Dead Island 2 Previews and Interviews

We have rounded up a few previews and interviews for Yager’s sequel to Dead Island, which mostly seem based on the game’s showing at EGX 2014.

Capsule Computers:

The final mission is set along the highway, and demands players to defend the party behind the bar from an angry horde of zombies of all sizes, shapes and tones the raggedy walker types and big runners. Without your teammates behind your back, this section can quickly get out of control. Fortunately, I was able to tag alongside a feisty shooter that cleared most of the zombies for me and I managed to kill 58 zombies in total during the round.

Towards the end of the game, there were a few noticeable glitches in the open-world of California, particularly during the swarm of zombies. I encountered a rather intimidating troll-faced zombie in convenience store, who trapped me in a corner and because of the proximity between us, I was unable to swing my arm back and attack him with my spanner. Thankfully, a fellow teammate took pity on me and blasted the dead weight to smithereens. The terrain is beautifully designed within the game, as well as the physical appearance of the zombies who in fact are the faces of employees from Yager Development, scanned into Dead Island 2. Essentially, players who purchase the game next year will be spending the majority of their time chasing after Yager zombies!

International Business Times has snippets from one of the developers, Isaach Ashdown:

“Our backstory is that California has been abandoned by the government,” says Ashdown. “But some people have stayed behind because they see it as a way to get a new lease of life, to do things the way they’ve always wanted to. And that matches the way we expect players to approach the game. It’s not going to be laugh a minute it won’t be full of wisecracks but there is humour there.”

It’s a refreshing take on the free-roaming zombie genre. Dead Rising always struggled narratively. In cutscenes and on paper the characters were scared, frightened, and under duress, but when the player got the controls, he could run around in his underpants pelting zombies with tennis balls.

Giving the characters in Dead Island 2 the same motivation as the player they’re here to enjoy themselves is an elegant workaround of that awkward relationship between developer and audience. It won’t be as on-the-nose as Spec Ops: The Line, but Dead Island 2 could end up with a very neat story.

And of course there’s co-op. Upping the player limit from four to eight, Yager wants to make the world of Dead Island 2 feel populated and alive, even though it won’t be forcing people to play together.

“We don’t put any barriers to people playing together,” says Ashdown. “If you’re at a different point of the story, we don’t want to say ‘you can’t play with these other people because their world is too different to yours.’ Everyone can be doing their own thing. Different events happen in the world and you can choose to help out with them or not. Your decisions might have an affect. Ignoring something might mean that an area that used to be safe becomes overrun with zombies.”

Red Bull Games:

But dialing up the gore and the saturation alone does not a good game make. When we play the demo, we’re in co-op with three other players (though when the game releases, servers will hold up to eight at a time). Our goal, we’re told by the rep, is ‘to kill as many zombies as possible’. Not the dramatic leap forward for the genre we were hoping for, but OK, we’re game.

And so we charge about a roped off segment of the California suburbs, flailing at zombies with knives, setting off car alarms, raiding stores and gas stations for loot (and electric shotguns), and finally ending up at the barricade in front of this house party thrown by survivors so ker-azy that their response to the screaming death of their loved ones is to throw a massive kegger. The routine is familiar: we backpedal and strafe around, chopping at zombies with bladed and blunt weapons and saving our punchier firearms for the hulking, chunkier Thugs who inevitably show up to boost the difficulty.

It’s OK. When you strike at a zombie in front of you, you’ve got the choice of a light, quick attack, good for dispatching enemies in a group; or you can really wind back for torso-cleaving heavy blow that might split them in two or cannon them off into the sky. If you liked the combat in Dead Island, good news! This is more of that.

Strategy Informer has a full interview with Ashdown, which covers the game’s story, seamless multiplayer, crafting and more:

Strategy Informer: Speaking generally, what areas are you looking to improve on from the last two games?

Isaac Ashdown: Well we’ve certainly made a big effort on the co-op experience. There’s seamless multiplayer with up to 8 players now. The idea is that when you’re playing it you don’t have any barriers to playing with your friends. Maybe you’re in different parts of the story or different levels, you can still play together and don’t have to wait for each other or anything like that. Also the world is self-populating with players who you might not know, they might be having trouble with a hoard of zombies and you might want to help them, or you can leave them to it and do your own thing. It’s an open-world sandbox with multiplayer tied in well.

Strategy Informer: Will the zombies scale depend on your level? So if you’re a level 8 player and go into a battle with a level 2 player will that player get slaughtered?

Isaac Ashdown: We definitely want to make it so that if you’re playing with someone of a different level you can still find ways to play together and still have a great experience. We don’t want the high level player to not get the loot they want to make it worth their while, or the low level player to not do enough damage to make a difference in combat. The exact specifics of how we’re doing that we’ll have to get into later.

Strategy Informer: It is still a free-roaming open world then? Not smaller, segmented levels?

Isaac Ashdown: Absolutely open world, yes.

Strategy Informer: How free will it be?

Isaac Ashdown: Well, we’ve got three main areas: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. The demo we’ve got represents just under 10% of the Los Angeles area. There won’t be any loading screens, but we can’t really quantify how big it all is yet.

Finally, Xbox Mad has a video interview: