'We really wanted to focus on pushing the boundaries of the sort of melee combat. 'We had a particular sort of vision and a passion for what Dead Island 2 should be,' Stenton explains.

While Dambuster had access to previous builds, it started essentially from scratch in 2018, with the only element fully carried over from the original Dead Island 2 being the Los Angeles location. One thing that should be made clear: the Dead Island 2 now on shelves is not the game that began development at Yager. We've had a smaller slice, just a few years, in the development overall wait for that. 'Obviously as time ticks by, now we're in 2023, and fans have been waiting ages, right? It's massively exciting and a privilege to be able to finally deliver the game that everybody's been waiting for all these years. It was a few years in by that point, so we wanted to push the boundaries and there's pressure associated with that that we were conscious of. 'So obviously you want to honour that, and you want to sort of push it already. 'There's a lot of people that fondly remember the Dead Island games – the first game and Riptide – and have got a lot of good memories of them,' he tells. 'We wanted to push the boundaries and there's pressure associated with that that we were conscious of' Instead, he was more concerned about how respected and established the franchise was, given the popularity of the original. The reins were then handed to UK developer Sumo Digital, and later passed to Deep Silver-owned Dambuster Studios – famously formed from the ashes of Crytek UK, the developer previously known as TimeSplitters creator Free Radical Design.ĭambuster took over development in 2018, but game director David Stenton tells us he and the team weren't worried about the pressure of taking over a project that had been in development for six years. However, after at least one delay and three years of development, a difference in vision between Yager and publisher Deep Silver led the German studio to be dropped from the project in 2015. Up there with Skull & Bones, Beyond Good & Evil 2 and probably some other non-Ubisoft titles, Dead Island 2 has been one of the most prominent modern examples of a game stuck in Development Hell.Īnnounced in 2014 with a planned release date of Spring 2015, it was originally being created by Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager.

Dead island 2 characters 2018