Dead Island wasn't exactly realistic. What with the electro-swords, the nuns and the knifing zombies in the chest. If you prefer your undead to be a little more quasi-Romero-real, you'll want the "Director's Cut" mod, which rebalances the combat, skill trees and items to deliver better pacing and a requirement for headshot precision. Mod creator tnutz says he "tried to refine and highlight the best aspects of the Dead Island combat and tie it together into a deeper combat system where you are rewarded for properly assessing the situation and acting tactically."
The full list of changes and a link are below. They include: "Ground-and-pounding the head with fists is viable". Not that games are violent or anything.
The mod's available via the Steam forums . Here's the full list of changes.
Mod Highlights
- More involved and demanding combat. I tried to refine and highlight the best aspects of the Dead Island combat and tie it together into a deeper combat system where you are rewarded for properly assessing the situation and acting tactically
Fundamentals
- Precision strikes to the head give you quick kills
- Different enemy groups can make for very different feeling fights
- You can stay in control of big fights by taking advantage of each situation, and you don't have to spam-kick the whole time
-------------
Tactics
- Normal attacks to the body work towards knock down, but do no health damage to Walkers and little to infected
- Weapon mods are useful and take full effect. A crit even to the body can make your enemies bleed out, burn to a crisp, or dance while being electrocuted
- Hits to a Walker's arms break and dismember them easily, doing little damage but setting up a killshot
- Strong blunt attacks to the leg will up-end zombies
- Walkers stay down for a shorter time, and randomly get up faster
- Skills affecting knockout might actually be interesting now
- Infected regenerate when taunting(and so do Rams), so be aggressive
- Infected take more damage from behind, an incentive to work together with a co-op buddy
- Ground-and-pounding the head with fists is viable
- Normal kicks are stronger against enemies you've maimed
- An uninjured walker will shrug it off quickly
- An armless or bleedingshockedburned zombie will often lose balance and fall
- A headshot from a pistol or rifle can take out a zombie
- A shot to the body has a small chance to knock them down
- Bullets have some penetration and can hit more than one zombie
- Shotguns are at least as dangerous as ever, and will knock-down and dismember satisfyingly
-------------
Non-combat changes
- Better overall pacing
- Health items give 2x health. Don't be afraid to engage in a fight even if you can barely survive
- Improved loot tables - a reason to put points into lockpick (used Anime SchoolGirl's non-cheater edition)
- Increased Durability (mildly, to balance the combat style differences)
- Much Tougher Escorted NPCS
- Co-op experience is much closer to equal. Killers and assisters get full exp. Nearby people get 90%.
- Auto-aim for throws is back. See below
-------------
Fun things to do
- Decapitate multiple zombies with one swing
- Headshot two zombies with one bullet
- Aim up while jump-kicking to send zombies arcing over a high railing
- Aim your jump-kicks so the ragdolls land on their heads or arms and they splatter
- Time your jump-kicks and thrown weapon extractions to combine them into one smooth motion
- Send some zombies flying to a watery death in the ocean with a sweeping sledgehammer blow to the legs
- Slice a Walker's leg to put them on a knee and then slice upward for a one-two decapitation
- Sever the leg of an oncoming Infected at full speed
- Shockburn yourself on an enemy you critted
------------
Auto-Aim I added back in auto-aim on the throws to not exacerbate the issue with losing weapons. Boomerang isn't a good enough fix since it's not nearly as fun as having to skillfully kick-remove your weapons mid-fight. If you like the challenge of arcing your throws, change line 54 in default_levels.xml to
------------
Installation: Extract to non-steam folder, e.g. C:\Users\
So your structure is: "DeadIsland\out\data\AI" etc...
------------
A few things I would like to do when I can
- Add tiny amounts of ammo as a chance to drop in normal loot, so there's not feast or famine like vanilla
- Make guns more challenging - remove auto-aim especially.
- Increase spawn sizes as an option, especially for co-op
- Have a Co-op version with more lethal enemies, more spawns, etc...
- Make kicks to the head have a different effect than to the body (tried some things and failed)
- Re-balance the skilltrees (some worthless skills in vanilla are already more interesting though)
