How Dambuster finally brought Dead Island 2 over the finish line
Dead Island 2 is out today. Yes, you're reading that right.
Up there with Skull & Bones, Beyond Good & Evil 2 and probably some other non-Ubisoft titles, Dead Island 2 has been one of the most prominent modern examples of a game stuck in Development Hell.
Announced in 2014 with a planned release date of Spring 2015, it was originally being created by Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager. However, after at least one delay and three years of development, a difference in vision between Yager and publisher Deep Silver led the German studio to be dropped from the project in 2015.
The reins were then handed to UK developer Sumo Digital, and later passed to Deep Silver-owned Dambuster Studios – famously formed from the ashes of Crytek UK, the developer previously known as TimeSplitters creator Free Radical Design.
Dambuster took over development in 2018, but game director David Stenton tells us he and the team weren't worried about the pressure of taking over a project that had been in development for six years. Instead, he was more concerned about how respected and established the franchise was, given the popularity of the original.
"There's a lot of people that fondly remember the Dead Island games – the first game and [2013 follow-up] Riptide – and have got a lot of good memories of them," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "So obviously you want to honour that, and you want to sort of push it already. It was a few years in by that point, so we wanted to push the boundaries and there's pressure associated with that that we were conscious of.
"Obviously as time ticks by, now we're in 2023, and fans have been waiting ages, right? It's massively exciting and a privilege to be able to finally deliver the game that everybody's been
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