Dead Island release for steam is a dev build
Svenpa
Wait, what? Join Date: 2004-01-03 Member: 25012Members, Constellation
Wait, what? Join Date: 2004-01-03 Member: 25012Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">auch.</div><a href="http://www.dsogaming.com/news/dead-island-pc-developer-build-released-on-steam-instead-of-the-final-version/" target="_blank">http://www.dsogaming.com/news/dead-island-...-final-version/</a>
Apparently you can get noclip by press "Y" and a forced thirdperson view shows horrible animations in singleplayer. Rumor has it that steam is handing out refunds just like they did for From Dust.
I've read a lot of "preorder cancelled! Pirating proper release" because of this but I find that quite the extreme overreaction. If they fix it within a few days will it really matter? I have not seen anything else that would imply it's a developer build, so everyone not pressing "Y" should have a perfectly fine game.
Opinion's go below.
Apparently you can get noclip by press "Y" and a forced thirdperson view shows horrible animations in singleplayer. Rumor has it that steam is handing out refunds just like they did for From Dust.
I've read a lot of "preorder cancelled! Pirating proper release" because of this but I find that quite the extreme overreaction. If they fix it within a few days will it really matter? I have not seen anything else that would imply it's a developer build, so everyone not pressing "Y" should have a perfectly fine game.
Opinion's go below.
Comments
Apparently you can get noclip by press "Y" and a forced thirdperson view shows horrible animations in singleplayer. Rumor has it that steam is handing out refunds just like they did for From Dust.
I've read a lot of "preorder cancelled! Pirating proper release" because of this but I find that quite the extreme overreaction. If they fix it within a few days will it really matter? I have not seen anything else that would imply it's a developer build, so everyone not pressing "Y" should have a perfectly fine game.
Opinion's go below.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I've run into one or two bugs so far that would have otherwise impeded all story progress without noclip. Having it available doesn't ruin the game anymore than having the console available in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas ruined the game. Whether or not it was intentional does not matter, it gives you the option to solve otherwise impossible problems.
..., it gives you the option to solve otherwise impossible problems.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That sounds VERY bad.
Having played Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas I've come to the conclusion it is pretty much standard for any game with an open world and a ###### load of quests to have a couple horrible bugs on launch. Yes, it is bad, but I remember how many times I had to use the console in Oblivion, FO3 and NV to bypass bugs prior to some massive patches. I'm not going to go on a big tirade and get all upset because the developer (accidentally) included debug tools, when those tools mean I can get around the launch day troubles.
Hell, when I played through COD: Black Ops in July I ran into a sequence breaking bugs that required me to completely restart missions. That was 8 months after the game was released, and following the release of 3 overpriced DLC packages. Sequence breaking bugs happen, they are not always 100% occurrences, but they are certainly more frustrating when you have no dev tools (such as a command console or noclip) to bypass them.
Edit: As it turns out the quest I thought was impossibly bugged wasn't. One of the objectives just wasn't showing up on the minimap, and was very, very far away from the others.
Hell, when I played through COD: Black Ops in July I ran into a sequence breaking bugs that required me to completely restart missions. That was 8 months after the game was released, and following the release of 3 overpriced DLC packages. Sequence breaking bugs happen, they are not always 100% occurrences, but they are certainly more frustrating when you have no dev tools (such as a command console or noclip) to bypass them.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas all share the same ###### old engine. All their bugs combined... is far from a standard for any open world game.
Fine, Red Dead Redeption. Open world, plenty of bugs; different engine, different developer.
Also Saints Row and Saints row 2. Again, another engine, another developer.. still an open world game full of bugs.
Also Saints Row and Saints row 2. Again, another engine, another developer.. still an open world game full of bugs.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Don't forget GTA 4 from Rockstar aswell, their other open world console port mess.
Doesn't bother me. Haven't every played a game I would accurately describe as 'immersive', so I have little to lose by opening the console and typing in a command to fix a bug.
The closest to immersive I get is whether the game is interesting, but's it's always a game, don't really see how people can think otherwise. It's interesting in the way taking something complicated to bits and putting it back together is interesting, playing with the mechanics, pressing a button and seeing what the effect is, that's the fun bit, and using the console to fix a bug is no more annoying than having to go get a screwdriver when you're taking something to bits.
Big complex games like oblivion tend to be a little buggy, but they also tend to have quite a lot of stuff to fiddle with, so I generally prefer them to more superficial but less buggy games.
I'd much rather have a good but buggy game with a console, than a game with almost no bugs but no console, as long as I can fix the bugs fairly easily, or even just cut out bits of the game I don't like, I'll enjoy it more than the alternative.
Good editorial by Yahzee on "imperfect" old games:
<a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9105-Extra-Punctuation-Golden-Era-of-PC-Gaming" target="_blank">http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/v...ra-of-PC-Gaming</a>
Tycho's post today seems to suggest there is much potential here:
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->...to me, this game is so PC it hurts. Personal Computer, not Politically Correct, although you’ve got the standard harangues about not being able to slaughter children. No, this has got all the hallmarks of the innovative, out of the way PC darling: poorly explained, often goofy, just on the edge of technological wreckage, and yet still, in a wholly inexplicable fashion, relentlessly intriguing.
Even with this wholly sundered piece of software, we managed to connect once in an afternoon otherwise littered with lost packets and uninvited stranger joins. The rest of the time was spent being invaded by the likes of “Poopship McGee†and other handles which followed the same algorithmic form. But those ten perfect, functioning minutes… my goodness. We saw, indeed, we inhabited their intention, however briefly: a cooperative, open world, survival RPG. It’s a dream so vast that it very nearly has mass; I’m tempted to laud them merely for attempting it. The actual version is up now, in the US at least. I’m prepared to spend as much time as it takes finding those ten minutes again.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Right now, I'm replaying Ultima 7.5: Serpent Isle, and you can hardly walk 10 feet without finding a way to break the game somehow, and it's probably my second favorite game evar. Similar to deus ex, the NPCs even call you out for your bizarre behavior, somewhat tongue-in-cheekily. There's a "trial" in one of the cities in which the NPCs comment on how you go into random houses opening random drawers, asking random questions.
QA is expensive and ultimately fruitless. You'll never catch all the bugs, honestly if you release a good game which works well enough to be fun, and you fix all the bugs people report quickly and efficiently, that's a better approach.
Like I said, I'd rather have an interesting if buggy game than an extremely glossy and polished yet ultimately uninteresting game, and it's very rare to get both.
You think QA is fruitless? You're wrong. Plain and simply wrong. Blizzard polishes the ###### out of their games, and I don't need to mention how successful they are. You may not care for any of their games, but a lot of people do and a lot of people did even before they went into the MMO market. And if anyone would claim that their success has nothing to do with how polished and relatively bug-free their games are, they've got their head up their ass.
I was a big fan of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Polished and bug-free. Rocksteady could've released Arkham City a year earlier, but instead they opted to spend a year polishing, fine-tuning, bug-testing. I don't doubt the final product will be better for it. Not everyone has that luxury. Not everyone can spend a year doing nothing but QA. But everyone NEEDS to do QA. Everyone needs to squeeze as much QA in as they can. Playtesting, bug-testing. They're what turn good games into great games.
You know who playtests the ###### out of their games? Valve. Has it worked for them? That's not even a real question.
ARE WE SEEING A PATTERN YET?
<a href="http://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/images/e/ea/Scout_goodjob02.wav" target="_blank">http://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/images/e/ea...t_goodjob02.wav</a>
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>This is going to be my thing now</span>
You think QA is fruitless? You're wrong. Plain and simply wrong. Blizzard polishes the ###### out of their games, and I don't need to mention how successful they are. You may not care for any of their games, but a lot of people do and a lot of people did even before they went into the MMO market. And if anyone would claim that their success has nothing to do with how polished and relatively bug-free their games are, they've got their head up their ass.
I was a big fan of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Polished and bug-free. Rocksteady could've released Arkham City a year earlier, but instead they opted to spend a year polishing, fine-tuning, bug-testing. I don't doubt the final product will be better for it. Not everyone has that luxury. Not everyone can spend a year doing nothing but QA. But everyone NEEDS to do QA. Everyone needs to squeeze as much QA in as they can. Playtesting, bug-testing. They're what turn good games into great games.
You know who playtests the ###### out of their games? Valve. Has it worked for them? That's not even a real question.
ARE WE SEEING A PATTERN YET?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Blizzard is successful because they made the first decent MMO and therefore it's the one everyone bought, and every MMO since then has been trying to leech off it's popularity, and largely failing because why would you want to pay out the nose for 'like WoW' when you already have paid out the nose for WoW? Aside from that, they make and always did make uninspired RTS games, now they make uninspired RTS games that rely on franchises to sell.
Blizzard would be successful if it released a giant turd with flies buzzing around it as long as it added 10 levels to your WoW character and it had the starcraft logo on it.
Funny you should mention valve also, valve makes pretty good games, but they didn't get where they are by making good games, they got where they are by making steam, and before that, by making games which support mods. The reason you buy half life is not because you want to play half life, you buy half life because you know it's going to have awesome mods made for it. That's what counter strike was, that's what team fortress was, that's what day of defeat was. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that mods are the most unpolished, buggy heaps of crap you're likely to find in gaming, but they are fun nonetheless. Mods BREATHE the idea of 'release buggy, fix later'. NS1 was a buggy, hardly functioning heap of crap when it was first released, it went through three versions trying to get the best gameplay out of it, but it was still fun despite it. The reason valve can release CSS and TF2 without bugs is because they are basing them off the buggy as hell mods that preceded them, they know the idea works, so they can spend their time polishing the game. That and valve probably has the GDP of a small banana republic what with them owning the only real digital distribution platform in existence.
To me, complaining that an unusual and interesting game isn't polished enough is kinda like saying the idea of air travel is stupid because the wright brothers' plane looked ugly.
Valve was also very popular before TFC. Yet again, because they released a game the defined a genre (in this case FPS games). They stayed popular because of their approach to the modding scene. Encouraging and acquiring top flight mods just gives them more games under their belt that shine.
I have said it before, my dream game is a survival horror MMO, however, I don't really want to see it developed by most companies, I would love to see either Valve or Blizz as they are the only ones out there with both the cash and the drive to make a game like that. I know it's never going to happen, as it's not their type of game, far to limited an audience.
I'll pick up dead island when it hits the bargain shelves, I'm not expecting it to be what I want, but I'll give it a shot for $20.
BTW: as I'm curious
Does any one know just how incomplete the dev build was that was released? I mean, the only thing that every one is reporting is that the developer key binds were left in. If that's it, people are seriously spazing out over nothing.
Neither company owes its current success in the modern gaming industry to obsessive polishing of games.
Type dead island yogscast into youtube, they're doing a playthrough, it looks laggy but otherwise remarkably fun, like borderlands mixed with left4dead mixed with fallout new vegas.
As far as I could tell it was just the developer bindings and some memory leaks that took numerous hours of gameplay before they became noticeable.
Valve playtests a lot. A LOT. Apart from TF2's deluge of new weapons (because they are sometimes a good example of what happens when you don't playtest enough), Valve games don't have that annoying moment where you stop and wonder how this stuff made it through even cursory playtesting (every GTA game in the GTA 3 generation had "that mission" that was just horrible and no fun, and nobody would understand why that mission would even be in the game). It just doesn't happen, and that's a huge part of the success of their games. Their success with Steam launched itself off of their success with games.
Blizzard owes its success to excessive polishing of games. It's the only area where Blizzard stands out - where others would polish and polish until they'd go "okay, that's pretty shiny," Blizzard polishes until you could place that object on the moon and bounce a laser off it. I wouldn't say WoW was the first decent MMO, but I would say it had something special, something that no other MMO had: ######loads of polish.
Blizzard was SOLIDLY established when it launched WoW. Go through their games catalog and you find best-selling game after best-selling game. How many of them were released AFTER WoW? ONE. It's true that they're raking in money like never before with WoW, but their older games sold very well. The success of the Warcraft franchise BEFORE it became an MMO is another thing that helped launch WoW to the pole position it occupies today.
To me, complaining that a fully priced, regularly released game isn't polished enough is kinda like saying the idea of air travel is stupid if the plane falls out of the sky in 1/5 cases: Justified.
<a href="http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2106453" target="_blank">http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/show...d.php?t=2106453</a>
<a href="http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2106453" target="_blank">http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/show...d.php?t=2106453</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
with the risk of getting VAC banned? no thanks
That he does.
A lot.
Regarding Blizzard, meh. I like Relic because even though their games aren't always the greatest, it's obvious that they're willing to try new gameplay concepts and mix things up. Company of Heroes, despite getting old for me as the missions started to feel repetitive, was freaking <i>good</i> as the cover-based RTS was incredibly awesome and is something that's been missing for a long time.
Blizzard doesn't innovate whatsoever - not with new franchises, and certainly not with gameplay. I'm also firmly convinced that, similar to Bioware, there's a huge 'popular because they're popular' thing going on - do any of you <i>seriously</i> think that if Starcraft 2 were reskinned and renamed and released by a different developer that it would be nearly as popular? You're kidding yourself if you think it would be - Korea would just keep playing Starcraft. I don't even think that game would be that successful.
I consider W:ET vs. ET:QW to be a decent example of this - Quake Wars was well received and there weren't a whole lot of reasons fans of W:ET shouldn't have migrated over, but they didn't - they just kept playing W:ET, because ET:QW wasn't W:ET.
<!--quoteo(post=1873940:date=Sep 9 2011, 07:28 PM:name=sheena_yanai)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (sheena_yanai @ Sep 9 2011, 07:28 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1873940"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->with the risk of getting VAC banned? no thanks<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Let's all talk crap about how Apple doesn't allow any users to do anything with their software that they don't want you to, and then talk about how Valve is some sort of benevolent, awesome company that cares about people. *Snort*
"Removed motion blur? PERMABAN!"
No doubt SC2 benefited from SC1 and by the Blizzard name, however, if SC2 was some random game made by some random developer I still think it would receive praise and slowly grow over time.
In regards to Blizzard not 'innovating' you have to keep in mind that 'innovation' does not necessarily mean 'improvement.' For the past few years before SC2 was released we did not see any new 'traditional' RTS's. We saw things like Company of Heroes, SW: Empire Of War, Dawn of War, Men At War, Tiberium Wars, and World in Conflict just to name a few off the top of my head. For the gamers out there that didn't enjoy the DoW/CoH style there were very few options. When Dustin Browder was asked, before SC2 released, if any innovations had been made he replied with something similar to "Yes, we're innovating by going back to the basics." He went on to basically say what I just said, how most RTS games out recently we're not traditional and by releasing a traditional RTS they were, in a way, innovating based off what was available on the market.
I remember when he said this I was so excited for SC2. As SC2's success as shown many others wanted a modern traditional RTS experience and that had been lacking prior to SC2's release.
That said, I'd expect to see some changes to D3 when compared to D2. While I'm not an avid gamer of that genre, I don't believe much has changes to those games over the years. Blizzard has an opportunity to try to make some improvements if they feel it's necessary.
"Removed motion blur? PERMABAN!"<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
To be fair, this has nothing to do with Valve as they are neither the publishers, nor the creators of DI. The makers of DI implemented VAC, and VAC works (in part) by matching hashes of dlls and such, which is a perfectly fine way of doing it. I mean, there is NO reason you should go into DLLs and start mucking about with them, that's what in game configuration is for, or at least a config file, or at the VERY least an official modding platform. Going over that thread, it looks like NONE of those three are in the game (not letting me rebind keys makes me rage tbh). So yes, Valve is still a good company a far as I care, their products are all rather open to modding/tweaking as we see fit, the makers of dead island? not a good company so far...
That would have had me wanting a refund, not them leaving in some silly developer key binds.