While developer Dambuster Studios and publisher Deep Silver have seen a fair bit of success with 2023’s Dead Island 2, the publisher has also revealed details about the original iteration of the title that was announced back in 2014.
In a talk at Develop:Brighton (courtesy of GamesIndustry.biz), former Deep Silver head of communications Martin Wein, now working at GameFlex Consultants, said that the version of Dead Island 2 that was being developed at the time would have potentially killed the Dead Island franchise.
Discussing the developer at the time, Yager, working on Dead Island 2, Wein spoke about how the project was delayed because the development team was veering away from the original design vision that was behind Dead Island 2. “I can actually give you an example where myself and the product team caused about an eight-year product delay,” said Wein at the talk.
“I was working on that with the creative team, and we were mightily proud of that [trailer],” Wein said. “But then, about 3 to 4 weeks later, we had a major milestone with the development studio that was in charge at that time. And boy, that game sucked.”
“It had nothing to do with what [made] the original Dead Island […] really fun,” he explained. “So we commissioned a play test and got horrific feedback. And we sat down with the development team and said, ‘Okay, what’s the course of action?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, leave it with us’.”
However, two or three months later, Wein described the game as being essentially the same as when it got the negative feedback from its playtests. Citing some of the feedback, Wein described them as being “this is not fun, this is not engaging, this does not feel like the Dead Island that I played.”
“So at the end of the day, we had to take the game away from that external developer, find a new studio, and that put the game on a journey of… well, it was supposed to launch in 2015. When did it come out? 2023?”
Wein spoke about the importance of publishers having to make some hard decisions with their projects sometimes, saying that “we could have, at that point, put out a s*** game. It might have made some money, but it would have killed the franchise.”
“I think at that point Deep Silver did the right thing, and Dead Island 2 was a commercial success in the end,” he said. “Because they took that step, and they said that we need to make a game that fits for the player.”
For context, Dead Island 2 had spent a notoriously long amount of time between its original announcement and final release. In that time, the development team behind the project was changed several times, including studios like Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager and Crackdown 3 developer Sumo Digital, before ultimately being developed internally at Deep Silver through its own team, Dambuster Studios.
Dead Island 2 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details about the co-op zombie hack-and-slash action RPG, check out our review.
