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

polygon.com:

The leak was accurate: Dead Island 2is back in the spotlight after a famously lengthy and troubled development. And it’s not that far off from seeing the light of day, either. Deep Silver re-revealed the zombie survival sequel during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, and confirmed it will be released on Feb. 3, 2023, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

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.

In 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 gamecomes 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