Dying Light and the current state of the zombie apocalypse trend... according to 'Rift!
It took me about a month and a half longer than I had planned, but I finally finished Dying Light. I keep getting distracted or occupied with life in general to write as much as I desperately want to, but this experience drove me to mental levels I thought had been long forgotten.
I am astonished. My mind simply cannot wrap around the mere concept that something like this gained such a tremendous amount of praise from folks. Many of you know how vocal I've been on Twitter, and other various forms of social media over the last couple years, just how tired I am of zombies. And not just zombie video games, mind you. Zombies in television, comics and movies as well.
I don't really know what exactly triggered the obsession, being that the zombie genre in all forms of entertainment has been around for decades. But it didn't seem all that intrusive either. They were an ordinary staple of horror. We accepted them just as much as vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons. Zombies, of course, give some of the messiest experiences, given that dismembering one always involves lots of blood, gross squishy/crunchy noises, and they never bite their victims in a clean manner. Some of the goriest games/movies ever made pretty much revolved around zombies.
Yes, I totally get the appeal. I enjoyed them. Come on, I LOVED Dawn of the Dead and Resident Evil. I rented Zombies Ate My Neighbors for my SNES like ten times, that game was fucking awesome! There is absolutely a place for it, and I totally get there's a rampant fan base. But somewhere after 2009, when Zombieland, Left 4 Dead and The Walking Dead spearheaded fans to a whole new popular level of zombie-slaughtering experiences, things started going a bit awry.
I kinda started noticing it after Call of Duty: World at War came out in 2008, and Treyarch had a "zombie mode" for online maps. Zombie Nazis? Hey, why not? Killing zombies in general sorta bypasses those moral and ethical rules of killing, being that they're already dead, and there's usually no real emotional resonance from tearing one to shreds with a chainsaw. Same goes for Nazis, so it was a humorous mix. However, once I learned about Treyarch developing the next game for November 2010, which was later subtitled Black Ops, I watched the community go into rampant demand over a zombie mode.
Umm... okay? "Are we going to have a zombie mode in every Call of Duty game from here on out?" I thought. It wasn't really bugging me at the time, but I did question why. I mean, I play military shooters pretty much to kill other soldiers/players, and not waves of zombies. We had Left 4 Dead for that, and those games utilized the concept a lot more effectively. Then I started seeing it all over PSN and XBL with little arcade zombie games like Zombie Apocalypse and Plants vs. Zombies. DLC for games like Borderlands (The Island of Dr. Ned) and Shellshock 2 (Blood Trails) started getting zombies. Uhh... thanks? Then you have Resident Evil 5 which launched the whole Revelations spin-off mode, and I think we were reaching a point where zombie fans had everything they've ever dreamed of.
2010 is where I felt the genre hit its peak, and I honestly thought things were gonna level out and take a breather from here on. However at this point, I was already beginning to feel fatigued. I didn't even buy Dead Rising 2 right away, and I had a good time with the first one. Now, my recent mediocre review of the game does not reflect my feelings for zombie games as a whole, for the rant isn't exactly about that. When Red Dead Redemption came out to critical and commercial fanfare, the LAST thing I expected to happen afterwards was zombie DLC for that game. THE FUCK?! Why?! Who the hell is begging for zombies to appear in that?! I honestly believed the next Grand Theft Auto title was going to get a zombie mode after this, it was getting ridiculous.
There was also a forgettable zombie car-combat game called Blood Drive, and the public reception of that almost gave me the notion that others were getting tired of it too. Nope. You see, I can't really pinpoint when exactly it officially became trendy, but fantasies about surviving a zombie apocalypse spiked pretty goddamn fast all the sudden. People have tried telling me it was 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead that kickstarted the obsession, but there's no way to really tell.
A little game came out around this time. It wasn't a zombie game either, but I honestly feel it had some levels of influence to where the genre went. Minecraft is nothing short of a masterpiece in its own merit, I have nothing but praise for the game's simple yet enormous capabilities for creative gamers. It has a "survival" mode where you must build shelter, raise food, craft items and weapons, and raise defenses against respawning swarms of mindless creatures like skeletons and creepers every time the sun sets. I didn't draw conclusions then, but now I make distinct comparisons. Skeletons and spiders were basically your run-of-the-mill zombies, and creepers were essentially "boomers". They scare the fuck out of you in dark places, and often sneak into your own safe places if your defenses aren't secured. When you think about it, Minecraft is really the first massively-successful zombie survival simulation.
Then you have the first huge open-world zombie game Dead Island which came out in 2011 to a pretty healthy success. This is pretty much where I just said "oh fuck this, I'm done" with the entire genre. While not taken seriously, it was still a mix of everything we had already played years prior... just meshed together. Lots of weapons, lots of ways to kill zombies, zombie swarms scattered EVERYWHERE as far as the eye could see... Then you had the Kinect-based game Rise of Nightmares... a fucking Yakuza game with zombies, subtitled Dead Souls. Let's not forget Gears of War 3 which had you going up against "Infected" in the game's second half.
I was beginning to sorta understand. From a programming standpoint, zombie AI doesn't need to be smart. It just needs to charge rampantly at you while you frantically drill them with bullets and sharp weapons. Have mass hordes of them running at you, and it equals an instant bloodbath. Apparently, this is supposed to make the scenario "scary" and drive the player to be more on edge or panicked since the action is now completely chaotic and unpredictable. But this was 2011. I bought Gears 3 at the midnight release and plowed through it with three friends overnight in one 11-hour sitting. All four of us were like "really? They had to put zombies in this too?"
There's no impact from killing zombies in a video game. None. Other than making them go 'splodey all over the place after a shotgun blast to the face, zombies aren't really much of a threat. They're akin to a rabid dog, violently tearing itself away from the tree its leashed onto. Zombies have no motive. They have no goal. There's no drive or purpose to their existence outside of munching on other humans. They have their place in zombie games, but shoehorning them into other franchises just for the sake of creating a "new enemy threat"? Go fuck yourself. I look at zombies as a programmer's lazy way of adding action filler to games now.
Let's fast-forward to 2012/2013 when players developed a mod from ARMA 2 into something that is STILL ridiculously popular on Twitch streams alone: DayZ. Oh my fucking god. This was just someone twisting the knife into a corpse that had already been decomposing. Now you're online with other players, trying to not only survive wandering zombies in the open landscape, but survive each other as well. While it was a free alpha mod at the time, another company saw this as an instant cash-grab and instantly threw together The War Z (aka Infestation: Survival Stories later), and I just about cackled in maniacal laughter at all the dumbass sheep that flocked in droves to buy it. No really, as much as a bunch of horrible pricks those developers were, the fact that people threw money at a game that was literally a bare-bones ripoff of a FREE ALPHA MOD was utterly mind-blowing. It was simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. Terrifying because it showed the world that zombie survival horror was officially the hip cow in town begging to be milked dry.
Now it was just getting silly. Dead Island: Riptide was just around the corner, but Tecmo felt they had to jump on the bandwagon as well and inserted zombies into Ninja Gaiden with Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. You also had World War Z out in theaters that same year, and I was about ready to lose my shit over the stupid, fucktarded over-use of the letter "Z" in these titles. God, there was even a game called "Zafehouse Diaries". STOP THAT!
Let us also not forget 7 Ways to Die and How to Survive, which still focused on survival. There was State of Decay which tried a different angle with stealth mechanics. Or what about Ubisoft's ZombiU which ended up being a huge hit-and-miss launch title for the Wii U? They didn't hesitate to make a zombie mod from Half-Life 2's source engine, called Contagion.
Now I'm not saying if your game has zombies in it, that it's garbage. If the oversaturation of zombies in everything wasn't so stupidly rampant, I probably wouldn't have let this blog post get so out of hand. This is supposed to be my review of Dying Light, and here I went on a hyperactive tangent. I could just blame the caffeine, I dunno. But upon doing a quick Google-search, I learned that there have been at least sixty games/mods/DLC add-ons involving zombies over the past six years alone, and I'm pretty sure the number is much higher than that, with the rate increasing exponentially after 2011.
Seriously. I KNOW there are good games in this genre. The Last of Us is a prime example, but it succeeded mostly because of its extremely compelling story and wonderfully-written characters. Well that, and your enemies weren't really "zombies" in their nature. The Walking Dead gets a pass because it was originally a comic WAY before the trend got as bad as it is now. That, and again, good writing and interesting characters tend to be a better draw. I also enjoyed the old-school throwback of The Evil Within, even though it really could have been better.
And with another "Z"-titled game making the rounds, H1Z1, as well as Dead Island 2 still under development, I really fail to see an end to the redundant obsession with zombie survival games. The fact that the whole zombie apocalypse concept has actually been researched by professionals is enough to make me feel like a lot of these so-called fans of the genre are delusional and hopelessly consumed by the idea of shacking up in a house with an arsenal of shotguns, beef jerky and molotov cocktails. There are people that actually DREAM of this shit being an eventual reality, it's fucking disturbing! It's one thing to joke and have a bit of fun with the idea, but to actually anticipate something like that? Stay the fuck away from me.
Maybe I just don't get it. There was a time when I had fun with this concept, and a part of me really wants it to take a more creative approach. This is what happened in January, when a game called Dying Light was released, and public word-of-mouth hailed it as a complete game-changer for zombie survival/action games. But as a skeptic, I was refusing to bite. All I saw was a serious version of Dead Island, which to be fair, is hardly that much of a selling point. I later learned that Techland separated itself from Deep Silver due to creative differences over Dead Island 2, and I managed to gain a small shred of curiosity.
Friends online and offline (hell, even co-workers!) were telling me to get this game, and that I would actually enjoy it. Nothing else was out that month that I wanted to get, so I went to Gamestop that weekend and threw down $60 on the spot...
I have a lot more on the zombie subject I have yet to come close to covering, but I'm saving a lot of that for the actual review. This was just the build-up. I felt it was necessary to give you guys an actual starting point on why I feel the way I do on zombies as a whole.
I am astonished. My mind simply cannot wrap around the mere concept that something like this gained such a tremendous amount of praise from folks. Many of you know how vocal I've been on Twitter, and other various forms of social media over the last couple years, just how tired I am of zombies. And not just zombie video games, mind you. Zombies in television, comics and movies as well.
I don't really know what exactly triggered the obsession, being that the zombie genre in all forms of entertainment has been around for decades. But it didn't seem all that intrusive either. They were an ordinary staple of horror. We accepted them just as much as vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons. Zombies, of course, give some of the messiest experiences, given that dismembering one always involves lots of blood, gross squishy/crunchy noises, and they never bite their victims in a clean manner. Some of the goriest games/movies ever made pretty much revolved around zombies.
Yes, I totally get the appeal. I enjoyed them. Come on, I LOVED Dawn of the Dead and Resident Evil. I rented Zombies Ate My Neighbors for my SNES like ten times, that game was fucking awesome! There is absolutely a place for it, and I totally get there's a rampant fan base. But somewhere after 2009, when Zombieland, Left 4 Dead and The Walking Dead spearheaded fans to a whole new popular level of zombie-slaughtering experiences, things started going a bit awry.
I kinda started noticing it after Call of Duty: World at War came out in 2008, and Treyarch had a "zombie mode" for online maps. Zombie Nazis? Hey, why not? Killing zombies in general sorta bypasses those moral and ethical rules of killing, being that they're already dead, and there's usually no real emotional resonance from tearing one to shreds with a chainsaw. Same goes for Nazis, so it was a humorous mix. However, once I learned about Treyarch developing the next game for November 2010, which was later subtitled Black Ops, I watched the community go into rampant demand over a zombie mode.
Umm... okay? "Are we going to have a zombie mode in every Call of Duty game from here on out?" I thought. It wasn't really bugging me at the time, but I did question why. I mean, I play military shooters pretty much to kill other soldiers/players, and not waves of zombies. We had Left 4 Dead for that, and those games utilized the concept a lot more effectively. Then I started seeing it all over PSN and XBL with little arcade zombie games like Zombie Apocalypse and Plants vs. Zombies. DLC for games like Borderlands (The Island of Dr. Ned) and Shellshock 2 (Blood Trails) started getting zombies. Uhh... thanks? Then you have Resident Evil 5 which launched the whole Revelations spin-off mode, and I think we were reaching a point where zombie fans had everything they've ever dreamed of.
2010 is where I felt the genre hit its peak, and I honestly thought things were gonna level out and take a breather from here on. However at this point, I was already beginning to feel fatigued. I didn't even buy Dead Rising 2 right away, and I had a good time with the first one. Now, my recent mediocre review of the game does not reflect my feelings for zombie games as a whole, for the rant isn't exactly about that. When Red Dead Redemption came out to critical and commercial fanfare, the LAST thing I expected to happen afterwards was zombie DLC for that game. THE FUCK?! Why?! Who the hell is begging for zombies to appear in that?! I honestly believed the next Grand Theft Auto title was going to get a zombie mode after this, it was getting ridiculous.
There was also a forgettable zombie car-combat game called Blood Drive, and the public reception of that almost gave me the notion that others were getting tired of it too. Nope. You see, I can't really pinpoint when exactly it officially became trendy, but fantasies about surviving a zombie apocalypse spiked pretty goddamn fast all the sudden. People have tried telling me it was 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead that kickstarted the obsession, but there's no way to really tell.
A little game came out around this time. It wasn't a zombie game either, but I honestly feel it had some levels of influence to where the genre went. Minecraft is nothing short of a masterpiece in its own merit, I have nothing but praise for the game's simple yet enormous capabilities for creative gamers. It has a "survival" mode where you must build shelter, raise food, craft items and weapons, and raise defenses against respawning swarms of mindless creatures like skeletons and creepers every time the sun sets. I didn't draw conclusions then, but now I make distinct comparisons. Skeletons and spiders were basically your run-of-the-mill zombies, and creepers were essentially "boomers". They scare the fuck out of you in dark places, and often sneak into your own safe places if your defenses aren't secured. When you think about it, Minecraft is really the first massively-successful zombie survival simulation.
Then you have the first huge open-world zombie game Dead Island which came out in 2011 to a pretty healthy success. This is pretty much where I just said "oh fuck this, I'm done" with the entire genre. While not taken seriously, it was still a mix of everything we had already played years prior... just meshed together. Lots of weapons, lots of ways to kill zombies, zombie swarms scattered EVERYWHERE as far as the eye could see... Then you had the Kinect-based game Rise of Nightmares... a fucking Yakuza game with zombies, subtitled Dead Souls. Let's not forget Gears of War 3 which had you going up against "Infected" in the game's second half.
I was beginning to sorta understand. From a programming standpoint, zombie AI doesn't need to be smart. It just needs to charge rampantly at you while you frantically drill them with bullets and sharp weapons. Have mass hordes of them running at you, and it equals an instant bloodbath. Apparently, this is supposed to make the scenario "scary" and drive the player to be more on edge or panicked since the action is now completely chaotic and unpredictable. But this was 2011. I bought Gears 3 at the midnight release and plowed through it with three friends overnight in one 11-hour sitting. All four of us were like "really? They had to put zombies in this too?"
There's no impact from killing zombies in a video game. None. Other than making them go 'splodey all over the place after a shotgun blast to the face, zombies aren't really much of a threat. They're akin to a rabid dog, violently tearing itself away from the tree its leashed onto. Zombies have no motive. They have no goal. There's no drive or purpose to their existence outside of munching on other humans. They have their place in zombie games, but shoehorning them into other franchises just for the sake of creating a "new enemy threat"? Go fuck yourself. I look at zombies as a programmer's lazy way of adding action filler to games now.
Let's fast-forward to 2012/2013 when players developed a mod from ARMA 2 into something that is STILL ridiculously popular on Twitch streams alone: DayZ. Oh my fucking god. This was just someone twisting the knife into a corpse that had already been decomposing. Now you're online with other players, trying to not only survive wandering zombies in the open landscape, but survive each other as well. While it was a free alpha mod at the time, another company saw this as an instant cash-grab and instantly threw together The War Z (aka Infestation: Survival Stories later), and I just about cackled in maniacal laughter at all the dumbass sheep that flocked in droves to buy it. No really, as much as a bunch of horrible pricks those developers were, the fact that people threw money at a game that was literally a bare-bones ripoff of a FREE ALPHA MOD was utterly mind-blowing. It was simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. Terrifying because it showed the world that zombie survival horror was officially the hip cow in town begging to be milked dry.
Now it was just getting silly. Dead Island: Riptide was just around the corner, but Tecmo felt they had to jump on the bandwagon as well and inserted zombies into Ninja Gaiden with Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. You also had World War Z out in theaters that same year, and I was about ready to lose my shit over the stupid, fucktarded over-use of the letter "Z" in these titles. God, there was even a game called "Zafehouse Diaries". STOP THAT!
Let us also not forget 7 Ways to Die and How to Survive, which still focused on survival. There was State of Decay which tried a different angle with stealth mechanics. Or what about Ubisoft's ZombiU which ended up being a huge hit-and-miss launch title for the Wii U? They didn't hesitate to make a zombie mod from Half-Life 2's source engine, called Contagion.
Now I'm not saying if your game has zombies in it, that it's garbage. If the oversaturation of zombies in everything wasn't so stupidly rampant, I probably wouldn't have let this blog post get so out of hand. This is supposed to be my review of Dying Light, and here I went on a hyperactive tangent. I could just blame the caffeine, I dunno. But upon doing a quick Google-search, I learned that there have been at least sixty games/mods/DLC add-ons involving zombies over the past six years alone, and I'm pretty sure the number is much higher than that, with the rate increasing exponentially after 2011.
Seriously. I KNOW there are good games in this genre. The Last of Us is a prime example, but it succeeded mostly because of its extremely compelling story and wonderfully-written characters. Well that, and your enemies weren't really "zombies" in their nature. The Walking Dead gets a pass because it was originally a comic WAY before the trend got as bad as it is now. That, and again, good writing and interesting characters tend to be a better draw. I also enjoyed the old-school throwback of The Evil Within, even though it really could have been better.
And with another "Z"-titled game making the rounds, H1Z1, as well as Dead Island 2 still under development, I really fail to see an end to the redundant obsession with zombie survival games. The fact that the whole zombie apocalypse concept has actually been researched by professionals is enough to make me feel like a lot of these so-called fans of the genre are delusional and hopelessly consumed by the idea of shacking up in a house with an arsenal of shotguns, beef jerky and molotov cocktails. There are people that actually DREAM of this shit being an eventual reality, it's fucking disturbing! It's one thing to joke and have a bit of fun with the idea, but to actually anticipate something like that? Stay the fuck away from me.
Maybe I just don't get it. There was a time when I had fun with this concept, and a part of me really wants it to take a more creative approach. This is what happened in January, when a game called Dying Light was released, and public word-of-mouth hailed it as a complete game-changer for zombie survival/action games. But as a skeptic, I was refusing to bite. All I saw was a serious version of Dead Island, which to be fair, is hardly that much of a selling point. I later learned that Techland separated itself from Deep Silver due to creative differences over Dead Island 2, and I managed to gain a small shred of curiosity.
Friends online and offline (hell, even co-workers!) were telling me to get this game, and that I would actually enjoy it. Nothing else was out that month that I wanted to get, so I went to Gamestop that weekend and threw down $60 on the spot...
I have a lot more on the zombie subject I have yet to come close to covering, but I'm saving a lot of that for the actual review. This was just the build-up. I felt it was necessary to give you guys an actual starting point on why I feel the way I do on zombies as a whole.