At the start of January, a new "official" trailer for Activision's upcoming The Walking Dead first-person-shooter launched, drawing the scorn of games journalists and fans dissatisfied with the apparent quality of the game. There was one problem: the video in question was only a fan-edit of early-stage gameplay stitched together from a series of clips featured during an interview on IGN's Up at Noon talk show.
Despite fooling even the most thoughtful reporters around, the strong reaction revealed just how intensely protective Walking Dead followers are of the property, particularly in the wake of Telltale's impressive adventure series.
In The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, players will control show favorite Daryl Dixon as he works with his brother Merle to survive and ultimately reach Atlanta, where they will eventually cross paths with Rick Grimes.
Glenn Gamble, principal effects artist at developer Terminal Reality, spoke to Eurogamer after showing off a more recent build of the game. "Hopefully you saw the differences between [the fan trailer] and [the demo build]. We've made big strides since then," he says.
Game development is a volatile process. Often times, projects don't entirely come together until the final weeks or months of "crunch time" when programmers, designers, and others work overtime to iron out glitches and remedy balancing issues. Yet, the widespread belief that the fan trailer was endorsed by Activision and Terminal Reality justly alarmed a large swath of gamers.
"That's the thing about a game. It's constantly evolving and getting better," says Gamble. "Time is the ultimate enemy of any game. If everybody had four years and an infinite budget every game would probably be infinitely better than they are. But eventually you run out of time and the date gets cut off and you just have to make the game at that point."
The artist assures fans that the gameplay will focus on distraction as opposed to Call of Duty-esque run-and-gun mechanics.
Glenn states, "We wanted something different. Drop a Call of Duty player in our game and they're not going to last long. We wanted a game that felt more real but at the same time being a little more faster-paced and not getting bogged down with the micro-management of some of the more complex games out there."
Survival Instict releases on March 26, 2013.
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