of crimson burst from every freshly-skewered enemy. The physiology of it all is questionable – we’re literally not sure how a creature of that size could contain that much blood. But it sure looks and feels good.Preview

Gears of War 3
A late entry, Gears of War 3 almost missed this list – as much as we love chainsawing friends, we’ve been doing that for years. But then we saw the E3 demo, in which a giant sea creature was attacking our heroes. Their solution? Blast it in the face until an eye bursts open, leaving the remnants dangling from its socket until the other one got blown out as well. This bodes well to us.Preview

And the winner
is%26hellip;

Prototype 2
Truthfully, this one wasn’t even close. Prototype 2 delivers theblood and guts in more different ways than you could imagine. It’s not just that your arms become blades. It’s not just that you’re practically made of gore, sprouting giant meat tentacles all the time. It’s not just that you can stabbing some poor bastard in the neck with your arm-dagger, which will make 40-foot tendrils shoot out of his body, grab everything withing range, then retract and explode. It’s all that and more. You can see this particular hell at around the 1:06 mark in the video below, but you should really just watch the whole thing. We have a winner.Preview

The Nominees

Rage
Capable of delivering some of the most eye-wateringly detailed graphics on the planet, Rage nonetheless keeps the gore quotient realistic and grounded. However, this creates one of those “less is more” situations – when you see the spray after unloading a shotgun shell into a mutant’s stomach, or watch as an expertly-thrown wingblade cleanly pops an enemy’s head off his body, you feel like a true master assassin. Preview

Dead Island
Zombies come apart more easily than not-yet-undead beings, and nowhere is that more evident than in this open world splatterfest. But the appeal here isn’t just that you can chop your foes into giblets. It’s the creative ways in which you can do it. Taking a cue from the Dead Rising series, Dead Island enables you to combine things like a hatchet and dynamite, which results in the ultimate sticky grenade when thrown.Preview

Prototype 2
Another open world game, but in this one you are a living bioweapon capable of incredible acts of destruction. Your body is capable of sprouting massive tendrils of living flesh, your arms can turn into blades six feet long, and nearly everything you see, be it monster, machine, human or some combination of the three, needs to be hacked into pieces. And if that wasn’t enough, you can consume people – literally – to take on their appearance.Preview

Rise of Nightmares
There’s no sense beating around the bush: Rise of Nightmares is not the prettiest game on this list. But it makes up for its lack of graphical detail by using Kinect to forge the most tangible connection between the player’s motions and what’s happening onscreen. It doesn’t quite come through in video, but here’s the point: It’s one thing to twiddle a controller stick to hack at a zombified face with an axe. But when you’re making the actual motion to press a chainsaw into a brain-eating ghoul and watching it rip through their rotting torso, it feels just a little bit more empowering. Preview

BloodRayne Betrayal
It may be the sole 2D representative on this list, but that doesn’t mean BloodRayne Betrayal is even remotely shy about letting massive gouts of crimson burst from every freshly-skewered enemy. The physiology of it all is questionable – we’re literally not sure how a creature of that size could contain that much blood. But it sure looks and feels good.Preview

Gears of War 3
A late entry, Gears of War 3 almost missed this list – as much as we love chainsawing friends, we’ve been doing that for years. But then we saw the E3 demo, in which a giant sea creature was attacking our heroes. Their solution? Blast it in the face until an eye bursts open, leaving the remnants dangling from its socket until the other one got blown out as well. This bodes well to us.Preview

And the winner
is%26hellip;

Prototype 2
Truthfully, this one wasn’t even close. Prototype 2 delivers theblood and guts in more different ways than you could imagine. It’s not just that your arms become blades. It’s not just that you’re practically made of gore, sprouting giant meat tentacles all the time. It’s not just that you can stabbing some poor bastard in the neck with your arm-dagger, which will make 40-foot tendrils shoot out of his body, grab everything withing range, then retract and explode. It’s all that and more. You can see this particular hell at around the 1:06 mark in the video below, but you should really just watch the whole thing. We have a winner.Preview

The post GamesRadar E3 2011 Awards: Most Satisfying Gore appeared first on Game News.