The following is a list of things that I...noticed while playing the game:
- Rebinding the Use key doesn't completely work. There are instances where I had to press the originally bound key to do anything.
- No quickslot keys. I have to use the middle mouse button to pull up a radial menu.
- The camera moves a little until the mouse moves past a threshold wherein the radial menu completely redirects input. So, the radial arrow AND the camera both move for a little bit.
- Switching weapons into radial slots takes a second before it registers. So, if you exit the menu too quick, your weapon won't switch spots.
- You have to sell stacks of items one, at, a, time.
- Inventory is categorized and placed in one huge list.
- Not sortable.
- I can carry bottles of bleach, several cans of food, bottles of water, nails, batteries, large batteries, a dozen bottles of champagne, and several engine parts, but can't carry more than 16 tonfas, 75 pistol bullets, 90 rifle bullets, and 30 shotgun shells.
- I get it. The tonfas are weapons and the rest are misc/crafting materials, but I raised my eyebrow at this several times because, if you're going to be somewhat realistic about ammo, why stop there?
- Skill descriptions persist instead of only appearing when the mouse hovers over them.
- They also obscure everything underneath them, so you have to click around in order to reveal the skill tree.
- Some descriptions are a bit...weird.
- If I alt+tab, vsync turns off.
- I've lost audio for everything but cutscenes once. No idea why.
- No FOV slider
- Shotguns or assault rifles at point blank range tend to do no damage to npcs, but npcs can shoot you at the same range.
- If I aim at an enemy and fire, it'll miss when the second shot from the same position hits. Yes, guns sway, but when the sway never takes you off the target (at around 20ft), shouldn't I hit?
- Gun specialist with no guns for the first quarter of the game.
- Except for her Fury.
- Mouse acceleration dramatically different between the menu and ingame.
- Too low and your camera is perfect, but your mouse has to run the length of a football field in order to get anywhere in the menus.
- The blood effect I had on screen has become a white, textureless blur. <-- I'm a bit concerned about this one. Better retest my graphics card.
- I got killed by a car door as I exited a vehicle while it pulled to a stop.
- My checkpoints are always where the main quest is, not where it says "checkpoint saved" or whatnot.
- Cars disappear if you venture more than 100 yards away from them. "Why yes, I wanted to trek across the entire island to turn in this quest."
- In one quest, you can't leave a key character in the SAFE ZONE without failing a quest and being forced to restart. However, you can leave said character in the middle of nowhere with no defenses whatsoever.
- If I have a stack of medkits, but my inventory slots are full. I cannot pickup another medkit and add it to the stack until I drop a weapon, pickup the kit, and then pickup the weapon I dropped.
- One cutscene sequence at a police station has no sky and reminds me of the hall-of-mirrors from the Source engine. Repeatable and only this cutscene, not the others.
Fortunately, a few key issues were addressed using Dead Island Helper and I've been enjoying the game. However, I've been running into the "No mic = ban" groups. Yes, yes, voice chat is very useful for coordination, but I've had enough people abusing it in the past to a) turn it off and b) not bother finding out what is wrong with my mic (bass boost/constant hum).
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Anyways, I'm thinking about releasing my black leather duster clothes model for Skyrim. It's still giving me this weird stretched polygon issue. I'll have to start it from scratch to ensure all vertices keep their numbers. This does annoy me because, as I've said before, the heavy model was the original scaled up in places to accommodate a thicker body. Nothing else was changed, even the weightmaps are the same.
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I tried getting another Portal 2 map fleshed out, but wound up starting yet another one and tweaking my Backstock map. And now, I've forgotten to work on any of them because I've been running around in Dead Island ("Get money's worth" *grumble grumble*).
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2k Games has put up their, what seems to be, quarterly "QA Testers needed" posting on Craigslist. I've applied in the past, but never got a response, not even an automated one. Now, I'm not sure I even want to drive 45 miles and pass LAX twice a day. I think I once calculated that the money the job paid was not enough to cover the cost of driving to and from their general location. Making negative income, brilliant! Of course, whatever I concluded from that is void because the vehicle I drove then had its transmission die (100mi from home no less) and I now have a more fuel efficient car (No, I didn't buy it. It was a gift and I can't even cover the insurance or car wash. My parents have to.).
I really want to get a job in which I either fix PCs or work on some aspect of Game Development (or both!), but about 75% of the applications I've sent out never received a response of any kind. The 25% that did were mainly for programming positions where I bombed the phone interviews because my vocabulary was terrible. I know what I'm doing (mostly), but can't express it in the exact textbook technical terms they want. I'm only applying for entry level positions, mind you.
I did have an interview with a game publisher last year, but they misread my resume and thought I ran focus testing instead of being a focus tester. So, when that came up a quarter of the way through the interview, they just went through the motions to humor me. When I followed up saying thank you, I got no response back. When I knew I didn't get the job a month later (how could I not know from the get-go?), still no messages.
I'm finding that if I get an interview, I don't get responses back and any further attempts at contact are met with silence. I've been at it for almost a year and a half. I hate my job (i.e. job hunting) so much that I don't do it. I'm tired of these oneway conversations. At this point, my CS degree is worthless ("Oh, a degree. What else ya got?") and the only thing I've programmed in that time was a couple weeks ago. 10 lines of code to brute force calculate a number whose right edge on a number line would match the left edge of another number. Thrilling. Better slap that on the resume.
What really gets on my nerves are all the postings that are blatant "We want to exploit those of you who have lost your jobs because of the recession" positions. What I mean is for a part-time PC technician position, I had to have 5-10 years experience and previously worked on enterprise-level hardware and/or ran an IT department for a big company. The job paid $15/hr and was for some local PC repair shop (of course, they didn't say who they were, so I couldn't bike over and shove my resume in their face). The job was basic PC troubleshooting, some network troubleshooting, assembly, some part swapping, and the occasional house call.
I did apply for idTech camps as an instructor, but after blowing the bully question ("I'd ask him to stop and move him from his target. If repeated, I'd call him out. If continued, I'd put him outside."), I didn't get the job, much to my relief; I'm a terrible teacher. This was the "Oh fine, why not?" application. Of course, now I can mark "familiar with 3ds max". *sigh*
