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It’s PAX Prime 2012 and way up on the 6th floor, a place I’ll honestly admit to saying I don’t visit often, is the Deep Silver booth. If you didn’t know they were up there, you would when you came across it because half of their booth is all about the newest development in Dead Island, Dead Island Riptide. On the other half, a slightly ominous area that is all about Sacred 3, the newest, and we mean newest, update to the games’ series. Since there is no playable versions of the game, you will need to stand in line to check out some live gameplay by the developers and comments about the newest things being implemented.
With Dead Island Riptide, the first thing you will notice is that it looks pretty much like the first version of the game. This isn’t bad since the game looks pretty good anyway. One of the first things we hear is that the weather system in the game has been updated in it’s visual appeal as well as it’s effectiveness when having to deal with zombies. I mean who wants to deal with zombies in a storm. We didn’t get an exact show of how this works, but just imagine running around the island tropics with rain pouring in your face and then you suddenly see a zombie appear and grab you. A bit frightening. You may pee a little. The level we were shown was more of a horde mode level and you and your co-op player needed to do whatever you can to fight off the incoming hordes of undead while building up your defenses in the process. So that means building up chain-link fence and other barriers so that you can use what limited resources you have, meaning ammo, and fire them at the head of your enemies. This is something to be particularly aware of when you are mowing down zombies with a chaingun. It’s not unlimited when it comes to ammo and even more so you can’t just spray because the gun will overheat. Bad mojo can occur if you’ve overheat or run out of ammo.
The physics engine is going under a tweak mode at the moment due to the desire to make bodies fly through the air in a better more realistic way. Which when you think about it, who really studies that process? I mean who is the expert on body flying after just being maimed? In any case, we applaud whoever has to do that because they appear to be doing a great job. A new character class has been added to the system so you can either bring in your saved game from the first Dead Island game allowing you to progress even further with what you’ve already built up, or work on a new person in the new class. Sadly this wasn’t announced in the demo so we don’t have much information for you there. Overall the game still looks great even though it is in a pre-alpha stage and you can really tell that the developers are proud of what they are doing. Having pride in your games makes for a happy developer, and as we always say: Happy coders equals happy code.
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