PigLick on 4/6/2012 at 14:44
I guess at this point we would have to define what makes an "open world" game, and thats probably best left to another thread. Though I dont recall GTA games having loading zones as such, sure they limited what you could access at the beginning of the game, but for example in San Andreas I can go wherever I like in the map without entering a new "zone", but thats apples and oranges really.
Basically Dead Island funnels you down maybe 2-3 different pathways at a time, you cant just wander off and explore that interesting looking mountain, because you have to get through 4 other seperate areas to reach it.
Dont get me wrong, I think its a solid game, and the first couple of levels in the beach resort area really captured my imagination.
Also, I dont think STALKER is an open world game either, its kinda in its own genre somewhere.
june gloom on 5/6/2012 at 04:03
The jungle actually ended up becoming my favourite part. Some truly tense moments when you're all alone out in the forest. ;)
Mr.Duck on 5/6/2012 at 04:14
A'ight, you bastards convinced me...*goes to download*
Though on my 1st playthrough I shall be doing it solo. SO DON'T SEND ME INVITES, FS! :|
Kisses.
Sulphur on 5/6/2012 at 04:53
That's Duckburg for 'PLAAAAAY WITH MEEEEE', though he never usually has problems stating that out loud. I wonder what's changed.
bob_doe_nz on 5/6/2012 at 22:25
He knows it's so bad that he'll play alone so nobody can hear him whimper.
Koki on 6/6/2012 at 05:26
He played it on a pad
He played it on a pad
henke on 6/6/2012 at 05:39
Say it a third time and a X-Box 360 Gamepad will appear behind you, blood pouring from it's thumbstick-sockets.
Sulphur on 21/6/2023 at 12:03
Did you know we have FOUR Dead Island threads, and not a single one about Dead Island 2? Anyway, exhuming this particular corpse because it's the most freshly interred.
I came across a nice article about (
https://www.gameinformer.com/2023/06/20/inside-yager-developments-failed-attempt-to-make-dead-island-2) what the everloving fuck happened to Yager's Dead Island 2, which some of us might have been looking forward to after Spec Ops: The Line. Apparently, UE4 was one of the biggest reasons, because it isn't great at open-world games. The whole thing's worth a read, even if they couldn't get any info from the people at Sumo about what happened when they took over.
Malf on 21/6/2023 at 12:44
You just made me go down a memory rabbit-hole Sulphur, as I was sure Techland, the original developers of Dead Island, had previously developed their own engine and that I indeed owned a bunch of games that used it.
Turns out, I was right, as I had bought their 2003 game Chrome, which, along with titles like Breed and Codename: Outbreak (wot GSC Gameworld did before Stalker, and actually had Crysis' multi-purpose, multi-attachment guns before Crysis), was one of many early Noughties, scrappy Halo-clones.
Chrome was actually one of the better, more stable ones, but suffered from low asset variation, with buildings in particular being reproduced many, many times over.
It wsan't actually bad, but I never completed it.
But yeah, as far as I was aware, the Chrome engine went on to be used in their later games, including Call of Juarez and is still being used in the Dying Light series.
But of course, that's the crux, isn't it?
Dead Island was initially a Techland IP IIRC, and after Techland split from Deep Silver, they took their engine with them while Deep Silver kept the rights to Dead Island, resulting in Techland making Dying Light.
So yeah, in splitting with Techland, they lost access to an engine specifically designed for open worlds.
Sulphur on 21/6/2023 at 15:04
That is the part that's a bit of a bitch in the entire story, being one of the first people to license UE4 and that coming to bite them in the ass.
I remember being summarily unimpressed by the early iterations of the Chrome engine and their attendant jank (probably unfair, some of the jank was the low budgets) until Call of Juarez: Gunslinger came around, which sported a great art style that obscured much of the hinky jinkiness (though ironically, it was not open-world). There's an aspect to the earlier titles that I'm going to term as gamefeel, for lack of a better word: literally, the feeling you get when you move around in the games and when things react to you. It's the difference between HL2's ultra-slick movement where Gordon feels like he's sliding on margarine and Killzone 2's ponderous weightiness; some of Techland's games until Dead Island felt like neither and were just oddly tuned, like everything - from the physics objects to yourself - was made out of cardboard.
Obviously, they improved on that front and by Dying Light showed us that it's clearly a capable engine.
Side-note: coincidentally, I got the first Call of Juarez recently, and I'm itching to try it for some oldschool shootens and bible thumpin'.
