.deadeyelind

Last week, the trailer for Dead Island hit the Internet and crashed like a tsunami on the unsuspecting shores of the gaming community. It presented a violent, emotionally charged, Memento-esque sequence leading up to, and simultaneously revealing the life, death, un-life, and re-death of a young girl on vacation with her family on an island during a sudden zombie outbreak.

At first watch, the sloppy mocap (all the more exaggerated by the slow-motion and reverse time lapse) was so distracting, that any significant emotional draw was almost lost on me. I know it sounds like a crude, elitist comment considering the impressive technical spectacle that is the trailer, but it's true. It was all I could see and it saddens me that even the tiniest bit of love from an animator was forgone in favor of "cheaper" performance capture and wiggly, wooden-faced humans that look more dead than the zombies they're fighting.

Trying to be less of a douche, I watched it again, ignoring the technical animation glitches. In short, it is really a great little piece of game cinema with a genuinely affecting tragic story, and some pretty intense, visceral action. The forward-backward reveal of a horrific tragedy the audience knows it can't escape is very clever, and the sorrowful score beautifully punctuates the theme of inevitability and loss. By the end, as the backward and forward timelines meet, and daughter and father reach out to each other hopelessly as time pulls them apart, it's hard to remember that this, in fact, a trailer for a video game. And a great deal harder to remain untouched.

This trailer has already gotten tremendous praise and (as of this post) nearly 3,000,000 views less than a week after being posted. I've seen a lot of people saying it could be the best game trailer ever made, and I'll say that if the game delivers anywhere near the emotional impact or heart-punching drama as hinted by this video, it could be a massive leap in terms of games as a more serious and meaningful form of entertainment. But that's the problem ... we all know it won't be.

Even though the games market is anything but lacking in terms of zombie-related titles, I would argue there is a great deal of ground left unexplored in the genre, as well as games as a whole, and I'll give a couple examples:

How about a zombie game not about killing zombies?

What if there was a game in which zombies exist, but blowing them up is not the objective? What if the zombie threat was ultimately inescapable, so rather than the focus being on the killing, it's your (the player's) job to find resources for a small colony of survivors by being using stealth and athleticism to avoid being caught/eaten by the roaming hordes?

Maybe it's your job to explore potential safe zones for your group of survivors, and after gathering enough resources and making sure the area is free of fatal security flaws, escorting your group to the next area?

The emotional cost of surviving.

I imagine being a survivor of a zombie apocalypse would be a hopeless, terrifying ordeal with loss and guilt being two of the most prominent personal issues one must face (aside from the zombies). If you are with a group, there is no doubt most--if not all--of you will have had to end the lives of several former people. Perhaps even close friends, family, women, and children alike. I've (thankfully) yet to play a game that required me to put a bullet through a child, zombie or living. Quite honestly, I don't know if I could. But how much more of an emotional impact would it have on an audience if that were (at least, apparently) the only option?

What happens when we build relationships with the other characters in our survivor group only to be confronted with a choice later in game as to who you must choose to save when something goes wrong? If there is an indefinite amount of time before one turns into a zombie after a bite, how would you deal with your friend if it happens to them? Do you end their life immediately, forfeiting another member of the team and sparing everyone a potential major liability, or do you keep them with you, perhaps in hope of finding a cure in time and risk putting your team in danger until you find medicine or the bitten comrade finally turns on you?

It just seems like these scenarios, so familiar to apocalyptic zombie culture, couldn't be more perfectly suited for interactive media, and yet they're easily the least-explored aspects of zombie games.
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So here's where I'm a bit put off by Dead Island and its trailer. It's hinting at a very human story dealing with powerful emotions and dark subject matter, rarely dealt with in video games, especially through the gameplay itself. However, a brief look at the actual game from various Internet sources clearly illustrates that Dead Island is a zombie game about killing a lot of zombies. And doing so in extravagantly violent, in-your-face ways. The Wikipedia article mentions RPG elements such as experience, skill trees, stamina bars, and upgradeable weapons...(?)

I suppose there's no way I can make a solid prediction until we get more information, gameplay footage, or perhaps I play it for myself. But the RPG elements seem to indicate to me that the majority of the game is going to be just bashing, chopping, slashing, pounding, and decapitating zombies, since combat seems to be the only way to progress and earn experience in most RPGs. While I don't really have any problem with this system in RPGs, this paints a vastly different picture from the trailer. In which, the violence is rendered in gruesome detail, and emphasizes how desperate and immediate the danger is, and how much is at stake (as well what the audience knows has already been lost). Making the violence the primary focus of the game and sole means of interacting with the game world reduces the impact it has during the trailer and turns it and the death of a little girl by the hands of her own father into little more than gratuitous grotesquerie used to draw attention and an artificial emotional attachment to the product.
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So anyway. Who else is excited about Bulletstorm?