Dead Island 2’s developer wants to make zombies fun again

polygon.com:

After years in the development wilderness, Dead Island 2 is back — and its developer also wants to go back to the basics of zombie fiction. At a preview event in London earlier this month, U.K. studio Dambuster Studios told the assembled journalists that one of the game’s four pillars — alongside “paradise gone to hell,” “visceral combat,” and “pulp tone” — was “zombie core.”

It seems like stating the obvious. Dead Island 2, like its 2011 predecessor, is a game about surviving a zombie apocalypse and combating the shambling undead. Of course zombies are central to it; why would Dambuster need to restate this? But the developers have a finer point to make here.

“A lot of the zombie… not just games, but franchises, especially in the last five to 10 years, a lot of times the message is that the real enemy is humans. The real bad guy is other people, hell is other people,” lead narrative designer Ayesha Khan (who goes by Khan, professionally) told Polygon. She could easily be talking about The Walking Dead or The Last of Us. “Zombies can become almost a backdrop, almost just a setting choice. This could be on the moon, but instead it’s with zombies. But really, it’s about the people and the relationships. And, you know, sometimes that makes beautiful, gorgeous games and movies and TV. We’re not dissing that in any way.

“But we wanted to keep zombies as the enemy, as the visuals, as the focus, as the gameplay. Always at the core, at the forefront,” Khan said. “That’s the focus of the game.”

Dead Island 2, then, is not a game about warring factions of survivors, or the human cost of living in an inhumane world. It’s a game about mashing horrible undead monsters in the head with heavy implements. Its zombies are not a