At Steam’s insistence I stumbled upon the newest trailer for Dead Island and it’s made me sort of depressed. Remember the original announcement trailer?
Remember how it pulled at your heartstrings? Remember how it painted a zombie apocalypse not as B-grade horror and a near-infinite series of targets to shoot, but as a portrait of hopelessness and loss? A man and a woman and their futile struggle to protect a daughter they had already lost? A drama-based zombie apocalypse more in the vein of Walking Dead than Dawn of the Dead? All set to a Michael Giacchino-esque piano track?
Well, the real trailer is about a drunk asshole who wakes up after a night of excessive debauchery and finds a bunch of zombies to shoot and stab, sometimes with magical weapons that can electrocute while stabbing or shooting.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/91310/ (It’s the first video on the Steam profile)
This isn’t news to anyone who’s been following the game, of course, but it just serves as such a perfect microcosm for the games industry. We have first amendment protections now. We have plenty of examples of how to take even game-friendly concepts like aliens and war and zombies and turn them into both great gameplay elements and meaningful social commentaries. We have the ability to render just about anything we could ever want onto a computer screen, and budgets that rival hollywood pictures. And what do we do with all of these gifts?
We make a shitty first person zombie game about stabbing people in the face, and then market it with 180 second spot with more emotional resonance than the game will have across its entire 8+ hour run.
2 Comments
Galaxy613
Sep 9, 2011
That really brings to question, why even make the 180 second spot in the first place? Are they really saying/expecting us to NOT be emotionally touched by it, and instead should be laughing at the deaths and the doomed fight for survival the first trailer portrays?
Ivan
Dec 12, 2011
I think it’s all manipulation. The good ad wasn’t made by the devs, right? It was made by some ad company probably, with the goal to attract attention [x].
The publisher decided to do this, to make more money [x].
As for the game itself. 8h+ ? It took me so long to decide which one of the protagonists was less of an asshole. I played it for 23,04 hours and while it had some good things, it fails on so many levels. They couldn’t get the basic gameplay and leveldesign straight and you expect emotional gratification lol
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