Deep Silver has acknowledged that it accidentally released an "incorrect version" of apocalyptic zombie shooter Dead Island on the North American Steam service, pledging to patch the title as quickly as possible.
Early players and reviewers have reported widespread technical problems with the title, including game freezes and crashes, graphical issues, and odd in-game behavior such as the ability to walk through walls.
"We deeply regret that an incorrect version of Dead Island was inadvertently made available to players on Steam launch in North America," Deep Silver spokesperson Aubrey Norris told Gamasutra.
The company also promised that a patched version of the game would be made available "ASAP," and that the issue would not affect Friday's international launch of the game. Deep Silver has already announced a release day patch intended to fix 37 separate issues with today's release.
Players that have dug into the code for the release have uncovered evidence suggesting that the version currently on Steam is a development build that contained elements of the Xbox 360 version. Deep Silver has yet to comment on this possibility.
Uh-huh... yep, the wrong version was released. Somebody slipped up, and uploaded last month's build instead of the one labelled "gold master". How often does that happen, as opposed to games simply being intentionally prematurely released in a bug-riddled state?
I don't know... it's possible that Deep Silver is telling the truth, but you know what? I find that I have too much respect for our industry in general to believe anyone capable of such an amateurish mistake. There was probably half a dozen people who had to sign off on that build before it went anywhere. So, all in all - I have to believe they're just plain lying. This version that was released - it seems to me most probable that that actually *is* the gold master.
The accidentally shipped version has a debug no clipping mode mapped to the Y key. That was obviously never an intended ship feature and was clearly intended to be ifdefed out for the release mode. I don't think they released "last month's build", I think they just had their build machine building debug or dev for a long time and forgot to switch it to release/shipping for gm, especially since console versions of the game (which are harder to get to gold master than PC) shipped without such bugs, proving that they were not at such a "bug-riddled state".
Ever? I mean, this is pretty bad. Outrageously bad. Like, laughably amateurishly bad.
I don't know... it's possible that Deep Silver is telling the truth, but you know what? I find that I have too much respect for our industry in general to believe anyone capable of such an amateurish mistake. There was probably half a dozen people who had to sign off on that build before it went anywhere. So, all in all - I have to believe they're just plain lying. This version that was released - it seems to me most probable that that actually *is* the gold master.
Still quite hard to fathom.