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.

Since making the announcement, the studio has disabled all real-money purchases that could be made in the game. The studio has also stated that any purchases made after June 14 will be refunded.

As the game heads into its shutdown date, Yager has made The Cycle: Frontier‘s Fortuna Pass free for all players, along with discounting level skips and accelerating all in-game progression.

Yager first announced The Cycle back in 2018. The game was originally launched exclusively on Epic Games Store as a battle royale before making its way on to Steam and pivoting to becoming a PvPvE format extraction shooter in the vein of games like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown.

The Cycle: Frontier can still be played until its servers shut down on Steam and Epic Games Store.

https://twitter.com/TheCycleGame/status/1673951156119171072

The troubles with Dead Island 2, in fact, started right at the beginning. The original Dead Island and its standalone follow up Dead Island: Riptide were both developed by Techland, and while the initial plan was for the developer to work on Dead Island 2 as well, things didn’t quite pan out that way. Wanting to work on its own IP, Techland parted ways with Deep Silver and would go on to work on Dying Light. Deep Silver, meanwhile, started the search for the studio that would fill the Techland-shaped hole in Dead Island 2’s development process.

The first of multiple studios that would attempt to lead the project over the course of the next several years was German studio Yager. The developer pitched its own vision of what a new Dead Island game would be, and clearly, it was one that Deep Silver liked- well, for a while, at any rate. At Sony’s E3 2014 press conference, Dead Island 2 was formally unveiled by Yager and Deep Silver, while a gameplay showing followed not long afterward at Gamescom- and at the time, it seemed like things were proceeding smoothly.

That didn’t last long. Less than a year later, Deep Silver announced that it had ended its partnership with Yager, and that the studio would no longer be developing Dead Island 2, with the developer and the publisher seemingly unable to agree on their creative vision of the game.

And so, Deep Silver started the search for a developer for the project a second time, and several months later, in March 2016, it was announced that British studio Sumo Digital had taken the wheel. And for a long time, officially, that continued to be the case- though skepticism surrounding the game’s development continued to grow by the day. The fact that the game had changed developers had already sown seeds of doubt in many people’s minds, but what made things seem even more dire for Dead Island 2 was how little we saw of it.

In fact, we saw absolutely nothing of it at all. By the time Sumo Digital was announced as the game’s developer, it had already been close to a couple of years since its last showing, but that silence would go on to be dragged on for several more years. In the absence of any showings, trailers, or any material updates whatsoever, many started the question whether the game was even in any tangible form of development- and over the period of several years, Deep Silver would go on to claim again and again and again that yes, Dead Island 2 was still in development, and it was making progress. For all of those statements though, we never once saw the game, and many people’s belief that development hadn’t exactly become less tumultuous since shifting over to Sumo Digital continued to grow stronger.

It was no surprise, then, when Deep Silver announced in August 2019 that Dead Island 2 was changing hands once again and would now be developed by Dambuster Studios, known for Homefront: The Revolution- which, incidentally, was yet another project that had a troubled development cycle and had to go through a number of developer changes. By this point, it had been over five years since Dead Island 2 was announced, and with showings and updates on the game still scant, optimism about its release or what state it was in behind the scenes was at an all time low.

Thankfully, Dambuster did indeed turn out to be the studio that would finally bring Dead Island 2 to the finish line. The action RPG was officially re-revealed in August last year at Gamescom, with Dambuster Studios and Deep Silver announcing a February 2023 launch, and though it would, of course, go on to see another slight delay to April, the next few months saw the game getting plenty of updates and showings, solidifying belief that this time, it was indeed actually going to release.

Interestingly enough, even now, with Dead Island 2 having been officially released, there are still plenty of questions about its long and bumpy development history that haven’t yet been answered. For instance, how much of the game’s original vision was retained? We can presume that Deep Silver liked the initial idea that Yager had in mind for the title, otherwise the studio’s pitch wouldn’t have been accepted, while even back when the game was first announced in 2014, it did share elements with the game that would go on to launch nine years later- like its more vibrant visual style than the original Dead Island, or using LA as a setting.

But other than those fundamentals, how much of the game’s original vision did Dambuster Studios retain? Did the developer pick up bits and pieces of the project from when it was under development at Yager and Sumo Digital and stitch them together to create something cohesive, or did it do away with most of what of the work that had been done before to just start from the beginning, barring the aforementioned fundamentals? Or was it, perhaps, a little bit of both? Dead Island 2 was in the works at Dambuster for four years, which is a pretty long time, of course- but is it long enough to finish a major project that essentially started from scratch?

Either way, the game is finally out now- though what the future holds for the franchise remains to be seen. Deep Silver was clearly adamant on getting Dead Island 2 out, so this is clearly an IP the publisher believes in, though what kind of a future it will have from this point forward may very well depend on how the new release does. Critical reception for Dead Island 2 hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, though many might argue that it was unrealistic to expect that from it anyway, so if its undeniably enjoyable zombie-slaying action can find a sizeable and engaged audience that wants more of the same, we may very well end up seeing a Dead Island 3 at some point in the future, and hopefully, its development will go much smoother than its predecessor. Until such time that happens though – if it does happen – we can at least take some satisfaction in the fact that Dead Island 2 did manage to make it to the finish line, and though it hasn’t reinvented the wheel by any means, it does at least deliver the brand of zombie slashing action that many had hoped it would for years.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Speaking in a recent interview with GamesIndustry, Dead Island 2 game director David Stenton said that though the game does indeed have a little but in common with that original 2014 trailer in terms of tone, Dambuster Studios didn’t really use that as inspiration for the final product, and instead wanted to craft its own vision of the game.

“It’s interesting to look back on that Yager trailer that everybody enjoys,” Stenton said. “And, frankly, there are some similarities between the tone of that trailer and our own version of Dead Island 2. But we never used that as inspiration. We didn’t sit down and say: ‘Oh, we really like this trailer, so we’re going to carry along the spirit of that’. There are significant differences between what we’re doing and what Yager were doing back then.”

In our review of Dead Island 2, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying, “Dead Island 2 isn’t ground-breaking, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. With its vibrant yet bloody take on the undead streets of LA, its brutal and enjoyable combat, and its gleeful excess of gore, it delivers a solid experience that’s well worth your time.” Read the full review through here.

Dead Island 2 is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Dead Island 2 was a game that was announced years ago, but then went silent. The developer of the first game, Techland, left the IP to create their own take on the idea in Dying Light, and since then publisher Deep Silver has seemingly been trying to pull something together for the game. Despite being MIA for over a half a decade, the publisher has contended that the game is still alive. Now, an interesting little artifact about the game has unexpectedly leaked.

Apparently, a very early build of a 2015 version of the game has been making the rounds, and several screenshots have been grabbed by some Twitter users, which you can see below. It’s unclear where the leak came from, so take this with a grain of salt, but apparently it’s confirmed that a version is out there. What’s here actually looks pretty polished, but apparently it’s not very stable and the build is obviously incomplete.

This version was the one being done by Yager. It has a style much closer to one seen in the Escape From Dead Island spin-off than the first title. Yager is no longer on the title, with the development now shifted over to Dambuster Studios. So, the game most likely looks quite different now- but it is an interesting look at what could have been.

https://twitter.com/JHarrdington/status/1268988453527498752?s=20

https://twitter.com/JHarrdington/status/1269054444676640769?s=20

vrOOOM pic.twitter.com/haRC3S4nKK

— James (@GarnetSunset) June 5, 2020

ITS HIM
THE MAIN CHARACTER pic.twitter.com/DtvKgemQqB

— James (@GarnetSunset) June 5, 2020

YAGER’s Dreadnought has made an important step forward today – it’s now in open beta and free to play for all interested. You can download the open beta by heading here.

The open beta introduces a new map in the form of Ixion. Situated above Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, it places emphasis on a huge orbital ring that with narrow openings. Night versions of the maps Rings of Saturn and Red Sands have also been added.

Dreadnought is essentially a competitive multiplayer game where teams battle in capital space ships for supremacy. There are 50 ships to choose from divided into five classes and each ship has its own variety of weapons and abilities. It should be noted that even though Dreadnought is free to play, it still possesses micro-transactions to purchase cosmetics, EXP boosters and Hero Ships.

What are your thoughts on Dreadnought going into the open beta stage after years of closed beta status? Let us know in the comments below.

"We wanted to give players the option to re-create the spaceships they love, from a space-pirate-inspired Galactica to a Millennium Falcon-type vessel. However, we wanted to bring these heroes and ships together to fight in fleets, like a league of extraordinary captains."

YAGER has had a rather interesting career graph, especially considering its work on Spec Ops: The Line and Dead Island 2. What motivated the return to a flight sim of sorts with Dreadnought?

Just like you said: spaceships were never really gone here at YAGER. Mathias Wiese, one of the co-owners of YAGER and our Art Director, is probably the biggest spaceship fan out there and is constantly drawing spaceships in meetings. Mathias also worked on the initial Yager game, where a lot of the visual design and spirit for Dreadnought can be found. So after Spec Ops: The Line, this passion turned into a pitch for Dreadnought. We finally had an opportunity to create something with big spaceships in the gaming space that captured the spirit of all the amazing TV shows and movies that we love. So, for us, the question is less “why are you doing this,” but more “why haven’t you done it before?” Big spaceships are amazing.

What inspired the multiplayer focus for Dreadnought? How was the overall gameplay envisioned, especially with regards to teamplay?

We wanted to give players the option to re-create the spaceships they love, from a space-pirate-inspired Galactica to a Millennium Falcon-type vessel. However, we wanted to bring these heroes and ships together to fight in fleets, like a league of extraordinary captains. Once we outlined this as our goal, the base ships we created aligned really nicely with classes from shooters, like Team Fortress 2—the main difference being that Dreadnought can go bigger and is not limited by human scale. We think this shooter-inspired DNA creates intuitive controls and adds a lot of depth to the gameplay. If you’re up against a fleet with a Tactical Cruiser and two Dreadnoughts, it triggers a range of potential tactics in your head, depending on your ship class and team setup. However, if a Corvette suddenly swoops in, you have to adjust to that. We’re big fans of this type of unit diversity because it creates a lot of tactical depth and encourages players to hone their individual play-styles.

Positioning your ship, using your shields and knowing when to strike have been key elements of the game thus far and have given it a more naval warfare kind of feel. How difficult was it to capture that kind of atmosphere while ensuring matches still flowed smoothly?

It’s great that you’re bringing this up, thank you. Naval warfare is actually one of our DNA slides for Dreadnought—it’s great that we got this across. Balancing the intense, cinematic action with the sheer size of the ships was a real challenge. We didn’t want to create a simulation; we wanted to create pop culture in the best sense. Accessible, but deep. So far, the feedback that we have heard tells us that we did a pretty good job, which we are obviously very happy about. Dreadnought feels well-paced and deliberate, but also intense and action-heavy once the ships engage.

"The 52 ships we have in our new progression system are keeping us pretty busy at the moment, but once we go into open beta, we definitely would like to explore more options."

Dreadnought has already received a fair amount of enthusiasm from its community. What is the current status of the closed beta?

We are super happy about the support we get from the community. This game is our passion project and we want to make it great. As a result, things have taken us longer than we expected. We are grateful that our community members appreciate our efforts, but we understand that they are starting to get a bit restless. We’ve been working really hard on implementing what we like to call Progression 2.0. This is a system that will significantly increase the amount of ships, weapons and modules available to players. It will also give them clear goals and more choices to make along their journeys as mercenary captains. We are very eager to see how players will react to it and to work with their feedback as we approach open beta.

What new modes do you have planned? How will they shake up team dynamics?

We just announced a shift toward bigger teams and currently have our sights set on 8v8. There are two main reasons for putting more ships in each battle:bigger, more intense battles and more tactical choices. This match size increase will also make it easier for each team to split up into smaller tactical forces of two and three ships.

The newly announced Onslaught Mode will introduce smaller, AI-controlled ships as targets. Similar to the 8v8 change, Onslaught is designed to keep the game manageable and fun for new players, while also creating more tactical options for experienced ones.

Can you tell us about the various ship classes? Will you be adding any more in the coming months?

We have five main classes in the game: the Dreadnought, Destroyer, Corvette, Tactical Cruiser and Artillery Cruiser. They’re essentially shooter classes—the tank, assault, scout, support and sniper—taken to the extreme. However, each of these classes has multiple ships that stress different characteristics on a high level.

Each ship also has four module slots that massively alter how it can be played. For example, a Monarch (heavy Dreadnought) can be equipped with the Plasma Broadside, Autocannons, short-range Missiles and Warp Jump. This makes the ship a pretty mobile, short-range skirmisher. The same ship with the Nuclear Missiles, Armor Hardener and Vulture Missiles becomes a fortress that stays behind the frontlines to deal long-range damage and breakup formations. It’s all about enabling the player to be the mercenary captain they want to be, while also keeping everything accessible. And we haven’t even started to talk about officer briefings.

Will we be adding more? The 52 ships we have in our new progression system are keeping us pretty busy at the moment, but once we go into open beta, we definitely would like to explore more options. We are very happy with the stable gameplay setup that we have. Now we can start experimenting and making the core even stronger without damaging it. So yes, there will be more classes, even more manufacturers.

"Inspiration for Dreadnought came from popular culture and sci-fi—Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and all those amazing universes."

What other changes can be expected for Dreadnought in the future? Will Steam integration happen any time soon?

Like we mentioned before, Onslaught is the next game mode that we want to make available to our players. We’re also working on new maps. Currently,we’re focusing on our own Grey Box platform, but we will continue to ensure that it’s easy for players to get into the game.

After reducing squad size from 5 to 3, what improvements have been seen in matchmaking? How has the response been from the community?

The reduced squad size has made it much easier for us to find balanced matches. Since we are in closed beta, we kept the player population pretty small since there’s no need to burden players while we’re still figuring things out. Again, we thank everyone for helping us get this right. Our community has taken the change to 3-player squads pretty well, but some are worried how it will affect the competitive play. However, we think there anyways that we can keep the competitive aspect of the game strong. We already announced our plans for custom matches, which will enable players to setup tournaments and clan battles much more easily.

With so much nuance to the game (and given its space sim genre), how much easier is it for new players to progress through the experience?

Inspiration for Dreadnought came from popular culture and sci-fi—Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and all those amazing universes. One thing that makes these stories so successful is that they are easy to get into, but also have a lot of depth and complexity once you get attached to them. We tried to keep the same kind of spirit in Dreadnought. The tiered approach is designed to create a journey for the player that is always interesting, but never overwhelming—at least we hope so.

When can Dreadnought be expected to release commercially? Will you consider PS4 and Xbox One releases?

At this point, we are not giving out exact dates. We’re in our last closed beta phases at the moment, so we should be there soon. Will Dreadnought come to console? Well, we’re focusing on the PC version, but we always created Dreadnought with the controller in mind—mainly because we wanted to keep the controls simple and intuitive, and because naval warfare gameplay naturally lends itself to the controller. So, who knows?To infinity and beyond, right?

The troubled development of Dead Island 2,the sequel to Techland’s original zombie hit, has been well documented- in fact, at this point, there were many worried that the second game may just be caught in limbo, what with there having been no news on that front for months now. However, for those of you who were looking forward to Dead Island‘s unique brand of zombie action, there is some movement at last- MCV has revealed that Dead Island 2 is being developed by Sumo Digital.

“Sumo showed so much understanding of the brand, had creative ideas and an excellent, vision that was aligned with our own,” Koch Media CEO Dr Klemens Kundratitz told MCV.

“It just made perfect sense for us to move the project to them. We will reveal more details at a later stage, but for now I’d like to say that we are obviously super excited about the progress that we are making with them.”

Sumo COO Paul Porter shared the studio’s excitement,saying, “It’s an honor to be charged with the evolution of such an important franchise in Deep Silver’s catalogue. We’re looking forward to exceeding fan expectation with an ambitious design that we’re confident will take bone-crunching, visceral, zombie action to a whole new level.”

We are almost certainly likely to see something from the game at E3 this year. As of right now, Dead Island 2 is still set for a launch later this year on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.

Earlier this year, Deep Silver announced that it would be parting ways with developer Yager, who was assigned to work on Dead Island 2, the current gen sequel to the undead action adventure series. Though the split was amicable, Yager managing director Timo Ullmann told Games Industry International that the effect on the company was far from pleasant. The project’s loss resulting in the closure of Yager Productions, a division which was created specifically for developing Dead Island 2.

“Having a project cancelled in such a late state is a catastrophic event on so many different levels. It really is the worst possible outcome. Everybody involved loses.”

Though a number of jobs were lost, employees were somewhat protected thanks to a provision in Germany which offers three months of guaranteed pay. Ullmann isn’t hating on Deep Silver though and such cancellations aren’t out of place in the industry.

“I really don’t blame them, and we wish them all the best. It’s tough, and not being given the chance to finish Dead Island 2, that… that hurts, you know? Right after the announcement a part of the team was a bit shell-shocked, of course, but you have to motivate yourself to keep going. Cancellation of projects, especially if the stakes are so high, is not unheard of. It hurt us, yes, but it happens.”

You know who Yager are, right? They worked on the highly acclaimed Spec Ops: The Line, and are now currently working on Dead Island 2 with Deep Silver. They are also working on a brand new game, called Dreadnought, which is a sort of tactical action game, with giant fleets of enormous spaceships duking it out.

A lot of people are probably puzzled as to why Yager would choose to follow up on such a cerebrally engaging game as Spec Ops: The Line with something like Dreadnought, and the answer is at least somewhat clarified in this new video that they have revealed above, where they show us more of the gameplay of the title, but equally importantly, show us gameplay with commentary, meaning we sort of see their own insight into the game that they are making here.

It’ll be out some time next year. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage.