Dead Island 2 Originally Had Eight-Player Co-Op

thegamer.com:

Dead Island 2 was announced on June 10, 2014, beginning a near-decade-long saga of developer hot potato. I was 13 when it was first revealed, and I'm about to turn 23 the year it finally came out. Given that it switched hands three times and went through several different builds, there were understandably a lot of conflicting ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor, and one of those was a more extensive co-op system.

Dambuster Studio took over Dead Island 2 from Sumo Digital who in turn picked it up from Yager, and rather than sticking with the work that had been left behind, it chose to start from scratch. In a new Inside Story with IGN, the team revealed a few of these abandoned concepts, such as eight-player co-op (compared to the release's three), California as a full map, and driveable vehicles.

RELATED: Dead Island 2 Has A Great Explanation For Why Some Enemies Are Big Boys

"We definitely had to evaluate what was there and go, 'Which features do we want to have in the game?'" technical art director Dan Evans-Lawes said. "Certainly, there were some interesting ideas that we looked at from previous iterations that didn't make it in primarily for scope reasons and trying to get the project done in a reasonable timeframe."

Playing with eight players was the initial goal of Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager, but such complex systems would have no doubt hindered a game that had already, infamously, been in development for quite some time. But it wasn't always because of scope; for instance, vehicles clashed with the more intimate melee system that Dead Island 2 is now built around, so Dambuster didn't bring them forward into its own version of the game.

"There was some vehicle stuff, driving cars, things like