Dying in Dead Island

Each character has different skills relating to their specialty.

Most survival skills tend to be similar, maybe just located further up or down. The most prominent change is in the Fury tree, each character's fury is different.

For example, Logan's (throwing expert) Fury allows him infinite knives and the ability to hit more than one zombie per throw, while Purna's (firearms expert) Fury allows her to draw her sidearm and have infinite ammo with it for the duration of her fury (while also increasing team-mates stats for the duration).

It's best to pick a character that has the playstyle you'd like (either sharp weapons, blunt weapons, throwing weapons, or firearms).

If you do not feel comfortable editing files by hand, you can use Dead Island Helper, a program which will fix the FOV issue as well as other advanced settings.

According to the creator, it does install a keyboard hook to detect if Dead Island is running, but only to prevent multiple keystrokes from being processed. It shouldn't trigger VAC, but you have to decide for yourself if you want to run the risk.

If you'd rather edit files yourself, you can follow the steps outlined below:

1. Navigate to the Data folder in your Dead Island installation. This will vary based on whether you installed through Steam or put it in an install folder of your choice. In Steam, by default it is located here in \Steam\steamapps\common\dead island\DI\

2. Locate the Data0.pak file and open it with a file archiving program such as WinRAR or 7-Zip.

3. Inside Data0.pak you'll see a folder called Data and inside Data, you will find the `Skills' folder.

4. Inside the Skills folder, locate the file default_levels.xml

5. Now that you have found this file, navigate to My Documents\DeadIsland\out

6. Inside the out folder, you're going to want to recreate the directory structure of where the XML files was located. Do this by creating a New Folder, name it Data, then inside that folder, create another New Folder and name this one Skills.

7. Copy/Paste the default_levels.xml folder from the archive into the Skills folder. You can close your archiving program after this, as you wno't need it anymore.

8. After pasting the default_levels.xml file, open it with a text editor such as Notepad.

9. Locate the variable CameraDefaultFOV. You can do this by using ctrl+F. You'll see v+"62.5" as the default value. Change this so something between 70 and 90, based on your preference.

10. Save the file and exit. You may want to set it as "Read-only" like it's recommended in this question just to be safe.

You should be all set. The way this works is that the game apparently reads the settings that you set in this file before it reads the default files. Because this doesn't involve actually modding any of the game's actual data files, you shouldn't be at risk for VAC to flag you for cheating or something.

~Source