deep-silver posts

As promised a few weeks ago, developer Egosoft has officially announced its next game project and to no one's surprise it's a new entry in its X space simulation series. Titled X Rebirth, the game is described as "a fresh beginning bringing with it a number of gameplay innovations without compromising its successful origins."

While there are not a lot of details yet, X Rebirth will let players see the massive game universe through the eyes of "a young adventurer and his unlikely female ally travelling in an old, battered ship with a glorious past." Look for "action-packed space combat, detailed trading mechanics and high-speed space exploration" in the game. It's due out from publisher Deep Silver in the fourth quarter of 2011. You can check out a teaser trailer after the jump:

Risen was an alright RPG that focused on an in-depth world and careful fighting mechanics. While we don't really know a whole lot about Risen 2, this trailer gives us our first real glimpse at the new world. With pirates, muskets, and voodoo, it's certainly interesting. We especially love how detailed the cinematic is, and it's close to Blizzard-quality in terms of fluid animation and texture work. If the game is as well-done as this little cinematic is, we'll be thoroughly impressed.

Download the Risen 2: Dark Waters Cinematic trailer
Check out all Risen 2: Dark Waters downloads

Dead Island screenshots are almost as popular as that "Friday" song but 10 times better to listen to (hehe, we made a funny). Today we got three new screenshots from the upcoming Techland-developed zombie action game that includes the return of the massive straitjacket-wearing zombie character from the last batch.

The zombie now has a name, the Ram, which we are guessing is indicative of some kind of ability to charge and do some damage with his whole body. The shot also shows the game's Assassin character which we would speculate as being, well, a character who likes to assassinate things. Hopefully we will see the actual game in moving action in the coming months before its release this fall.

Take a good look at the logo above this post for Dead Island. The upcoming zombie action game from developer Techland and publisher Deep Silver uses a dead body hanging by a rope to the tropical tree to form the "I" in "Island." That image is apparently too graphic for the ESRB ratings system here in the US.

According to IGN, the logo for the US box cover for Dead Island will be changed so that the body is standing upright on the ground, without a rope connecting it to the tree, when the game is released. The original logo will stay in the game itself and will also remain unchanged for the European box cover. There's no word as to why the ESRB asked for the change.

Dead Island currently remains one of the most talked about upcoming games and this evening publisher Deep Silver sent over a trio of new screenshots from the upcoming "zombies at your tropical vacation spot" action game from developer Techland.

We have added those new screenshots to our gallery of visuals from the game. Two of them are just empty location pictures showing a beach and a pool side covered in blood. The other shows what looks like a huge zombie wearing (or should we say "encased in") a straitjacket and a breathing apparatus. Even if that thing is secured we would be pretty scared of it if it showed up on our doorstep.

Dead Island has generated as much, if not more, interest in the movie industry as it has in the game industry. That was in part due to the CGI teaser trailer released last week to help promote the upcoming zombie action game from developer Techland and publisher Deep Silver.

While some movie industry web sites reported last week that the movie rights to Dead Island were actually snapped up two years ago, Deep Silver quickly sent out word that was not the case. In a chat with the Los Angeles Times Malte Wagener, the head of global business development for Deep Silver's parent company Koch Media, stated that while there is still no movie deal in place for Dead Island there have indeed been a number of inquires. He states, "Right now I'd say it boils down to three or four opportunities. "

He added, "We had a couple of big-name directors come to us. One of the top directors in Hollywood sent a studio his link to the trailer and said he was interested in this, and the studio contacted us." Wagerner knows that the massive buzz that the trailer created is finite, saying, "We're a private company and we're not under the same pressure as other companies. We don't have people saying accept the next offer. But we're also aware the buzz won't last forever."

Download the Dead Island Cinematic Trailer at Big Download

Risen 2: Dark Waters was first announced last August but so far there's been little info on what the sequel to Piranha Bytes' fantasy RPG would be like. That changed today with publisher Deep Sliver finally releasing a press release on the game which offers up some concrete info on the title.

The game itself is set several years after the end of the storyline for the first Risen game, which shipped out in 2009. According to the press release, ".... monstrous creatures have risen from the watery depths of the sea and their attacks have brought all seafaring to a grinding halt." Your player character is, naturally, the only one that can stop the creatures and his adventures take him to a set of island where it's rumored that that the local pirates may be the key to stopping the creatures.

The press release clams that Risen 2 will give the game a number of different choices to solve the game's challenges, along with a "highly interactive environment and a full day/night-cycle affecting countless aspects of the game world." Deep Silver is still keeping mum on Risen 2's release date.

On Saturday we and other web sites reported that the movie rights to the long-in-development zombie action game Dead Island had already been bought by movie producer Sean Daniel and Union Entertainment back in 2009. The first reports came from movie industry web sites which usually are accurate.

Now our sister site Joystiq reports that according to a statement from Klemens Kundratitz, the CEO of Koch Media (the parent company of Dead Island publisher Deep Silver) those movie right haven't been bought at all. While it admits that it has received "a vast amount of inquiries" about securing those rights, Kundratitz states, "We want to do it the right way as film realizations of games (or vice versa) usually fail to deliver what the fans were looking for." That's certainly true. Our question: How did all these movie industry web sites miss the mark so badly on their original stories?

Risen 2 was first announced last August during Gamescom but since that time there's been little to no info on what the sequel to Piranha Bytes' fantasy RPG will be like. This week the game's official web site finally came online, revealing that the game now has a sub-title Dark Waters.

The web site also released the first screnshots from the game and it looks like there will definitely be some kind of pirate theme in this second installment. No other info on the game, including a release date, has been revealed but it will be published once again by Deep Silver.

Dead Island is a game from developer Techland that was first announced way back in 2007. Set on an island where the players have to fight off a ton of zombies, there's been little info on the game since the announcement. Now IGN has the first preview, new screenshots and a CGI trailer from the game.

The preview states that the game will be a first person title set on a swanky island resort that gets hit with a zombie apocalyse. The game is designed to have players use items that would naturally be on such an island to fight off the infected so don't expect massive machine guns or rocket launchers. Instead the game will concentrate mostly on melee combat against the zombies. Look for four player co-op support along with some RPG-lite elements for player character progression. Dead Island is currently set for release sometime in 2011 for the PC and other platforms via publisher Deep Silver.