Dead Island EP 2: What Do We Have Here?

By Shamus Posted Thursday May 14, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 73 comments


Link (YouTube)

Once again I fear Chris is going to take a bunch of crap for not following the compass. In his defense, that particular compass is kind of confusing and it’s not at all clear from the prompts what you’re supposed to be doing. Apparently you need to open up your journal, read your goals, then consult the compass to track down the zombies. The skull on the compass means “zombie here”, and the little arrow (that’s actually pretty dang far from the skull) means “the zombie is on the floor above you”. This would be somewhat more forgivable if the goal was something like, “Bring the Quest Item back to Bob Questgiver.” But here your goal is “kill all the zombies before you try to use the radio. Yes, even the hidden zombie that isn’t a threat to you and you don’t even know it exists.” It’s just more lazy, dumb, confusing nonsense.

Let’s talk about the stamina meter:

Rutskarn and Josh make a pretty good point, in that limited stamina seems to only exist to prolong your travel times and rarely matters in combat. I don’t have anything against them in principle. In fact, “running out of stamina” is often a major deal in zombie movies. A lot of tension comes from moments when a character is struggling to reach some sort of shelter before the horde overtakes them. That’s an exciting scene and potentially an exciting mechanic, but it serves no purpose in a game where you never have to run away from anything. In fact, it seems like you only run out of stamina outside of combat, just trying to get around.

Skyrim did it better, in that stamina was a big part of your melee attacks. Also, it was possible to find yourself in a fights where you needed to run away. (The bear just outside of Ivarstead has run the legs off of me a few times when I went there at low levels.) But in Dead Island everything is the same level and all fights are engineered to be about the same difficulty. It’s impossible to run into a fight that’s too tough for you now but will be more manageable in a couple of levels. Moreover, enemies don’t seem interested in chasing you.

Even in games where the stamina meter isn’t useless, it feels like it’s missing something. I think part of the problem is that you just have one meter for your whole body. In Skyrim, if you spend all your strength bashing on an enemy and barely make a dent, then it’s time to run away. Except you can’t, because your stamina is goneOn the other hand, it’s not hard to jog away so that the AI gets stymied by level geometry and their pathfinding fails them. But that always feels like such a cheat.. The actual system being abstracted by that simple “stamina” bar is ridiculously complex. If you run out of breath, then it makes sense that you can’t run away. But if you’re failing because your arms are spent but your legs are fresh then running away should be easy. On the other hand, I’m not very keen on the idea of having a huge bank of stamina bars for all your various bodily systems.

It’s a complex problem. I still think there’s some sort of interesting fight-or-flight dynamic to be explored for whoever can figure out an intuitive way to convey things to the player. In the meantime, I’d love it if games wouldn’t use the stamina bar to prolong the pain of backtracking and item-fetching.

 

Footnotes:

[1] On the other hand, it’s not hard to jog away so that the AI gets stymied by level geometry and their pathfinding fails them. But that always feels like such a cheat.



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73 thoughts on “Dead Island EP 2: What Do We Have Here?

  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

    To be fair,you can break an iron pipe by smashing skulls.Skulls are hard,and those pipes dont have that thick of an iron shell.But if you find an aluminum bat and that breaks,that is going to be hilarious.

    EDIT:Or a sledge hammer.Thats the stupidest thing in any game that has weapon degradation.You can smash through dozens of walls with those things before you even dent anything on those things,and we are to expect that it breaks after 20 skulls?Heck no!

    1. Ardis Meade says:

      Sledgehammers might not be as tough as you think. While the heads are functionally indestructible, we had to replace the handles pretty frequently back in Scouts. They’re usually made of wood and take a fair bit of force. Especially if you’re not using them properly.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        That is true for wooden handled ones.However,the sledge hammers seen in most video games are actually these ones:

        http://www.staples-3p.com/s7/is/image/Staples/s0470602_sc7?$splssku$

        which is basically just a single chunk of metal cast into a shape of a hammer.

        1. Ardis Meade says:

          Even then, if the face of the hammer doesn’t hit straight on, then a lot of force will get focused on the neck. I’m in no way an expert here, but I can’t see that being good for it.

          My main point is that the things around us tend to be a lot more fragile than people realize. We also tend to underestimate the amount of force we can produce.

          1. Ivan says:

            You say that, but the fact is that the items in this game are disintegrating in a matter of seconds. I get that it’s an abstraction but whenever I see weapon degradation I have serious concerns about how society was built upon such flimsy tools, even if I am misusing them.

          2. Syal says:

            According to this article, a sledgehammer with a wooden handle can generally survive over 400 bad swings. These things are designed to be swung at full force; think of the lawsuits if they broke easily and sent that head flying at someone’s face/stomach/toes.

            Plus… those suckers are heavy. It’s actually pretty tough to swing one hard enough to hurt it.

            Of course, you could solve the whole problem by calling them ‘battered sledgehammers’ and make a point to mention it’s obviously past its prime by the time you pick it up. It’s not like a resort is going to make replacing their old sledgehammers a priority. Same with pipes; a lead pipe won’t break, but a corroded lead pipe sure could.

        2. Michael says:

          …or ones with fiberglass handles. Which are also stupidly durable. You can break them if you’re mishandling it, but turning 20 or 30 zombies into a rough approximation of a back yard BBQ’s potato salad shouldn’t do much of anything.

        3. Never once have I seen a sledgehammer that looked like that in a videogame.

          Just sayin.

          1. AileTheAlien says:

            That also looks to be a rubber mallet, not a hammer. One’s for bumping things into place, the other is for smashing them apart. Big difference in materials and sturdiness. :)

    2. Jokerman says:

      I still use the same sledgehammer my dad used, that gives it at least 25 years of constant use breaking down walls.

    3. Andy says:

      The problem I always have with sledgehammers in this game is how the character swings ’em. With the same sort of side-to-side motion you do with pipes and oars and everything else. Like, you hold it in front of yourself and kind of wave it around. One, that’s not a really effective stroke – you’re fighting gravity, not using it to your advantage. Two, waving a 10lb chunk of steel around on the end of a stick is a very good way to destroy your lower back. Especially when you don’t follow through properly, and in fact are stopping the thing in midair -using you muscle power alone – and swinging it BACK.

      Seriously, looks like it has the mass of a feather on a swizzle stick.

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g5ljDSPHfpM

    4. ehlijen says:

      Skulls can break aluminium. I used to sail Laser dingies, and one day did an unintended tack (wind shifted suddenly), resulting in the aluminium tube boom smacking across my forehead something fierce. I was fine, but a few hours later, the boom snapped in half…

      Granted, that was a tube, not a solid baseball bat. Still, whack with things hard enough, and you will eventually break them. I’m guessing it takes more than a few zombies, though.

  2. Thomas says:

    This game should have been fun :( In which case why do they have so many of the least fun mechanics possible?

    Everyone hates weapon degradation. In a game like Fallout or Far Cry 2, at least it serves some purpose. Here it does nothing. Okay it drives the economy of the game and might encourage people to experiment, but if you’re forcing people to sit on marbles so that they’ll have fun – you’re doing it wrong.

    And the stamina bar is exactly the same. Someone on the forums suggesting that no matter how fast you travel in an open world game, it never feels fast enough. But surely the answer to that is to have a ‘boost’ button you hold down. A stamina bar just makes you hate the game even more.

    They even have auto-levelling enemies!

    1. Keeshhound says:

      The really weird part about the autoleveling enemies is that there’s an option to have them autolevel to each player in multiplayer.

      So if I’m level 12, playing with a friend who’s level 50, when we look at the same zombie, I see (and interact with) it as a level 12 zombie, but to my friend, it’s a level 50.

      Honestly, the whole system would’ve worked better with stagnant enemies.

    2. Michael says:

      Yeah, I’m not sure if I can legitimately say Fallout 3’s weapon deterioration had a point, beyond dumping late game weapons on you early and saying, “yeah, have fun with these.”

      Far Cry 2, ironically, did exactly what this game is trying to, and made it work. Weapons degraded so you couldn’t just use the same tools constantly (unless it was the .45, and AK47) to get through the game. But, here… it’s an ammo system for melee weapons, which is just stupid.

      1. Thomas says:

        Weapon degradation in the Fallout games sells the post-apocalypse survival theme. It would almost feel weird if you could rely on the tools and weapons around you

        1. Michael says:

          It was a new feature with Fallout 3, actually.

          There’s no entropic systems in the Interplay era Fallout games.

          Thematically it kind of makes sense, because, as you said, it’s a post-apocalyptic setting.

          But, for Fallout specifically? It’s a little off tone. The earlier games, hardware and tools had this kind of 50’s “built to last forever” thing going. The guns never jam… except on the crit failure table, I think. The car never breaks down. Electronic locks left in a cave for 180 years work fine without any maintenance.

          It’s weird, but a 10mm pistol surviving 200 years only to break down from perfect condition to inoperable in less than 1,000 rounds is even stranger. Some of that is going to be down to the time compression for the game, but still…

        2. ehlijen says:

          Fallout 1, 2 and to a degree tactics followed that theme by making ammunition rarer, expensive and most importantly, weigh something.

          You had to keep looking for ammo for the guns appropriate to your level and couldn’t afford to lug around too many at once (even with the broken economy of FO1). In Fallout 3/NV, ammo basically becomes money: you can carry around everything you find, so you just hoard it in case you find a gun that uses it or a merchant that pays well for it. The degradation system was kind of needed to cover for guns suddenly becoming too easy to use otherwise.

          The downside is that that made the big guns skill really bad :(
          The M2 was fun, but at 90pd empty and firing 5pd of bullets per volley, it wasn’t really practical even in a game only about combat.

    3. pdk1359 says:

      Well, weapon degradation kinda works in for survival games, but only when the degradation is reasonable. take minecraft; basic wood axe breaks quickly, iron axe is much better and lasts longer, diamond axe lasts nearly forever and is amazing. Once you’re up to iron things are solid.

      But then terrible games give you a weapon that lasts an encounter or three and, okay, if it’s an improvised piece of crap that shouldn’t be used that way, maybe? But a fire axe or a metal pipe is good for a long while, unless you’re beating stone monsters or something else much more durable than flesh and bone.

      I’d like to see a game that had weapon degradation and then skill with the weapon or general combat prowess meant you’d break things less often/slower because you don’t swig it around like an idiot.

      Alternatively, make your apocalyptic game actually apocalyptic; Ruin has com to the world, the dead are rising and the trappings of civilization are literally crumbling around you. Later chapters of the game would have all buildings, vehicle, tools and etc GONE, disintegrated in the face of the eldritch abomination that has come to end our pitiful species. Final boss fight has you thrash the thing with your bare hands (because you’re basically godlike yourself with the weird powers you’ve picked up) and then things start over for another round of humans rising from the stone age to the information age, with another set of tablets that get ignored by the next jackass to download Ruin from an alien satellite. Or something.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Its been a while,but I think in eschalon books 2 & 3 your weapons degrade slower if you are skilled with them.Weapons also have different degradation depending on what they are.

    4. Galad says:

      “No matter how fast you travel in an open world game, it never feels fast enough”

      Running super fast and flying in SR4 sure felt fast enough

      1. ehlijen says:

        It felt very fast, but running from quest point to quest point could still take annoyingly long if you do the side quests back to back.

        Awesome game despite that, though.

  3. Christopher says:

    Sorry, but if you’re talking about stamina bars, it’s actually appropriate to bring up the Souls games. It’s a system that makes sense for relatively slow, deliberate combat, where each blow you deal and take(or hopefully, dodge or guard) count. It goes down fast and regenerates quickly. Fittingly, it looks like the stamina bar is more forgiving in Bloodborne, which is faster and demands more action. In this game, I don’t see the point. It’s always frustrating when a stamina system limits you for a long period of time. It’s been a while, so forgive me if I don’t entirely remember these examples correctly.

    Dragon’s Dogma would make you stand still if your stamina hit bottom, leaving you completely open. Since you can at any point pause and heal stamina with an item, this just made it a matter of healing the stamina to continue attacking. Vanquish would frustratingly have your time stop mechanic, melee and speed boost use the same meter, so messing up one of them meant you couldn’t use the others to get out of the situation. Odin Sphere used to have attacks fill up a meter the more you attacked, so that you were forced to back away if you were attacking too much. In boss fights, since it takes place on a 2d plane that’s connected at the ends, this just made me do a couple of combos, jump up and fly around the world until I hit the boss again. Their later games, Muramasa and Dragon’s Crown, instead uses a system where you switch between several weapons as each one gets tired and regenerated when not in use and nothing, respectively. Instead, you are encouraged to keep going through successive stages to earn exp, and weapon degradation, along with collecting quest rewards and spending ability points, is used to stop you from going forever and occasionally return to town.

    I do think thinking too much about this sort of stuff would lead to unnecessary busywork. Metal Gear Solid 3 had a stamina meter for hunger that would continually decrease and hinder your aiming and naturally regenerating hp until you ate something, a system for catching and eating animals, and a system for performing first aid on yourself. Great gameplay moments emerge from that, especially when you can feed bad or poisionous food to enemy soldiers or destroy their food supplies to make the local soldiers tired, but it was probably more effort than necessary whan using a ration used to do the job.

    Since you also talked about weapon degradation, I’ll say I think it is pretty stupid in Dark Souls 1, at least. Makes sense in the others, when you could theoretically go forever because of healing items while repairing items requires checkpoints or using an expensive item. In Dark Souls 1, what’s the point when healing only refills at checkpoints anyway? In the end, the only effect is that enemy abilities can corrode them and that the weapons with special moves uses up a lot of the durability points to limit them. “Realism” has nothing to do with it for me, I don’t care at aaall that you pay money to repair a pipe that breaks on flesh on a tropical resort apocalypse, but it would be nice if games used meters in ways that didn’t get in the way of having fun. I don’t mind it if a turret you can pick up or like a bus sign or knife in a beat ’em up don’t last forever, because those are supposed to be short-term powerups.

    At least Dead Island looks pretty. The saturated colors alone are a world apart from how dull Survival Instinct looks, and it’s good to soak in the sunlight before the black and green night of Arkham Asylum. Maybe the actual graphics aren’t that good, but they look fine through the filter of an embedded youtube video at least.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Josh,why didnt you mention this in the show proper?You have failed your only duty and therefore must commit sudoku!

      1. Ledel says:

        Who’s to say he didn’t, and Shamus just cut it out of the audio recording and just covered it up with Rutskarn talking about Borderlands 2?

      2. MichaelGC says:

        That’s a big Japanese daikatana sword that chap has there. I wonder if Josh owns a big Japanese daikatana sword?

        1. Nimas says:

          I know you’re being sarcastic, but the actual phrase “big Japanese daikatana sword” hurts me on a physical level >< (big, big Japanese, Japanese sword sword)

          1. MichaelGC says:

            Apologies! I am a bad person, and am forced to confess that was exactly the reaction I was going for…

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              That was vely disonorabur!Commit mentar asyrum!

    2. Abnaxis says:

      I think that you hit on a good point, which is that stamina mechanics don’t mean all things for all games. In Souls or Skyrim, stamina is a precious resource that keeps you alive in combat–it drops quickly and it recovers quickly, and it guides player behavior so you are more careful to make your attacks and movement effective, lest you get curb-stomped after your stamina drops to zero (more-so in Souls than Skyrim).

      To me, “running” stamina should be different. It should be a bar that goes down more slowly than in Dark Souls, and recover much more slowly. It’s purpose is to limit how long you can keep bypassing enemies before you can’t keep running at a full sprint/fighting at peak capacity any more. Draining it all the way shouldn’t mean you’re completely worthless in combat, but should impose penalties that make everything you do harder, combat or otherwise. In that way, stamina is more of a personal durability meter that gradually deteriorates, which could make for a more interesting mechanic in a zombie game. I think that’s how Dying Light did it and (from what I’ve heard) it works pretty good.

      Incidentally, I like the stamina mechanic in Souls, but I think calling it “stamina” is kind of silly as an abstraction–so what, you’re completely exhausting yourself, completely recovering, then completely exhausting yourself multiple times in the span of a minute when you fight a boss? I like to think of it more like “balance,”–if you keep making hay-maker swings or keep getting batted around by a massive demon you lose your footing until have a chance to steady your bearings again

      1. Christopher says:

        If that’s what Dying Light is like, good on them, they’ve already improved on that complaint. I’ve never played a game that’s like that, but I think that should help with the frustration of running somewhere with a stamina bar. I also like the boost button Thomas suggests. I don’t think it’s that big a deal if there are cars or horses around, but I liked how Okami would speed you up automatically if you kept running for a while. No use in normal fights, but it made traversing the world less of a pain.

        I have no idea which particular game made “stamina meter” stick as a description, but sure, it’s not appropriate for what exactly goes on in Souls. Or Vanquish or MGS3, for that matter. I don’t really mind, it’s only a name for some kind of “ability to do things”-meter that stuck at this point. It’s sort of a useless term in general, I guess, but it works just fine when talking about a certain game’s mechanic.

      2. keldoclock says:

        The stamina system in the experimental builds of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead does exactly this. Takes a few rounds of running to use up, takes an hour or so to recharge. Before it was implemented if you wanted to avoid zombies you used terrain or meth, now you have a 3rd option.

  4. Thomas says:

    Wow these zombie games have short lives. I’m already bored of Dead Island, and Survival Instinct didnt hold for much longer

  5. Daemian Lucifer says:

    That plane!It finally makes sense!I know why this game is so shitty and has all of the gameplay elements tossed inside for no reason!This lost the video game.Pretty soon,youll find a hatch and get a quest to punch in random numbers,only for it to turn out that this whole thing was just a social experiment,and zombies arent real,but they kind of are,and the whole world depends on you for some reason.And then you will end up being dead and in purgatory just for shits and giggles.

    1. Michael says:

      That’d be hilarious… if it wasn’t so close to being true.

  6. Daemian Lucifer says:

    I think stamina would work best if done somewhat like the awesome button in saints row:It empowers your strikes,but is depleted quickly when used for combat.So you can sprint forever without it going down,but if you use it to punch harder you will quickly run out of it.

  7. Octapode says:

    In answer to Rutskarn’s question, caffeine withdrawl and exhaustion are readily solvable by energy drinks. They’re also good for ignoring the fact you haven’t eaten yet because you’re too busy trying to get your work done for a deadline at the end of the day.

    I’d have to ask an actual medicalologist person, but I’d expect the ridiculous sugar content of the average energy drink to be at least somewhat helpful for low blood sugar.

  8. Ledel says:

    I honestly think Left 4 Dead (after the update) had the best solution for the stamina problem. Where you could use your melee push-back several times in a row, but at a point it took longer and longer for the melee to be usable. It recovered after a short rest, but drained you in a manner that felt fair.

    I think the biggest issue is that games don’t give you a base movement speed that feels good without using your stamina to run. If you moved relatively fast, and your run only moved you a little bit faster, the 30 meter sprint you do could feel more like a mechanic than your only means of traveling far distances. You could then keep your stamina as a reserve to use for dashing past a group of enemies, but it wouldn’t change your overall speed that much.

    Think of Link’s rolling movement in the recent LoZ games. Yes, rolling is faster, but you really only save yourself maybe a minute traveling from one side of the field to the other.

    This game doesn’t do it great, but at least when you’re moving it feels alright; you don’t slow to a crawl when out of stamina, and your stamina recovers fairly quickly so that you aren’t stuck trying to dodge enemies while waiting to be able to attack all the time.

  9. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Im not sure if youd ever be able to get a kidney problem by drinking too many energy drinks.Not because they are healthy,but because your heart would fail waaaay sooner than your kidneys.

    And I think the lethal doze is somewhere under 10.So by this point its safe to say that sam b has suffered a dozen heart attacks.

    1. Ledel says:

      What if the zombies are actually some kind of vampire that needs to drink blood with high concentrations of sugar and taurine? It would explain how Sam B is able to drink so many energy drinks and still be alive, and why they are health in this game.

      1. Christopher says:

        So they should ideally emigrate to that city in Sunset Overdrive that has the energy drink monsters.

    2. Ardis Meade says:

      Try over 80. Assuming an adult of 200 pounds drinking Monster, the lethal dose is 85.3. See http://www.caffeineinformer.com/death-by-caffeine Remember Energy drinks usually have far less caffeine than an equal amount of coffee.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        That depends on the energy drink in question.Also,on how much you are addicted to it.Plus,you dont need to overdose on caffeine in order to get a heart attack,especially when straining yourself.

      2. Cybron says:

        It depends on the energy drink. I once knew a fellow with a serious caffeine problem who gave himself a heart attack by chugging four Redlines in a row.

        When the bottle says “Don’t drink more than half of this is in a sitting”, drinking multiple is probably a bad idea.

      3. Michael says:

        That assumes the cause of death would be caffeine, and not all the other industrial waste in your average can of energy drink. :p

      4. Melodious Punk (@Meodiou5Punk) says:

        That calculator is based on the LD50 of caffeine which means 50% of 200 pound people will die drinking that much caffeine. In reality a lot of people will die or become seriously ill on lower doseages.

        Even if Sam B doesn’t drink enough to die or become ill, he has already drunk enough that when he comes down it will be with one hell of a hangover.

  10. Jarlek says:

    I must admit, by now I’m more impressed than annoyed by Chris’s devotion to never check his minimap.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Drop the damn incinerator Josh!

      =

      Check the damn map Chris!

      1. MrGuy says:

        Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

        Chris doesn’t check the minimap because he doesn’t realize he should (and, to be fair, the game doesn’t emphasize teaching you to use it. Also, if you have to keep opening the map to play the game, your game sucks.

        Josh and the incinerator is pure, gleeful, unapologetic trolling of the audience with malice aforethought.

        Josh is evil. Chris just sucks.

      2. Michael says:

        In Chris… and Josh’s defense, LiveCom is hard. You have no idea how hard until you try doing it.

        Your choices are to suddenly become terrible at the game and inattentive as hell or sound like an idiot.

  11. Tizzy says:

    The islands probably don’t make their own diving knives and paddleboard. That’s why repairs are so expensive…

  12. Disc says:

    “In fact, it seems like you only run out of stamina outside of combat, just trying to get around.”

    It’s just another illusion the game conjures up with this “false start”. Later when the zombies get tougher, you can easily spend all of your stamina just taking out single zombies unless you go for the weakspots. For most zombies it’s the head and it’s easy to miss. With bigger groups you also often need to do some crowd control (jumpkicking them to the ground etc.) and that’s what also drains your stamina fast. Generally speaking, if you want to avoid taking damage, don’t wanna spend half-a-day killing them and and not ruin half of your weapons in the progress, then you’ll see that bar go down a lot.

    1. Ivan says:

      I hate it when games do this, presumably they cut down the number of things you need to worry about so as to not overwhelm the player, or in this case make it easier in order to try to ease you in a bit. But this first hour of gameplay is really important, it’s when I’m learning how to play the game. If you’re not teaching me how to play the game proper, with all it’s mechanics then you’re doing it wrong! I never learned that I was supposed to spend most of my time kicking zombies in the shins or curb-stomping them. Neither did any of my friends. We all just assumed that we just needed to keep a good, high-durability weapon with us and repair it often.

  13. MrGuy says:

    This game reminds me a lot of what I thought of Borderlands. It’s a single-player MMO. A bunch of samey sidequests, of which you have many at any given time, that you grind for exp and “ding!” levels. The game is only as enjoyable as you find this particular flavor of grind.

    Unlike borderlands, Dead Island is a CRIPPLED single player MMO because the auto-leveling removes the one Skinner box reward for grinding.

  14. Wooji says:

    I have seen a person not used to caffeine get a caffeine overdose and have to go to a doctor after 5 energy drinks so i would think that 20 might have some rather negative effects even on someone who is used to drinking them.
    If nothing else that amount of suger would probably make you rather sick.

  15. Duoae says:

    I actually really love the Dead Island (and now Dying Light) series. Dying Light is actually very good compared to the former two games but Dead Island and Riptide had this weird phenomenon whereby the game got more interesting to play the higher level you became. Yes the enemies were auto-levelled but you died way easier at lower levels and had fewer cool moves to utilise in combat.

    It’s strange but in both games I hated them until I loved them by the end of the game…. plus the city map in Riptide is beautiful!

  16. Jeff says:

    “But if you're failing because your arms are spent but your legs are fresh then running away should be easy.”

    Well, I don’t know about that. After I do HIIT or run 5k, my ability to do weights is ridiculously impaired compared to just doing weights. If I do weights to failure, my ability to run afterwards is like-wise impaired (though generally not as much).

    It’s less a muscle fatigue issue and more a general aerobic/anaerobic issue, which is what I imagine Stamina simulates.

  17. Alex says:

    On stamina:
    The fastest way to move long distances should be to not sprint. Make stamina only recharge when walking or standing still, so that jogging at a steady pace gets you further than alternating between sprinting and walking, while sprinting is only done when you need to get out of dodge right now.

  18. General Karthos says:

    I find stamina meters to be somewhat annoying, but I don’t think that having separate bars for different parts of the body is realistic. The thing is that, in fights (and I don’t think there’s any game that accurately simulates this, because the animation cost would be absurd) your legs move all the time. Constantly repositioning yourself to get a little extra speed or power behind an attack, or to avoid falling over when blocking an opponent’s attack. The odds are fairly good that if you spend five minutes trying to take out an opponent, you’re going to be too tired to run away at the end of those five minutes.

    1. Ivan says:

      I agree, separate stamina bars is both over-complicated and unrealistic. I can spend the day bikeriding or hiking and at the end of it my whole body is exhausted. I can’t exactly drop and give you 20 at the end of it even if my arms did none of the work themselves. Then again I suppose that’s an issue of endurance rather than sprinting, but if you run to the point that you need to stop and catch your breath then I doubt you’re going to be able to throw an effective punch in that state either.

  19. kdansky says:

    Stamina can be done well, as explained at length here:

    http://theludite.com/2014/12/19/dark-souls-2-difficulty-dissected/

    But Dead Island just slaps the mechanic in there, with no care in the world for why or how it works. Basically like everything else in that game. It just feels like someone played a bunch of good games, and then wanted to combine them all, but never thinking hard enough. You can’t add pie-fights into Schindler’s List because it was funny when Charlie Chaplin did it, and therefore would improve any movie. Stamina bars are such a mechanic: Every game has it, but very rarely is it relevant.

    1. Fizban says:

      That link led to a good post but I took issue with a couple points (about stuff other than the stamina bar, all agree there) that weren’t raised in the discussion, and since it’s only like 6 months old I figured “why not” and dropped a comment over there. Spent way too much time on it so I hope someone reads it, I had story time and sketchy comparisons and everything!

      (Well after it gets out of moderation queue, which could take a while if the blog isn’t very active).

  20. Chamomile says:

    Ways to make the Dead Island narrative better:

    -Instead of playing in a zombie apocalypse, a trade blockade by Russia/China/North Korea/whatever has left the island cut off from vital resources and unable to interact with the global economy, causing a rapid devaluation of money, causing a collapse of society. Violent gangs have risen up to seize control of urban centers, the government has militarized in response, blockade strike teams are making incursions onto the island in small enough numbers that it won’t show up on the news as an invasion (a bridge which, for whatever reason, the hostile government is unwilling to cross). and with the place rapidly devolving into a warzone citizens and tourists are taking a Mad Max approach to survival. All of this is background. The game opens with a news broadcast about day five of the blockade, your character(s) talking about how their hotel room is out of food and they’ll have to leave, and you spend the rest of the time as a desperate survivor fighting other desperate survivors, a reactionary government, and blockade soldiers. More enemy variety, more original plot, all the ugly “beating the Hell out of people” implications are part of the point.

    -Too complicated? Political overtones too difficult to pull off correctly? Okay, you’ve been juiced up on supersoldier drugs in a hidden government base on this island and then set loose for observation. With a foggy memory you return to your hotel room and stumble out the next day, suffering vivid hallucinations. Your character immediately devolves into (or always was?) a charming sociopath who isn’t sure if the “zombies” he’s killing are innocent bystanders or hostile thugs or what, and also isn’t sure he cares.

    -That’s too dark? Okay, let’s go all-in on the first person Tropico thing. A slightly dark comedy about a deposed dictator whose treacherous righthand man has signed a deal with a stand-in for the Umbrella Corporation, who are now using the population of the island as a testbed for the zombie virus. Make fun of how the Umbrella stand-in has absolutely no plan for profiting from complete global saturation and have your dictator make jokes about how now he can finally use his ability to slaughter unarmed civilians for a good cause.

    -Still too dark? Don’t want “comedy” and “human rights violations” crossing over at all? Okay then, we can do the zombies thing, but the zombies are caused by an evil curse. I don’t care what kind of wizard casts it, Ctulhu-esque or voodoo style or what, but an evil wizard casts a curse which causes the dead to rise and civilization to break down in totally arbitrary ways while also summoning up some number of awesome looking boss enemies themed after whatever kind of wizard he is (alternatively, have multiple wizards with multiple different themes who each create a class of boss monsters, like Cthulhu wizard summons up aquatic looking bosses, and voodoo wizard summons up Baron Samedi style undead bosses, and some Satan-themed pentagram guy summons up demon-looking things). The boss enemies kill a bunch of people leaving lots more dead around to rise, and now a few days in you’ve emerged from your hotel room to try and fight your way off the island after the first wave of marines got killed by supernatural forces and the government has decided that liberating a tourist trap is not worth further investment of resources. Now it’s up to a ragtag band of survivors to save the island from the evil wizard’s(or wizards’) evil curse. That sounds ridiculous but it doesn’t have to be any more ridiculous than your average Marvel movie, which is exactly the level of “fun but not parody” that writing of this caliber should be shooting for. I mean, sure, the jokes will fall flat, but a flat joke is way better than incoherent, self-important mellodrama.

  21. Izicata says:

    I can already tell I’m not going to enjoy this season very much. Not because of anything you guys are doing, but because the gameplay is going to be so repetitive; hit zombie 10 times, find new zombie, goto 10. It may or may not be more fun to play, but it’s certainly miserable to watch.

    1. Supahewok says:

      You’re not alone. I find zombies A) gross and B) completely uninteresting. Add to that I dislike negative seasons of Spoiler Warning, and I’ve sworn off watching this month. Batman can’t come fast enough.

      1. Ivan says:

        Don’t worry, only one more episode of this and then Chris has already promised that the next week will be a zombie game they like.

  22. Patrick-who-is-Hector says:

    So, when are you guys Spoiler Warning-ing Dark Messiah?

  23. Completely-off-topic-but-I-don’t-tweet:

    @Shamus, there was a Black Widow “movie” sort of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KVnRR5QIus

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I prefer this one:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_5KgpN38hM

      Also,a black widow movie would look like salt.

      1. “The uploader has not made this video available in your country.”

        Video DRM, yay!

        No idea what it is besides an SNL skit I presume?

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Yup,the snl black widow trailer(which is so similar to the supergirl actual trailer,making it even funnier).

  24. MichaelGC says:

    So I had to jot down a little chart like the one for Inception in order to figure out all the levels of “meta-” here, but I think around 7:30 we get:

    – Shamus
    – doing an impression of
    – Agent 47
    – doing an impression of
    – Shamus
    – doing his impression of
    – a zombie.

    Absolutely nailed it, too – dialled back the gutturality perfectly! And then instead of e.g. *gurgles* it was a definite: “Gurgle.”

    It might be fun to get everyone groaning like a zombie, so:

    Q. What’s a zombie’s favourite search engine?

  25. Mersadeon says:

    My compass broke in this game, so I had to reference the map a lot. It was just always pointing to the right.

    Weirdly enough, I have a tendency to have that happen. The Fallout 3 and Skyrim compasses did the same thing to me. Maybe I’m virtually magnetic.

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