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Dead Island 2 (The Most Miraculously Technically Competent Game of 2023) - Information Thread, update: Steam release set for April 22, released on Xbox (not PC) Game Pass today

Commissar SFLUFAN

By Commissar SFLUFAN
in The Spawn Point

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SoberChef

SoberChef

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Well that's certainly refreshing to see listed! Genuinely thought it was a dead project, glad to see a release date for it! Let's just hope that the marketing can hold a candle to the legendary trailer for the first title, still one of the best of all time to do it in my humble opinion!
 

 

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Remarkableriots

Remarkableriots

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4 minutes ago, SoberChef said:

Well that's certainly refreshing to see listed! Genuinely thought it was a dead project, glad to see a release date for it! Let's just hope that the marketing can hold a candle to the legendary trailer for the first title, still one of the best of all time to do it in my humble opinion!
 

 

I pre-ordered this from Amazon on Aug 22, 2014!

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Dead Island 2 (23 February 2023, PC/PlayStation consoles/Xbox consoles) - Official CGI and Gameplay trailers
  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Dead Island 2 (23 February 2023, PC (EGS)/PlayStation consoles/Xbox consoles) - Official CGI and Gameplay trailers
  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Dead Island 2 (PC (EGS)/PlayStation consoles/Xbox consoles, 03 February 2023) - Official CGI and Gameplay trailers
stepee

stepee

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Looks good, hope it is! A bit skeptical given its 8 year, 3 dev cycle, and the current developers other game being Homefront Revolution (though they did help with Chorus, which I heard good things about) but who knows maybe it all somehow jammed together just right!

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Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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Hands-on previews:

 

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Dead Island 2 returns, and it’s like the last 10 years never happened

WWW.POLYGON.COM
Will it be third time lucky for publisher Deep Silver?

 

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It has taken Deep Silver a decade, and three developers, to get to this point. After Techland, maker of the original Dead Island and its stand-alone expansion Riptide, decided to follow its own path with the Dying Light series, Deep Silver started shopping for new studios to make a sequel. Germany’s Yager (Spec Ops: The Line) stepped up in 2012, and the game was announced in 2014 for a 2015 release, with a build even being shown to the public. But, in 2015, Yager was dropped by Deep Silver, apparently over creative differences.

 

2016, U.K. studio Sumo Digital (LittleBigPlanet 3, Crackdown 3) won the contract, and worked on Dead Island 2 in silence for two to three years. Then Sumo, too, was ditched. In 2019, Deep Silver announced that development had been switched to an internal team: Dambuster Studios (Homefront: The Revolution). There it stayed, and Dambuster’s is the version of this game that will be released, and that Polygon had the chance to play at an event in London earlier this month.

 

So this game comes with a lot of baggage. But as far as the Dambuster team is concerned, Dead Island 2 has been a normal game development process (pandemic notwithstanding) that began at some point in 2018. The team, based in Nottingham in the English Midlands, took the Californian setting established by Yager, threw out everything else, and started building Dead Island 2 completely from scratch.

 

The result is a game that feels like something of a time warp. That’s not a value judgment. There’s as much that’s refreshing about the straightforward approach Dambuster has taken as there is that seems simplistic or outdated about it. Barring its technical advances, Dead Island 2 picks up just where the series left off, and feels like it could well have come out in 2015, when it was initially supposed to. It’s a pulpy, wisecracking, ultraviolent, first-person action-RPG, with its sights firmly set on making killing zombies fun again.

 

 

 

dead-island-2-preview-gamescom-2022-blog

Dead Island 2 Hands-On Preview - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM
Dead Island 2 has returned from the grave, and it comes with gory combat, disgusting zombies, and wild DIY weapons in abundance.

 

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I’ve played Dead Island 2. That’s an odd sentence to write in 2022. First announced back in 2014 with its now-infamous trailer featuring a zombified runner, we’ve seen next to nothing of the game since. The almost decade-long radio silence likely had most people believing that Dead Island 2 was, well, dead.

 

Until now. I’ve played Dead Island 2. A whole 20 minutes of it. It’s real. It’s genuinely planned to be released in 2023. And, from what I can tell, I think it’s got the potential to please a lot of Dead Island fans.

 

Despite a long absence, Dead Island 2 is still what it originally set out to be: an open-world, co-op, California-set sequel to Techland’s well-received (if incredibly shonky) original. While that vision was first put together by Yager Development, and then passed onto Sackboy: A Big Adventure creator Sumo Digital, Dead Island 2 is now in the hands of Dambuster Studios, the folks behind Homefront: The Revolution. Rather than continuing its predecessors’ work, Dambuster has built a new version of Dead Island 2 entirely from scratch. Despite all this, that sun-soaked, humorous, pulpy vision from the original trailer remains. In fact, much of what I’ve played looks reasonably similar to the gameplay we saw of the original version, but with a few modern upgrades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dead Island 2 aims to be the "goriest game out there"

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET
First impressions and developer interviews based on a hands-on with Dead Island 2

 

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The last time we here at Eurogamer previewed Dead Island 2 was way back in 2014 when I went hands on with a playable demo at Gamescom.


At that time the game was being developed by Yager Development, but when that studio was removed from the project in 2015, Sumo Digital took over and attempted to pick up the pieces. Sumo's involvement was short lived though and it was also taken off development sometime around 2019.

 

After that, Dambuster Studios took up the reins and since then all has been worringly quiet. I'm sure I'm not the only person out there who thought that this troubled sequel was dead in the water but surprise, surprise, not only has Dead Island 2 risen from the grave in true zombie fashion, but it also has an actual, set in stone release date.

 

 

 

 

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What Dead Island 2 lacks in surprises it makes up for with great zombie fights | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM
It's back from the dead and ready to brawl.

 

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It's all too easy to compare the continued existence of Dead Island 2(opens in new tab) to the zombies it features. Lurching on for years, long after it seemed dead, passed from one studio to another. In spite of the name, though, Dead Island 2 is practically a new game. According to game director David Stenton, when development was taken over by Dambuster in 2018 it was "built from scratch". The only thing it kept was zombies and its LA setting. "That serves the "paradise gone to hell" pillar," he says. Though the genre in which it sits feels like it never dies, with zombie games still releasing on the regular. What does something like Dead Island 2 bring to the table? What even is the identity of this series?

 

Speaking to Stenton and creative director James Worrall, and playing a 20-minute demo, it's clear the focus is squarely on its gnarly close quarters combat. "It was the passion for the gore, the passion for up close melee combat," Stenton explains. "And just doing that really, really well." The section of the game I played sent me to the Santa Monica Pier as Amy, one of six playable characters. It's a tight, linear portion in which the bright lights and amusements rides are slowly brought back on as I delve deeper, which makes for a poor showcase of how the game's ambitions as an open world will fare, but a good showing for the game's moment to moment fighting.

 

 

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Dead Island 2 (PC (EGS)/PlayStation consoles/Xbox consoles, 03 February 2023) - update: hands-on previews posted
Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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The messy 9-year development of Dead Island 2 | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM
Original developer Techland has made two Dying Light games while this languished in limbo.

 

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If ever a game was sold on an inspired trailer, Dead Island was that game. Originally announced at E3 2006 by developer Techland, then best-known for its work on the Call of Juarez series, Dead Island suffered considerable delays before eventually breaking cover with a CG trailer that grabbed everyone's attention. Showing a family's grisly fate in reverse order, with an understated piano backing as time speeds up, slows and freezes, the quality of its cinematography was unusual then and now.

 

The game, of course, was nothing like this trailer. But this is what sold Dead Island to people. Fair warning: The animation is graphic, and caused controversy at the time for its inclusion of the family's young child.

 

 

 

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Eight years and three studios later, playing Dead Island 2 resurrects its zombie promise | GamesRadar+

WWW.GAMESRADAR.COM
When there's no more room in development hell Dead Island 2 shall walk the earth

 

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While waiting my turn to play Dead Island 2 I had the chance to watch somebody else hammer at the undead with a baseball bat for a while. Which was lucky, as it really let me appreciate just how over the top the gore is in Dambuster Studios' reanimated Dead Island sequel. Later, while I was playing myself, and concentrating far too hard on the careful timing of dodges and swings needed to manage corpse hordes, I'd totally miss the finer details of the carnage. It's real 'red paint for blood' style, old school zombie movie carnage, full of big fleshy gouges, severed limbs spiraling out of shot, and exposed jaw bones swinging loosely from partially degloved faces. It's hideous, but in a laugh out loud, 'did you see that?' kind of way. 

 

According to creative director James Worrall, there's a cutely named F.L.E.S.H. system behind all the bloodlust – short for Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids. It's the passion project of an apparently overzealous lead technical art director, a system that is designed to procedurally generated damage anywhere on a zombie. "It's fully anatomical,'' explains Worrall, "so we've got layers of skin and fat, muscle, and all the organs inside."

 

Dambuster's Dead Island 2 is going to get compared a lot to Techland's Dying Light 2 as another first person zombie smasher, but even with the blood and guts there's a much lighter tone overall. The FPS styling might look similar, but with a much brighter color palette and a more chipper, quippy feel to its story and characters, there's a much more 'fun' vibe to all the death. One of the phrases thrown around by the development team is that Dead Island is "about thriving, not just surviving", and that's reflected in the more theme park zombie apocalypse vibe the studio has created here, versus Techland's more broody rooftop botherer. Dead Island 2 is the kind of ride with warning signs saying people at the front will get wet that only makes everyone crowd to the front more. And it's blood. The wet is blood, just in case the metaphor wasn't clear. 

 

 

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Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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dead-island-2-1.jpg

Dead Island 2 is a surprisingly polished zombie 'em up that sticks to the script

WWW.ROCKPAPERSHOTGUN.COM
We got a brief hands-on with Dead Island 2 at Gamescom 2022 and found it to be a zombie hack and slasher that's bloody fun, despite its troubled past.

 

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Eight years ago Graham (who used to be to blame for all of this) got hands-on with Dead Island 2, back when the game was being developed by Yager, the folks behind Spec Ops: The Line. Since then, development changed hands like a baton at the Olympic relay; Yager left a year later, to be replaced by Sumo Digital, only for Sumo Digital to leave and be replaced by Dambuster Studios. Usain Bolt hasn't expressed interest yet, but there's time.

 

So going into a 20-minute hands-on with the game in the year 2022, I was a bit apprehensive. What sort of Frankenstinian horror awaited me behind closed doors? But, far from a shambling mess, what I played was a zombie 'em up that seemed close to what Graham saw in 2014, only polished up to a surprising, bloody gloss.

 

Things kicked off with a brief presentation, where an enthusiastic man in a Dead Island 2 t-shirt gave us the elevator pitch next to a plastic pool of blood, some joke shop fingers, and a striped sun lounger. Combat was described as "visceral", the main location as "Hell-A", and there was lots about it being a "thrill" to cut through swathes of the zombie horde. For the demo, a bunch of us journos would be dropped into a mission halfway through the game and do our level best to reach the end, where a demonic, zombified version of Ronald McDonald awaited us.

 

 

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Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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Another one:

 

Dead-Island-2-Hero500.jpg

Dead Island 2 Preview – Back from the dead and looking better than ever

WWW.THESIXTHAXIS.COM
Dead Island 2 is back, with Dambuster cooking up a great-looking first person open world zombie game. We go hands on at Gamescom 2022.

 

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As with the originals, this game can (and probably should) be experienced in co-op, though this time it’s for up to three players instead of four. We, however, dove into the concise demo in single-player, the Boardwalking Dead mission taking us to a wrecked Santa Monica Pier in search of the ‘Blood Drive’. There’s plenty of undead to cleave your way through, from the occasional stragglers on the beach to new, fearsome enemies that will threaten to overwhelm you when they turn up in the middle of a horde and you’re caught in the maze of fences and buildings for the pier’s attractions.

 

It’s worth mentioning here just how good the game looks. Built on a modified version of Unreal Engine 4, it’s got rock solid foundations that Dambuster has added keystone tech like FLESH to in order to make the game look and play as good as possible. It’s a gorgeous setting as the lights of the pier’s attractions shine in the night, the Ferris wheel and the looping rollercoaster contrasting with the fences, makeshift barricades and destruction that the zombie outbreak has led to.

 

It’s also immediately clear that Dead Island 2 is a clean break from the first two games in the series. Techland has refurbished their reputation with the Dying Light games (the first one in particular), and there were reportedly mitigating circumstances for their earlier work, but Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide were both pretty darn janky. Dead Island 2 immediately feels more like a big budget modern game, from how the melee combat connects, to the handling of the ranged weapons, and beyond.

 

 

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Phaseknox

Phaseknox

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That’s an extremely short delay, I don’t know how much more that they expect to improve it in just a little over two months. Saints Row got delayed six months, and it was still one of the buggiest games that I’ve ever played. I can’t imagine how buggy that it was when they were originally going to release it.

 

I’m actually fine with this delay, because Hogwarts Legacy is basically coming out at the same time as this was originally going to. I wanted them both on day one which wasn’t really an option, so now I don’t have to decide between the two. :p

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XxEvil AshxX

XxEvil AshxX

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They delayed it because everything else on the planet is releasing in February. It's a good call bumping it to April. A few more months of polish and it's not going to get completely demolished under the avalanche of Dead Space, Hogwarts Legacy, Atomic Heart, Like A Dragon Ishin, Calisto Protocol.. etc. 

 

Now they just have to compete with the tiny, insignificant zombie game that is Resident Evil 4 Remake :p

 

Dead Island always came off to me as a summer game, anyway.

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Phaseknox

Phaseknox

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9 minutes ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

They delayed it because everything else on the planet is releasing in February. It's a good call bumping it to April. A few more months of polish and it's not going to get completely demolished under the avalanche of Dead Space, Hogwarts Legacy, Atomic Heart, Like A Dragon Ishin, Calisto Protocol.. etc.

Yeah, that’s probably the real reason for the delay. February is all about Hogwarts Legacy for me now, the others can wait until later.

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Dead Island 2 (PC (EGS)/PlayStation consoles/Xbox consoles, 28 April 2023) - update: release postponed to 28 April 2023
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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Dead Island 2 (PC (EGS)/PlayStation consoles/Xbox consoles, 28 April 2023) - update: "Welcome to HELL-A" gameplay overview trailer
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