I see several people saying they absolutely hated Dead Island but Dying Light is their GOTY....
This is confusing to me. I mean, I understand liking one much more then the other, but HATING one and the other being one of your all time favorite games seems like a stretch.
I mean, I have admittedly only played the demo for Dying Light thus far (several times), but I just booted up Dead Island just to refresh my memory, and it is VERY similar.
I mean, the way weapons work, attacks, slow mo deaths, looting, flashlights, basic art style, etc etc is all extremely similar, although its obviously improved in Dying Light, and Dying Light has parkour.
So I guess I just fail to understand this, but it seems to be an opinion quite a few people hold...
There are a few things to it. If you've only played the Dying Light demo, you'll have a very limited perspective on how even small improvements in Dying Light had a huge impact.
1. Dead Island is almost totally non-dynamic. The zombies appear in
literally the same places every time you pass through an area, with very minor, occasional variations. They have generally crap-O AI.
By contrast, even if zombies often spawn in the same places in Dying Light, they are far more mobile and have better AI, so they often spread in big groups. On top of that, the mobs spawn randomly and at different times of day, so sometimes a street will be empty, other times it will be heaving.
2. Dead Island has serviceable close combat, but it's infinitely more wooden and feels 'janky' as a result. The zombies have half as many animations as they do in Dying Light, and worse than that, they only have basic ragdolls and non-dynamic get-up animations. In Dying Light, there are far more reaction animations, so they react to strikes far more believably and quickly - immediately improving the combat tenfold. It's really satisfying striking a zombie, and knocking a zombie over results in well-handled dynamic animations where they fall and try to get up and react better to dismemberment. They stumble more and climb more and are more dynamic.
On top of that, the player has three times more combat moves, including grappling/throwing zombies, slide-kicking zombies, drop-kicking zombies, camouflaging yourself as a zombie, stealth-killing zombies, etc. And the environment is now littered with zombie-killing objects, so you can spend lots of time doing things like chucking zombies onto spikes
Then you've got the climbing - you might not have played Dying Light enough - but in Dying Light a handful of zombie types can
chase you across rooftops and climb after you. So when it's getting dark and you're under pressure, you might accidentally blow something up, and hear screams in the distance as they come for you. This leads to awesome rooftop fights and cool, dynamic combat situations.
Humans also have way more combat animations, and they are fucking deadly, so getting in combat with humans in Dying Light is very dangerous and intense. They react to zombies, so you can run into a group of humans, fire a gunshot, then leg it to a rooftop. The humans can't follow you - but the zombies attracted by sound will go to where you fired the gun and take care of the humans for you
perfect sandbox gameplay.
3. Free running. By itself it's a minor thing, which you mentioned, but some later quests make
fucking amazing use of the free running mechanic and the game dynamically reacts to your free running, too.
For instance, there's a side quest where you have to enter a building by the rooftop (and the game doesn't make this explicit). When you realise the hatch is on the roof, you have to emergently work out how to get up there, and it leads to an amazing Mirror's Edge-beating parkour-puzzle where you have to work out how to get above it and drop down. One of the most memorable quests I've ever played in an open world game because the free running mechanic was so perfectly used. Compare that to every Dead Island quest where you simply drive to a location, kill some zombies/people, call it a day.
Dying Light also has a really well designed randomised objective system for 'emergency drops'. Unfortunately little else in the game is randomised - but these are great. When 'supply drops' land, they do so in a random selection of places. If you get to them in time (good free running), you collect everything in them. If you take too long, goons/thugs will be there, and you'll have to fight them off to get the items. (And fighting humans is very hard/dangerous in the early game, so you'll burn through medkits on Hard doing so.)
Also, for the record, there is not one other FPS game which has an open world and a free running/climbing mechanic, with the ground-level detail of Half Life 2 or another good FPS. That alone is a unique thing which bumps it several tiers above Dead Island. Even if you hate the combat you can play and enjoy Dying Light for this alone.
4. Dying Light has a structure which provides gameplay experiences Dead Island categorically does not have.
- the day/night cycle in Dying Light (which you won't see in the demo, only activated after 2 hours or so) turns night times into survival horror. There are super-powerful, near-invincible zombies prowling around, who can kill you in 2-3 hits. They can free run just as well/better than you, so if you're spotted you have to fucking
run. They have vision cones on your minimap and Far Cry style 'being spotted' graphics, so you can use legit stealth to evade them. (I've had times where I was almost spotted, and crouched behind a car, and had proper hollywood-movie style moments where it was right above me breathing heavily looking about while I hid, quivering, beneath one). At night time, safe houses are the only place they can't get, so often you have to dynamically run away to a safe house (Dead Island had rubbish safe houses IIRC)
- in Dead Island, if you made a loud noise, zombies would shuffle over to you. In Dying Light, if you make a noise (easy to do by accident as well as intentionally), recently-infected people will burst out of nearby windows and come sprinting at you, including on to rooftops and into buildings. You can hide from them, or fight them, or run from them. Often a series of dynamic events will chain more and more of them onto your tail, until you free run to a safe house.
5.In DL zombies collide with each other, with a pretty consistent physcs = alot of micro-shades of gameplay, especially in melee and crowd control
TL;DR: You can't judge at all until you play the full version of Dying Light a bit more
Sorry for the essay. Hope this clarifies things for you!