The original Dead Island 2 reveal trailer is now an iconic (perhaps infamous) moment in games. It was a great trailer, people loved it and almost a decade later we fast forward and the game is still in development.
Dead Island 2 was first revealed in 2014 and was in development at Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager, with Dead Island developer Techland having parted ways with the property of working on Dying Light. Publisher Deep Silver handed over development of the game to LittleBigPlanet 3 developer Sumo Digital in 2016, and then in 2019 the company announced that Dambuster Studios, the developer of Homefront: The Revolution, would develop Dead Island 2. It’s now 2023 and Dambuster’s Dead Island 2 is finally out in April.
Dambuster unveiled its new Dead Island 2 last year with a snazzy new movie trailer, though very different from the original 2014 reveal. That’s not exactly surprising – Dambuster says it built Dead Island 2 from the ground up. During my trip to the cover story to play 8 hours of Dead Island 2 in Dambuster’s Nottingham, England, I was curious: has the team ever considered remaking the original Dead Island 2 trailer? The answer was no.
“It wasn’t really on our radar to revamp the trailer,” David Stenton, game director of Dead Island 2, tells me. “I think it’s fun to take that trailer — especially now the location of the trailer — and see it , as it applies to the tone of Dead Island we deliver. This trailer definitely delivered on the postcard LA, and I think we’re going to deliver postcard LA in a different way.”
Still, I’ve been wondering if Dambuster used that original trailer as a guide when developing the game, especially given the good response it received in 2014 (even Goat Simulator 3 recently remade the trailer).
“Not really,” says Stenton. “We started with a clean slate, absolutely with our own vision. We don’t look too much at… what’s happened in the past or at too many other games out there. We’re just really focused on how we want to make Dead Island 2 absolutely phenomenal, bring it up to date and deliver a game that we think fans will really enjoy.”
To learn more about the game, read my Dead Island cover story here, then head over to game informants Exclusive Dead Island 2 coverage center for stories you can’t find anywhere else e.g. For example, why the game is set in a non-island town, detailed breakdowns of two Dead Island 2 survivors, Dani and Ryan, and what weapon durability is like is a useful tool for Dambuster Studios.
You’ll also find exclusive gameplay in videos like this one on how Dambuster Studios captures the sounds of zombie guts in Dead Island 2, and new details about our hands-on time in the Dead Island 2 cover story discussion episode The Game Informer Show.
Are you playing Dead Island 2 on day one? Let us know in the comments below!
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