Getting Your Hopes Up

There is something to be said about hoping for more than what is really delivered. A trailer for a film is released, only to completely overhype the film in every way. It isn’t just a feeling of disappointment you get when you see the film and realize that it’s bad; you feel cheated and lied to, as well. I think that this is even truer for video games, since many teaser trailers for games do not even show actual gameplay. Using pre-rendered animation, the marketing for these games are meant to draw as much attention as possible, even if the game isn’t particularly interesting or innovative.

Enter Dead Island. Dead Island was a game designed to be an open-world role-playing game where players fought side by side to survive in a tropical resort during the zombie apocalypse. After a few years of development hell, rumors began to spread about the game finally coming to fruition. Even then, attention on the game wasn’t very widespread until an announcement trailer was released.

 

The trailer drove all ideas about what the game could be to a fever pitch. The trailer was unconventionally laid out, extremely well-produced, and heart-wrenchingly beautiful and extremely disturbing at the same time. Suddenly, people believed that it could be more than a zombie survival game; it could be a stunning tale of having to protect people close to you and the terrible decisions you would have to make to keep them (and yourself) safe. Suddenly, it seemed like it was something beyond just basic survival; it was about saving every person or only some people close to you.

It wasn’t.

Dead Island had some good ideas, but it never delivered the story or the characters or the themes that the trailer promised. It was just another action role-playing game, only with zombies. Survivors you don’t know just send you to fetch trinkets or escort dumb, computer-controlled characters from point to point, and you try to stop your generic villain from dooming everyone in the long run. It wasn’t a particularly bad game (though I have heard of some nasty glitches and bugs that plague the game), but it wasn’t very unique.

The game sold well, of course, thanks to the trailer. It is still one of my favorite trailers of all time. But it oversold the game itself. The game wasn’t terrible, but it never delivered what the trailer promised in terms of tone and emotion.