Not Broken Version of Dead Island Now Apparently on Steam

Dead Island went live on Steam last night, as many PC games do. What customers booted up Dead Island, however, they were treated to something...strange. You could tap a button and begin clipping through the environment, there were trace elements in the code about the Xbox 360 version, and all sorts of other nonsense. All of this created suspicion perhaps the wrong version of Dead Island had been uploaded to Steam's servers.

Publisher Deep Silver isn't admitting that's what happened today, but it did just issue a statement that the "correct version" of Dead Island is now being distributed through Steam.

This updated version may break compatibility with saves, however. Deep Silver noted that players will have the option to "Chapter Select" their way back to roughly where they were, though.

"We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience caused to fans who wanted to spend their day crushing some zombie skulls," said the company in a statement. "We are right there with you."

There will be a "make good" moment for fans eventually but in what form remains to be seen.

"Stay tuned in coming days for those details as internal discussions are ongoing on our end," said the company.

If you're still experiencing "The Ripper activation bug," Deep Silver's aware of it. A fix is coming.

What a mess of a launch! Hopefully, these issues let people get to the zombie killin' soon, as Brad seems pretty keen on the game. This one seems to have fallen in the good pile of Techland releases.

Looking forward to this =)

I don't know. No clip is pretty cool.

Not admitting, hmm. I want to know the real story behind this! Patrick investigate!!!

I haven't had a chance to play it myself, but judging by what Danny Baranowsky had to say on Twitter, this patch actually may have done more harm than good. Yeesh! 

Good to see them working on things and communicating.

I was trying to reinstall it and redownload it an hour ago, did the new version just go live? Because that hour was wasted if so :L

Hmm.. I want to know the real story on this one, seems like such a big misstep. Patrick! Investigate!

Cloak yourself into HQ and hack some computers or something. Find some air ducts!

Edit: Sorry for double post, first one disappeared after I wrote it but it's suddenly back o.O

Haven't launched this yet. Will I need to redownload? Or is it just an update?

Pressing Y either let you no clip or crashed the game. It added an element of danger that shall be missed.

Man, I would not want to be working at Techland today. I know this is a major bummer to a lot of people who wanted to play the game, but avoid places like the Steam forums at all costs. I know it's an inconvenience but these people are fucking ridiculous. You'd think someone just ruined their life.

Game looks interesting, i'll wait a couple weeks for some patches and hopefully a steam sale.

Someone at Deep Silver must have been really tired. Glad I'm in Europe so I don't have to experience this. :)

Good thing I didn't plan on a release day buy for this game. There just has to be hell going on somewhere inside Techland over all of this.

Great. Now if we could just have a Giantbomb review for the game, we'd be all set.

This is crazy this is why I don't buy games on release day 99 percent of the time but damn this is a huge  epic fail.

Bah hahahahahah. They loaded the X360 version... Heheh... Onto Steam... Hahhaha... Instead of the PC version? Hahahahahha, that's fucking hilarious. Noobs.

Image caption typo: "diaster"

It's a terrible game that runs even worse for myself and several other people that I know who also bought it. I know better, but I have contacted Steam in hopes of getting a refund for this POS. Here's hoping I will get it so I can put that money towards a hopefully good game.

The bits of this game that I watched on youtube were so completely and ridiculously out of sync with the expectations set up by the amazing trailer that I have to assume that this entire game is an enormous prank.

Erm... What I mean to say, is, I'm waiting for the review.

I have re-downloaded Dead Island in the last hour, I can confirm that the version on the Steam servers is still the debug version.

I can confirm that even after the patch the game is still really buggy.  Menu options don't work correctly, objects and enemies pop in and out of existence, and the game will randomly drop to about 3 frames per second and stay there.  Too bad because I'm finding the mix of Borderlands and Left 4 Dead really interesting and fun. 

i'll play anything that's 4 player coop these days. *sigh*

Cracked up at the title

The game is still buggy as hell.  It's a shame that this game is complete port even though they went on record to say it wasn't...what a load of shit!!  All they did was put out a patch to gloss over the dev debug stuff, but it's still the dev debug build.  They couldn't even bother to version up their patch numbering so the game is still reading version 1.0 and now the dlc for preordering is broken.  Sadly enough, I still don't think this was the worst release of a game ever.

Spoiler alert: the game is actually still pretty broken. I'm crashing frequently--on the lowest settings with a max-capable machine.

What do you expect, anymore? It seems about 90% of releases on the PC are just half-hearted ports of games where the primary effort and focus is on a console. PC is the red-headed step-child and the whole time we're being ignored and dismissed by developers and publishers in action, we're acting as apologists on their behalf.

Yeah my game still has two-three second pauses every so often and sometimes i'll just crash right to desktop. I have the proper version because I downloaded it pretty late in the day today, but it's unplayable unless it's in offline mode.

This fucking sucks.

Also you DON'T NEED TO RE-DOWNLOAD the game to know if you have the right version. Just verify the game cache to make sure you have the same files that are on the steam server. All you're doing is bogging down servers and making everything slower for everyone.

Game was buggy last night.  Dont know if they patched it, but Ive had no problems barring 2 load errors that required me to drop to desktop, and click ok for it to finish loading.  Yea, thats a new one....About the time I got to the lighthouse game has pretty much ran perfect.   
 
Maybe 360 version was on certain servers.  Barring, the early game crashes/areas with poor framerate, I had no problems, nor any ruined save files.

Happened to me last night, hit some random button and had control of a flying camera with no clipping, which I used as an opportunity to explore the island. Unfortunately when I loaded up my game today it had been patched and it restarted my save, which had a few hours on it, back at the hotel room where the game opens, and I couldn't trigger the scripted elevator event so I had to restart the game from the beginning.

About the actual game it wasn't bad, pretty ugly to look at, but so far it's been satisfying smashing zombie skulls.

I don't know what's more buggy, Dead Island or the grammar in this article...

@cday130 said:

I don't know what's more buggy, Dead Island or the grammar in this article...

OH SNAP.

Lets argue semantics and not talk about dead island.

Looks like the 360 version is the way to go then? So far I don't think I've heard anything messy about that yet..

@playastation said:

@cday130 said:

I don't know what's more buggy, Dead Island or the grammar in this article...

OH SNAP.

Lets argue semantics and not talk about dead island.

How dare I hold Giantbomb staff to a higher standard than your average fanfic writer!

Proofreading gents, proofreading.

This is all a gigantic diaster!

Well, at least that was fast.

I want to buy it but not until they fix the PC version.

@Branthog said:

What do you expect, anymore? It seems about 90% of releases on the PC are just half-hearted ports of games where the primary effort and focus is on a console. PC is the red-headed step-child and the whole time we're being ignored and dismissed by developers and publishers in action, we're acting as apologists on their behalf.

I wouldn't say it's close to 90% at all. Bad ports are pretty rare for full retail games.

Soooo.. should I not buy this on steam?

I had practically zero issues before the patch (no more than any new PC game has). Either I'm lucky or others are exaggerating.

Some of the shit listed isn't even an issue. "There were trace elements in the code about the Xbox 360 version" --? SAME FOR PRACTICALLY EVERY SINGLE PC PORT FROM THIS GENERATION. It seems like people are just actively looking for problems for the sake of complaining. Fuck, Internet.

yeah everyone i know, the patch seemed to break things even more.

Actually doesn't come out till friday for us EU folks.

Fix your shit, yo.

@MrKlorox said:

I had practically zero issues before the patch (no more than any new PC game has). Either I'm lucky or others are exaggerating.

Some of the shit listed isn't even an issue. "There were trace elements in the code about the Xbox 360 version" --? SAME FOR PRACTICALLY EVERY SINGLE PC PORT FROM THIS GENERATION. It seems like people are just actively looking for problems for the sake of complaining. Fuck, Internet.

The reason that is an issue is because Techland claimed that the PC version was not a port; that it was built from the ground up simultaneously with the console versions.

I am interested in hearing how this mess up actually happened.

@Meatsim said:

I am interested in hearing how this mess up actually happened.

someone was drunk.

The patch they put on the PC today broke multiplayer.

So apparently the newly rebroken version of Dead Island is now on Steam.

I screwed myself and broke my game. I was playing in Texas just fine. Then I traveled and connected to Steam in Germany(layover) to Kuwait. Now the game is locked and re-encypted. I just hope it unlocks when I get to Kuwait. Freaking German laws...