As I slash and shoot my way through 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead Island 2, I can't help but feel like I'm in William Shakespeare's most famous play. Except, instead of Juliet calling down to Romeo from her balcony, it's every NPC shouting down mission instructions to my zombie slayer.
The first-person melee game from Dambuster Studios makes a deeply strange design choice and I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to notice it. About 12 hours in, I realized that for roughly the 50th time, I was entering an area, hearing a disembodied voice, looking around to find where the noise was coming from, only to realize that th💟e NPC addressing my character was st𝄹anding on a platform above them.
This happens so often that it has me a little g♏obsmacked. After I noticed it, I realized that I couldn’t remember a single instance (after the plane crash that kicks off the game) when an NPC had been introduced anywhere other than a s🤪afe room, or on a balcony (or similar elevated platform).
When you’re inside a safe room, NPCs get complex animated cutscenes. In one, I saw a zombie hulk reach in through a window, shattering the glass, grab a dude’s head, and squeeze it until it burst. Even when dialogue is more grounded, the game handles the nuances of talking to someone perfectly competently. Through dedicated voice acting and solid mocap work, it clears the bar of making you feel like there's a character there.
But when you’re on a mission, you will almost only meet people standing still on top of objects or on balconies. When I met that dude that got his head crushed? Standing on a balcony. When you meet an aging Hollywood star at his Beverly Hills mansion? Standing on a balcony. When I met a woman on an outdoor movie set? Standing on top of a bus. Then I went inside to a soundstage where another guy was waiting for me… also on a balcony. It’s a bizarre choice that makes many of the NPCs you meet interchangeable. If I'm so far away that I can't see someone’s face, how am I going to remember them?
The only conclusion I can come to is that these NPCs haven't been programmed to fight alongside you in battle, so Dambuster can only introduce them safely outside the fray. But it seems extremely strange that there wasn't any other solution. Couldn't the NPC just run and hide? Or, at the very least, cower in cover until the player character dispatched all the zombies?
I don't make games so you should take every bit of my speculation with a grain of salt. But if this is compensating for a lack of animations, it doesn't seem like an especially easy workaround. I'm always wary of ‘lazy devs’ explanations for why games turn out a certain way, and I would be especially skeptical in this case. By saving on whatever work was cut out by skipping those run-and-hide animations, Dambuster instead opted to design every arena so that it included a balcony or elevated platform. That seems like more work!
Games are weird, and most developers that have shipped one will tell you it's a miracle any game makes it out the door at all. Though we see the graphics and UI, beneath the surface, all sorts of strange things are chugging along. In 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fallout 3, for example, the metro train was an equippable armor piece attached to an NPC who moved along unseen beneath it. Game engines are twisted amalgamations of code, and I doubt I'll ever fully understand how they work. I assume Dead Island 2 is using balconies to work around some equally strange behind-the-scenes issue that we may never be aware of. I can only hope the problem is as strange as the solution.