Dead Island Diary: End of the World Worries

It's the end of the world for those who were unfortunate enough to be trapped on Banio when the zombie outbreak began but for many of the secondary characters a player meets in Dead Island seem to be unable to grasp the trouble they are in and what they need to do to get out.

Dead Island is an open world horror action game with role playing elements and that means that there are quite a few side quests the player can take on, choosing to get experience, money and some weapon as long as they do the bidding of another survivor who is afraid of facing the undead horde.

Among the task are frivolous things like recuperating jewelry or the delivery of important medicine to relatives.

Yes, all important tasks and something worth doing in a normal role playing game, where the implicit destruction is far off in the future, but none adapted to the universe of Dead Island, where the big, terrible event has already happened and urgency (to get supplies, to get off the island, to find a cure) should be the dominant feeling.

Despite being rationally aware of how out of place these kinds of delivery quests are in a game like this I nonetheless seemed strangely attracted to them because of the attached rewards (killing zombies is financially draining, but that's a subject for another diary).

I know that doing them will drag me out of the atmosphere that Dead Island is pretty effective at creating and will make me somehow think less about the game but the developers put them there for a reason and, in the back of my mind, I am sure that skipping up them will lead to a point in Dead Island when I will be unable to progress.

So, as a player who likes to analyze his surrounding a little, I am trapped between doing side quests I see as uninteresting and playing the game while feeling unprepared.