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The Game That Should Have Been Terrible

ZombiU was not only a great reason to buy a Wii U, it was one of 2012's best experiences. Tough, scary, and weird, the developers at Ubisoft Montpellier talk about how it all happened.

No Caption Provided

It was probably unfair to write ZombiU off so quickly, but...it was called ZombiU. Between my disappointment in Assassin’s Creed III, Ubisoft’s track record with Nintendo launch games, and the silly name, anything more than surprisingly mediocre seemed like a longshot. But as the horror guy at Giant Bomb, if I wasn’t going to play it, who?

A few hours and a few completely unexpected deaths later, it became clear ZombiU was special. Besides being scary as hell, the game managed to turn me around on the whole idea of animation priority as it relates to game design (see: Monster Hunter). That’s no small feat, and it’s why ZombiU ranked in my favorite games of the year.

When I asked for the chance to fire off some questions to the developers at Ubisoft Montpellier, I had to ask about the damn name. There are no great revelations to behold, however. ZombiU was chosen because it was both descriptive of the game’s content, and it was a Wii U launch title. That Ubisoft’s first game was 1986’s Zombi had no bearing on why it was called ZombiU, either.

“As odd as it may seem, it was a pure coincidence,” said producer Guillaume Brunier in a recent email exchange. “Some of us on the team did play that game way back in the old days, but that’s it.”

The original Zombi was a first-person, point-and-click survival game heavily influenced by George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead film. Zombi gave players control over four different characters fending for themselves in a mall. Besides trying to stay alive amidst the zombie apocalypse, there’s not much overlap between Zombi and ZombiU. (That game actually looks pretty cool, though!)

ZombiU was not always ZombiU, either. When Nintendo first revealed Wii U at E3 2011, Ubisoft also announced a first-person-shooter called Killer Freaks From Outer Space. It didn’t look that great. While some of the concepts created for Killer Freaks From Outer Space carried over, including a multiplayer mode where one person acts as a humanized Left 4 Dead AI director, much of the game design was overhauled.

What the team always knew, however, was the game had to eventually ship for Wii U’s launch.

Killer Freaks From Outer Space was shown at E3, and then never seen again before ZombiU.
Killer Freaks From Outer Space was shown at E3, and then never seen again before ZombiU.

“Being tied to a release date always has an influence on what we are able to produce,” said Brunier. “For ZombiU, we decided early on what we did not want to compromise on: Wii U GamePad use, and a true survival experience. For the rest, we sometimes had to manage our ambitions.”

Managed ambitions explains why, besides guns, your character can only swing around a cricket bat for melee attacks. By the end of the game, you’re intimately familiar with that cricket bat. As someone who never quite understood why anyone could enjoy games where you were forced into canned animations, after spending 15 hours with a cricket bat, I became closely acquainted with its specific timing. There was certifiable merit in knowing a weapon that well, given how much precise timing played into surviving longterm in ZombiU. That said, the only reason there weren’t more weapons is because there just wasn’t any time to make them.

When the box for ZombiU showed up on my desk, I wasn’t sure what to think. All I’d heard about was a game vaguely influenced by Dark Souls. Truth be told, I hardly suspected that would mean a game interested in excitedly punishing the player every step of the way. I suspect ZombiU isn’t nearly as challenging as Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls, but it operates on the same principle: act with purpose. If you try to bite off more than you chew, if you try to act like the badass that other games actively encourage, the game will smack you to the ground and laugh.

That doesn’t seem to line up with what you expect from a launch game, and while I’m much happier with what ZombiU became, didn’t it make more sense to make a more mainstream experience?

“We figured if we worried about that and made decisions accordingly, we would have delivered a lukewarm experience,” said Brunier. “And we really did not want to do that. We want people to remember ZombiU as a game that lived up to its promise as a true survival horror game.”

“Actually, being so harsh with the player was not a goal in itself,” said story design director Gabrielle Shrager. “We were driven by our wish to deliver a realistic experience. Just for one moment, picture yourself, I mean really try to picture yourself in the middle of a zombie outbreak. Would you feel empowered? This powerlessness makes every zombie encounter epic, and the reward of surpassing oneself all the more satisfying.”

The moment more than one zombie shows up, you might as well turn around and run away.
The moment more than one zombie shows up, you might as well turn around and run away.

Powerlessness was crystallized roughly an hour into the game. You’re returning from your first mission--an initial, brief flirtation with the outside world. Surviving a one-on-one encounter with a shambler in ZombiU can be intense, and that’s about all you’ve dealt so far. Then, moments before returning to your safe house, the one place you can reliably count on, you’re shut out, and told to defend the incoming horde. Horde? Yeah, horde. That’s not just one or two zombies, it’s a whole crowd of them. I barely survived the encounter, but it mostly felt like luck. It was a moment where players were supposed to die, learn about resurrection, and not have to walk very far for your precious, precious equipment.

Shrager pointed to another moment where this was true, as well: ZombiU’s very first sequence. When the game opens, there’s a brief cutscene where players encounter The Prepper. In most games, you're given control in a safe, quiet moment. Nope! Suddenly, you’re thrust into this screwed up world, and dozens of zombies are chasing you.

“We wanted unprepared people to die so they’d understand what the game is about,” he said. “ [...] We are quite comfortable with killing your survivors in the game, because it is faithful to the zombie genre where most of the main characters die, and significant for the experience. Plus, you don’t ever see a game over screen. The story picks up with a newbie survivor where your last character left off...sort of like a deadly relay race.”

“A deadly relay race” is one hell of an accurate way to describe ZombiU. You’ll spend six hours with one character, make one false step on a platform, fall to your death, and start back at the safe house. Your "progress" is saved, but you don't spawn nearby. If you're lucky, maybe you were coming back from a successful mission, but chances are that area is infested with the undead, and the prospect of trudging back there, no matter what treasures were in your pack, aren’t worth it. These are the most infuriating moments of ZombiU, and also what makes it work.

Having players performing ambitious corpse runs upon greeting death came up early in the development process, the team told me, and quickly became a central pillar the rest of the game

All of these concepts mold a game I suspect many people might not finish. It would be no great surprise to me if someone bought ZombiU on launch day, and quickly shut it off. The developers aren’t losing sleep over this idea.

“The idea of players not finishing the game is not upsetting to us,” said Shrager. “The idea of players not being scared witless and not having a memorable experience does. “

One of ZombiU’s most memorable moments (this will be a mild spoiler!) comes during an extended sequence investigating a nursery. Nothing good happens during nursery sections in horror games, movies, or novels. Hell, hospitals in real-life are creepy enough, and it’s only made worse by someone dripping blood from the ceiling and sending the walking dead after you. What’s amazing about ZombiU’s nursery is how little actually happens. There is one jump scare from a closet, and otherwise...nothing. it’s quiet tension until a nail biting battle with one of the game’s few boss characters, a zombie nurse with the ability to zap around the environment. When you eventually take her down, you’re asked to use the in-game tablet to examine the zombie. You’ve never been asked to do this before, and so you don’t even really think about the request that much. As the tablet nears the zombie’s face, you look down at your real-life GamePad and BOOM! The zombie emerges, and utterly paralyzes the player.

“After that fight is over, the player is relaxed, relieved that he got rid of that ‘monster’ after a stressful fight,” said Shragrer. “At that particular moment, the player is definitely ‘off guard.’ It’s the perfect moment for a jump scare that takes you by surprise when you least expect it.”

No Caption Provided

Yeah, well, you got me.

Messing with players isn’t limited to scripted events, either. ZombiU was built with certain dynamic elements the development staff can tweak on-the-fly and without issuing a patch. Not long after the game was out, Ubisoft Montpellier started taunting the community for not having finished the game’s vaunted Survival mode, in which you’re only given one survivor to finish the whole game. The tauntings came in the form of in-game text that prodded players.

“Some players have spent more than 100 hours in the game!” said Shrager. “That surprised us. Some others are still trying to beat the survivor mode after 50 tries! That’s dedication. It’s been amazingly fun and rewarding for the dev team to watch players get the crap scared out of them in all the viral walkthrough videos--I think they hate us and love us with equal measure for making them feel so vulnerable.”

For the moment, Ubisoft isn’t talking about any downloadable content for ZombiU, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we never saw any. The developers do have the ability to spawn zombie hordes, craft new events, and deploy new challenges, though, and it sounds like that may be coming.

“I can’t talk about new content but I can say we will continue messing around with players,” said Brunier. “We’re having quite a bit of fun doing it!”

Patrick Klepek on Google+

187 Comments

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TheHT

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Edited By TheHT

Seeing the original Zombi makes me realize I'd love to play a survival horror isometric turn-based strategy zombie game.

XCOM but with zombies everywhere and the goal is to sneak around and survive. You'd encounter other randomly generated surivors who could be hostile, or friendly, or deceptively friendly. Then, like XCOM, when your survivors get strong enough and find/make enough sweet loot, you just start massacring zombies.

Then, unlike XCOM, the next stage in the game takes place. Instead of just securing safe rooms, you start securing towns, then cities, etc. Then it introduces elements of a Sim City game as you rebuild society! But you start having to deal more often with other humans who want what you have, all along with a much more massive amount of zombies.

Holy shit, I'd play the fuck outta that.

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paulwade1984

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Edited By paulwade1984

I liked this article. Excellent read. More like this please.

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CptMorganCA

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@mrpandaman said:

@ll_Exile_ll said:

I've never understood the hate for so-called "animation priority." It seems less like animation priority and more like common sense. Taking actions take time, whether swinging a sword, reloading a gun, or crouching. I just don't get it, how else would you expect these things to work?

I think it's sometimes the inability to get out of the animation that becomes the problem. The inability to interrupt yourself.

To me Animation Priority has become another way to do combat, and nothing else. It's not bad, it's just preference. It's totally reasonable to hate it. The most obvious examples, the Souls games, do it really well. Surprisingly enough, Dead Rising 1 & 2 also heavily rely on animation in combat.

In these sorts of games, a significant part of the strategy is to know how long an animation will take, and plan attacks accordingly. I love it :)

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jred250

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Edited By jred250

Great article Patrick! I love that you took the time to go in depth with an underappreciated game. Keep up the good workq

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mclargepants

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Edited By mclargepants

Great article, I still haven't gotten around to playing this game, maybe after Ni No Kuni, but I am looking forward to it!

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triumvir

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Edited By triumvir

A good article. The title is maybe a little awkward.

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glyn

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Edited By glyn

@CptMorganCA said:

@mrpandaman said:

@ll_Exile_ll said:

I've never understood the hate for so-called "animation priority." It seems less like animation priority and more like common sense. Taking actions take time, whether swinging a sword, reloading a gun, or crouching. I just don't get it, how else would you expect these things to work?

I think it's sometimes the inability to get out of the animation that becomes the problem. The inability to interrupt yourself.

To me Animation Priority has become another way to do combat, and nothing else. It's not bad, it's just preference. It's totally reasonable to hate it. The most obvious examples, the Souls games, do it really well. Surprisingly enough, Dead Rising 1 & 2 also heavily rely on animation in combat.

In these sorts of games, a significant part of the strategy is to know how long an animation will take, and plan attacks accordingly. I love it :)

Ninja Gaiden also relied on animation

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BBAlpert

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Edited By BBAlpert
@cannonballBAM

@Daveyo520 said:

I thought this was going to be about Sleeping Dogs.

Aww look at the little guys! Someone get GameSpy on the line, we've got puppies that need proper petting!
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ProfessorEss

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Edited By ProfessorEss
@CptMorganCA said:

@mrpandaman said:

@ll_Exile_ll said:

I've never understood the hate for so-called "animation priority." It seems less like animation priority and more like common sense. Taking actions take time, whether swinging a sword, reloading a gun, or crouching. I just don't get it, how else would you expect these things to work?

I think it's sometimes the inability to get out of the animation that becomes the problem. The inability to interrupt yourself.

To me Animation Priority has become another way to do combat, and nothing else. It's not bad, it's just preference. It's totally reasonable to hate it. The most obvious examples, the Souls games, do it really well. Surprisingly enough, Dead Rising 1 & 2 also heavily rely on animation in combat.

In these sorts of games, a significant part of the strategy is to know how long an animation will take, and plan attacks accordingly. I love it :)

That's one of the big things that confuses me about ZombiU. I also love animation priority (used appropriately of course) but how much strategy can it really add if there's only one weapon? Would it really take someone who's played a lot of Monster Hunter or Souls much effiort to master a single weapon's timing? 
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AlKusanagi

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Edited By AlKusanagi

I could have sworn that other than GB, this game was widely reviewed poorly.

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mintyice

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Edited By mintyice

Killing female zombies is sexist.

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jimmyfenix

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Edited By jimmyfenix

You kill female zombies

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Gerhabio

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Edited By Gerhabio

I thought this was going to be about Sleeping Dogs (though I liked the first True Crime).

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SirOptimusPrime

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Edited By SirOptimusPrime

Good read. I'm still not entirely sold on a WiiU, but if more experimental stuff like this gets put out on it then I might have to bite the bullet.

I generally hate nursery levels in horror games because they rely on "Oh look it's a dead baby /pathos" but not when it's like you've described. That sounds more like the return to the Ishimura in Dead Space 2 which, while totally overblown, was memorable because so little happened (for the first ten or so minutes) in a game that was all about bombast. I like that, because it's a minimalist approach in a modern, pew-pew world. I want more minimalism in my horror games in general, but wish they could find a niche to live in like, say, strategy games or something.

@TheHT said:

Seeing the original Zombi makes me realize I'd love to play a survival horror isometric turn-based strategy zombie game.

XCOM but with zombies everywhere and the goal is to sneak around and survive. You'd encounter other randomly generated surivors who could be hostile, or friendly, or deceptively friendly. Then, like XCOM, when your survivors get strong enough and find/make enough sweet loot, you just start massacring zombies.

Then, unlike XCOM, the next stage in the game takes place. Instead of just securing safe rooms, you start securing towns, then cities, etc. Then it introduces elements of a Sim City game as you rebuild society! But you start having to deal more often with other humans who want what you have, all along with a much more massive amount of zombies.

Holy shit, I'd play the fuck outta that.

This just makes me wanna play UFO Defense.

Thanks a lot.

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manhattan_project

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I was sure it was going to be about Sleeping Dogs.

The couple of hours I played of ZombiU, before I said "fuck this" and traded it in, were spent fighting with bad controls and terribly boring combat. That anyone compared it to Dark Souls is crazy. That game is actually fun to play.

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CptMorganCA

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Edited By CptMorganCA

@ProfessorEss said:

@CptMorganCA said:

@mrpandaman said:

@ll_Exile_ll said:

I've never understood the hate for so-called "animation priority." It seems less like animation priority and more like common sense. Taking actions take time, whether swinging a sword, reloading a gun, or crouching. I just don't get it, how else would you expect these things to work?

I think it's sometimes the inability to get out of the animation that becomes the problem. The inability to interrupt yourself.

To me Animation Priority has become another way to do combat, and nothing else. It's not bad, it's just preference. It's totally reasonable to hate it. The most obvious examples, the Souls games, do it really well. Surprisingly enough, Dead Rising 1 & 2 also heavily rely on animation in combat.

In these sorts of games, a significant part of the strategy is to know how long an animation will take, and plan attacks accordingly. I love it :)

That's one of the big things that confuses me about ZombiU. I also love animation priority (used appropriately of course) but how much strategy can it really add if there's only one weapon? Would it really take someone who's played a lot of Monster Hunter or Souls much effiort to master a single weapon's timing?

That's a good point. I haven't played ZombiU, but it sounds like a game that could greatly benefit from a myriad of melee weapons. Anyone who's played the game for an hour can get a feel for the cricket bat and begin to master it.

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haggis

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Edited By haggis

Well, I guess some people liked it. Honestly, I thought the game was a bit of a mess. I don't think it was terrible, but it wasn't by any means good. Adequate, mediocre. I thought it tended toward dull and tedious. But terrible? I guess not. I'm not sure why this is much of a surprise, though. Maybe Klepek ought to stop judging games so harshly before them come out?

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Edited By Hailinel
@MildMolasses

@JoshyLee said:

@gladspooky said:

I don't know when Giant Bomb is going to quit making dumb assumptions about how good/bad a game is supposed to be based on the title. I bet they just assume sequels to good games are going to be just as good as the original, too.

Dude, don't you know a game's quality is based on a few non-game related things like title, when it comes out, and what the advertising is like?

Did neither of you read the explanation? Ubisoft has a less than stellar record NIntendo launches. He was coming off the disappointment of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 3, which soured him a little Ubisoft games. Combine that with an uninspired name, which in the grand tradition of shovelware, is horribly generic. If they are going to put so little effort into "creatively" naming their game, I don't think it's an unfair assumption to have low expectations going in. After all, when you hear Wii Party, Wii Play or any other game that has 'Wii' in it, do you immediately think quality?

The Wii Sports games are actually really good.
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Nomin

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Edited By Nomin

@TheHT: Perhaps you should check out 'Dead State', an RPG being developed based on survival from zombies.

http://www.deadstate.doublebearproductions.com/about/

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BLipp18

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Edited By BLipp18

Screw this game. Got to the invasion of the safe house right after the tutorial area, first guy dies, go try to kill him before zombies appear to get my stuff, 2nd person dies, then all my items are gone and i have 6 bullets and nothing else, 2nd person dies, rinse and repeat in loop of unable to kill the 5 zombies they throw at me with NO ITEMS, resist urge to destroy controller, take disc out, put in box, never play again. I repeat: Screw this game.

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bkbroiler

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Edited By bkbroiler

@tremors said:

At least the picture of a mutilated torso isn't front and center on the homepage anymore.

edit: It wasn't when I posted this at least. I guess they switched it back for more clicks.

@Miketakon said:

This was a lot better than yesterday's hit grab.

@jbuchan76 said:

eyes roll back and forth quickly.. wait.. this is a article about a game??? OMG Really! There is a god!

Good article Patrick :)

holy shit i fucking hate you people

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Trilogy

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Edited By Trilogy

I must admit that I've grown a little tired of the Giant bomb sentiment of "This game was better than It had any right/business being." I think a lot of it grows out of our constant desire to be taken by surprise by games. Maybe we long for the days before internet told us everything we needed to know about a game before it even came out. Maybe we crave that feeling of discovering a game to be way awesome and falling in love with that experience.

Or maybe I'm just reading into too much and I'm more just tired of Patrick and Ryan saying, "This game is better than it had any business being."

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CJduke

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Edited By CJduke

I don't understand why Patrick loves this game so much and doesn't like Dark Souls but eh whatever. Good article and a fun read

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sixpin

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Edited By sixpin

I didn't think this game was all that good. But I rarely agree with the reviews/opinions on Giant Bomb anymore, unless it is Vinny. To be fair I don't agree with a lot of other review sites as well. My tastes are just different than the mainstream games writer these days, it would seem.

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Elfen

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Edited By Elfen

I gave Zombie U a go. It was the first game I bought for the wii U. I listned to what Patrick said and I played it until it frustrated the shit out of me. Then I played it again, thinking it has got to get better. It did not. Then I gave it one more shot. The difficutly didn't stop me (I beat super meat boy). It was the stupid cricket bat, no story and the fact that your character has no personality. Why would I care if he or she died other than the fact I would lose all my items. Screw Zombie U.

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Edited By Katkillad

Great article Patrick!

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Grimluck343

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Edited By Grimluck343

Not enough sexism.

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HellknightLeon

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Edited By HellknightLeon

@Grimluck343 said:

Not enough sexism.

I agree... But just wait... it will get to that point... it always will. }; ) <-- evil? (that's the best i got)

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jbuchan76

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Edited By jbuchan76

@bkbroiler said:

@tremors said:

At least the picture of a mutilated torso isn't front and center on the homepage anymore.

edit: It wasn't when I posted this at least. I guess they switched it back for more clicks.

@Miketakon said:

This was a lot better than yesterday's hit grab.

@jbuchan76 said:

eyes roll back and forth quickly.. wait.. this is a article about a game??? OMG Really! There is a god!

Good article Patrick :)

holy shit i fucking hate you people

I love you too bkbroiler... Happy Friday! :)

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Edited By Yummylee

I love pretty much everything about this game, from a conceptual point of view anywhoo since I haven't played it. Just wish this was more widely available since games of this sort are of a depressingly small variety these days, and I'm otherwise still not very interested in getting a Wii U.

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deactivated-5a46aa62043d1

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Care to expound on WHY you (and so many other game critics) have (or had in your case I guess) such a negative opinion of animation priority?

Anyway, good article Patrick. :)

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YOU_DIED

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Edited By YOU_DIED

@Hailinel said:

@MildMolasses

@JoshyLee said:

@gladspooky said:

I don't know when Giant Bomb is going to quit making dumb assumptions about how good/bad a game is supposed to be based on the title. I bet they just assume sequels to good games are going to be just as good as the original, too.

Dude, don't you know a game's quality is based on a few non-game related things like title, when it comes out, and what the advertising is like?

Did neither of you read the explanation? Ubisoft has a less than stellar record NIntendo launches. He was coming off the disappointment of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 3, which soured him a little Ubisoft games. Combine that with an uninspired name, which in the grand tradition of shovelware, is horribly generic. If they are going to put so little effort into "creatively" naming their game, I don't think it's an unfair assumption to have low expectations going in. After all, when you hear Wii Party, Wii Play or any other game that has 'Wii' in it, do you immediately think quality?

The Wii Sports games are actually really good.

True, I think those are like the most played Wii games of all time, which may or may not be attributed to them being packed with the system. Anyways, why have preconceived notions based on the title/marketing at all? Most trailers and teasers nowadays feature little to no gameplay, so if you don't consume anything beyond that you have no idea what the game is like. Is being cynical more fun than playing and enjoying games?

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RageKage14

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Edited By RageKage14

The title of this article should be "The Game That is Terrible"

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deathbyyeti

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Edited By deathbyyeti

"Dark Souls Dark Souls Dark Soulsian"

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leinad44

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@RageKage14 said:

The title of this article should be "The Game That is Terrible"

And we have finally found the wittiest person on the planet, ladies and gentlemen! A true master of his craft! HOLY SHIT!

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KlUMZeE

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Edited By KlUMZeE

@RageKage14 said:

The title of this article should be "The Game That is Terrible"

Agreed, one melee weapon for the whole game? This game is not good, and I can't understand what Patrick likes about it so much.

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darkvare

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Edited By darkvare

@KlUMZeE: "the game that sould have been terrible and suprise it was"

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Chibithor

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@Soapy86: I think it's just unfairly associated with unresponsive/sluggish/slow controls. Snappy controls feel good, so people assume it's bad if it's not like that. Plus I think generally speaking it's harder to do right, so people have more bad experiences with that stuff.

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Edited By OleMarthin

judging a game before it is finished and done is just plain stupid. i always thought this game looked like the one cool game coming to the wii u on launch day.

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sonicrift

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I got this game for Christmas, and only popped it in last night. I wanted it because Patrick was raving about it. The quicklook made it look fun. I got to that horde part Patrick barely survived and died 7 times. I was ready to smash my gamepad. I hate this game. I fucking hate it. It wasn't made for me. I can see why the reviews were so polarizing. I feel so guilty that I asked for this for Christmas.

Still love ya, Scoops!

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Mystyr_E

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Edited By Mystyr_E

I get he likes the game but one of THE best experiences last year? No, and it seemed like it was included on the GOTY list because everyone had to have their game on the list (Jeff's Syndicate e.g) then it being legitimately a good game.

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Darji

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Edited By Darji

@KlUMZeE said:

@RageKage14 said:

The title of this article should be "The Game That is Terrible"

Agreed, one melee weapon for the whole game? This game is not good, and I can't understand what Patrick likes about it so much.

Maybe he is just fighting for the weaker Nintendo and wants equality in the GOTY rankings.

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Edited By Scotto

The title of this article has virtually nothing to do with it's contents - or even the article's deck, for that matter. And the justification for saying it "should have been terrible" is supremely weak - an unrelated franchise's fifth installment being a bit of a letdown (but still getting a 4/5 from a website called giantbomb.com), a nebulous claim of Ubisoft Nintendo console launch games being shit with no examples, and pointing to the game's silly name, despite lots of good games having silly names. It also ignored the media buzz that had been surrounding the game for months - mostly positive.

I personally think ZombiU looks boring as hell, but this kind of sensationalism isn't really necessary. Though I won't go so far as to say I think Patrick did it to attract hits. Such cynicism is unwarranted.

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deactivated-594be97fd5af7

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I did want to like this game but I just couldn't get on with it. I had way too many instances of shooting a zombie dead centred in my crosshair and it missing, then getting chomped.

Also whoever thought that the "hold out against the waves coming for your safehouse" bits would be fun needs a stern talking to :/

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Nictel

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Edited By Nictel

Interesting, definitely unexpected.

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sub_o

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Edited By sub_o

Next stop, Dark Souls.

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Scotto

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Edited By Scotto

@Mystyr_E said:

I get he likes the game but one of THE best experiences last year? No, and it seemed like it was included on the GOTY list because everyone had to have their game on the list (Jeff's Syndicate e.g) then it being legitimately a good game.

I personally really liked Syndicate, but was utterly mystified at a) how little resistance it faced from the rest of them, and b) how high it ended up on the list, as a result. It was a short game with an above-average campaign, a cool setting, and great co-op - nothing more.

Yet Vinny had to fight tooth and nail to scrape Sleepy Dawgz in at the bottom of the top ten.

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Edited By IzunaDrop

Scoops emerges.

You know, if the WiiU has as good a run as the Dreamcast, hardware-wise, the software library will eventually have enough of these gems to make the purchase worth it.

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Edited By Young_Scott

@AlKusanagi said:

I could have sworn that other than GB, this game was widely reviewed poorly.

The European press seemed far more pleased/interested with the final game, with Eurogamer giving it a really positive review.

Most of my online friends who have reacted positively to ZombiU seem to be rogue-like or classic Resident Evil enthusiasts looking for an old-school kick. I haven't played the game, but I think I'll try and find a cheap copy eventually when I pick up a Wii U. :)