Yager even showed off some impressive gameplay at Gamescom in August 2014, but the partnership was not to be. Unlike the original Dead Island, which takes place on the fictional tropical island of Banoi, this sequel would be set in several real life cities across California, with an expanded crafting system and co-op for up to eight players at a time. The fruits of their early efforts represent the last thing we properly saw of Dead Island 2, as it was revealed to the public at E3 2014 and tagged with a somewhat ambitious Q2 2015 release date (ha!). As a result, Deep Silver brought on a new studio, Yager Development (Spec Ops: The Line), to reboot development and start afresh on the property. Dead or alive?ĭead Island 2 was originally supposed to be developed by the studio behind its predecessor, 2011’s Dead Island, but Techland left the project in its very early stages to create a different kind of zombie game, Dying Light, with Warner Bros instead. So, with that cleared up, here’s the story so far. Consider this a pre-emptive clarification before we dive into the giant noodle soup that is Dead Island 2’s development history. The important point to be made from this is that all of these companies have a financial stake in Dead Island 2, which perhaps explains why it hasn’t yet been cancelled when so many other publishers might have kicked the can on the project a long time ago. To put it as succinctly as possible, the property is owned by Deep Silver, which is the publishing division of Koch Media, which itself is the sister company of THQ Nordic, previously known as Nordic Games before it acquired several IPs from the bankrupt remains of THQ. Not only has it been worked on by four different developers (more on that in a second), but the Dead Island IP has several more companies attached to it on the business side. Part of the trouble with getting to the bottom of what exactly is going on with Dead Island 2 is that the game sits in a spaghetti bowl of ownership. Truth be told, I may now have more questions than I did before I started out on this fact finding adventure.ĭead Island 2's publishers are so reluctant to talk about it that you can’t even confirm who’s working on it anymore. I’ve scoured the four corners of the internet, spoken to some of its many developers, and retraced the game’s troubled development history step by step in an effort to draw up a definitive timeline.

Desperate to find out more, I’ve tried to learn everything I can about what the hell has happened to Dead Island 2 since we last saw it.

Dead island 2 e3 2019