Dead Island : Anyone playing this buggy game?

[Gambit37]

Like an idiot I bought "Dead Island" the other day as an impulse buy on Steam. I didn't know anything about it.

I was enjoying the first few missions of zombie mashing, but became increasingly frustrated with numerous bugs. The worst one now seems to have hosed my game: key weapons disappeared when I reloaded the last checkpoint and now I'm too defenceless to continue. It turns out the PC version had a mistaken dev version released on Steam which was full of massive problems. I seem to have the later patched version which is less problematic, but it still seems there are a number of show stopping bugs. I really don't want to start again, I'd played many hours already (I'm at 34%)

That will teach me to buy something without checking the reviews first! Anyone else playing this pile of buggy poo? What's your experience?

[Gambit37]

I guess no-one else is playing it. I've persevered and got a bit further, but several times have lost my weapons and had to improvise. It's slow going! Despite this frustration, I'm having fun mashing up zombies

One of the characters, when in the Jungle, says "So many bugs...." Perhaps Techland (the developer) were being prophetically ironic....
http://deadislandwiki.com/wiki/Bugs

Read the note about "Save System" -- this is the main problem. It's totally barmy. I somehow doubt that I'll ever finish the game as a result.

I can't stand checkpoint based games. Why can't we have save slots for a game like this? It's so massive (an open world island), it would have made much more sense!

[beowuuf]

Yeah, only heard thigns about it (including the bug stuff), not really one for playing many games right now.

[Gambit37]

Yeah, generally same here -- not really playing games, but it looked like fun. For some bizarre reason, after coming home from 2 sunny weeks in Turkey, I really fancied mashing up some zombies...!

Also... When you die in the game, you get reincarnated, but lose some of the cash you've collected. If this keeps happening, you don't have enough money to fix your weapons or buy new stuff. Given there's so many bugs in the game anyway, I don't feel bad about applying a cheat that stops money being deducted when you die; at least this will now give a slightly better chance of progressing.

[Sophia]

It looks to me that the whole approach to the save system is less of a "bug" and more of a "hideous design flaw."

[Gambit37]

I agree with that assessment Item persistence has basically been ignored, although apparently this is because the game is really designed for co-op play -- no idea how that explanation works though!!!

The gameplay areas appear to load seamlessly, however there are clearly hundreds of discreet "zones" that the player is unaware of. If you move too many zones away from zone A for example, zone A is "reset" -- more creatures are spawned and any items left there simply vanish. You can throw all your sharp weapons into enemies which will lodge in their bodies (great fun!), but if you stray out of the zone and return, those weapons will have vanished. I lost expensive heavily invested stuff this way. Damage done to bosses in these zones sometimes is forgotten too -- so if you run off to heal or find new weapons, and come back, you can find the boss is fully healed again. I sliced a Thug boss's arm off and burnt him badly but he didn't die. I ran away and when I came back his arm had grown back and he had miraculously healed his burnt flesh.....!

The checkpoint is also messed up. There's basically only one and it's constantly overwritten. You can reload the last checkpoiint, but sometimes it'll place you on the opposite side of the map, or a random spot sort of near where you last were, but not actually there. It seems to be connected to the quest or sidequest you're on -- I think it repositions you based on what you need to do next in the quest, even if it's nowhere near where you think it was saved. It's clearly not an accurate save game!

Reading around this issue, I've read lots of people saying this is exactly how many console games work (Fallout 3, Borderlands, Gears of War) -- having never played any of them, I don't know, but if that's the case, it seems like games programmers are in some kind of collective mental block about how to properly handle saving a persistent world-state! I'm glad I don't play modern games very often any more, they would drive me nuts.

[Jan]

Yuck. Sounds awful.

I'm glad I don't play modern games very often any more

I'm glad I don't play modern games at all.

Anyway, I made a short enquiry and I found that the game was published by "Deep Silver" (a Koch Media's video game label). And, now, behold: "The British headquarter [of Deep Silver] is based in Basingstoke, UK." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Silver#Deep_Silver)

I wonder what that means?

[beowuuf]

Haha, suckers! *runs*

Weird, I need to do a google search to find out exactly where they are based, cause Basingstoke isn't that large, and they've relased over a hundred games, apparently!



Edit: Holy boogie-balls! They're based in herriard! That'#s right by where my office mate lives, and where another work collegue's friend works. I must pump them for information, dammit!

[Gambit37]

Deep Silver are just the publisher. The developer is Techland, who are Polish -- and funnily enough, they don't even have a page for Dead Rising on their own site. Perhaps they are trying to pretend it's nothing to do with them!
http://www.techland.pl/?id=home

[Christopher]

I've played this on Xbox and the save system doesn't delete weapons so much as it deletes entire saves. Five of my seven games have become corrupt for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Needless to say, I stopped playing and won't play it again unless the save system is completely changed and corrected.