Dead Island and The Game We All Wanted To Play That Never Existed

Dead Island’s CGI trailer was instrumental in generating awareness for the FPS/RPG hybrid but also dramatically different in tone from the actual game, and this apparently didn’t sit well with GameFront, that recently wrote an editorial about it, in which they also make some broader points about gaming narratives and the audiences they aren’t catering to. Here’s a sampling:

We got about a quarter of that promise in the final release. There are moments of Dead Island that are intense, but much of the game isn’t. And certainly the story isn’t just lacking but practically nonexistent. Gamers who like Dead Island excuse the story as not being the reason they signed up in the first place but then, those aren’t the people who were drawn to that trailer, and they’re not the gamers I’m talking about.

Those gamers, the ones I am talking about, are likely among the two million who purchased Deus Ex: Human Revolution in its launch week. They’re the ones that make up the communities that spend countless hours in role-playing games. They’re the gamers who give life to a whole side market that allows developers and writers to publish novels based on popular franchises like Mass Effect, Gears of War and Halo.

John Carmack of id Software was once quoted as saying, (Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.) I’d argue that, while perhaps developers don’t care about stories, there’s a huge subset of gamers who definitely do, and to them, it’s extremely important. And we’re out here, crying out to be told stories and engaged in the way that only games are capable of accomplishing by bringing us into the very story being told.

The way I see it, Techland made the wrong game. Or rather, it thought of the wrong game. The Dead Island that was poignant and emotional, the one that made us sad to see a family destroyed in its final moments, that’s a game that not only could find an audience, it has an audience dying to play it. And any game like it. Immediately.