Dead Island 2 - Interview @ Red Bull

Red Bull posted a interview for Dead Islands 2 with Senior Gameplay Programmer Isaac Ashdown of Yager who answers a few questions. Here is a small sample.

Gone is the plinky-plonky piano of the first trailer. Gone too, the tragic couple deliberately burning themselves to death in the cabin of a boat surrounded by an impenetrable moat of ghouls (as featured in the trailer for Dead Island's not-quite-sequel, Riptide). In their place, we get a trailer starring a fraudulent fitness instructor, obliviously going for a jog as other Californians are set upon by zombies in the background, before graphically mutating into a lolloping corpse himself (his bicep implants flopping out from under his putrefying skin as he does so). Yager are making a point: in Dead Island 2, the zombies are played for laughs.

"The trailer definitely matches the tone we're going for," Isaac Ashdown, one of Dead Island 2's senior gameplay programmers tells Red Bull. "It's a kind of lighthearted take on what would happen if a zombie apocalypse came to California, and all the people who stayed behind saw it as an opportunity for a new way of life. When you looked at the first game and the tone of the trailer, and then at how people were playing it, there was a kind of disconnect. There was a disconnect between what the game was trying to get them to feel, and what they were actually doing. So we've gone the direction of creating a game with a tone that matches how people actually played."


That's not necessarily a cop-out, or even a bad thing. Dead Rising 1 and 2 showed that zombie games don't have to be gruelling to be fun – largely by letting heroes Frank West and Chuck Greene strip off all their clothes and pedal full-tilt at zombies on tricycles. Dead Island 2 is more restrained than that (the 2009 movie Zombieland is a tonal inspiration, says Ashford), but po-faced it is not. This is a perverse postcard picture of California: the sun is shining, the Hollywood Sign sits bright on the hill, and when you take an enemy's head off, the corpse might plod around in board shorts for a minute before keeling over.

More information.

What Yager doesn't seem to understand is behind the crazy fun of DR1/DR2/DI1/DI:R were story-driven narratives guiding the player along. Plenty of other games have tried for "crazy" and failed because they lacked context. I would even argue Dead Island had strong characters and a mysterious plot players enjoyed discovering.

So far Yager seems bent on just making an absurd zombie-killing game without much actual purpose or meaning. Imagine DR1 without Frank West! Imagine DR2 without Chuck Greene!

Let's face it: DI2 is an imposter, a game being made because Deep Silver wants to cash in on the name. They got Yager to help them because…well, Yager probably agreed to do it for real cheap.

Dying Light is the answer…hopefully. It is the true sequel made by the true innovators (Techland) who made the original Dead Islands.

Originally Posted by Brumbek
Dying Light is the answer…hopefully. It is the true sequel made by the true innovators (Techland) who made the original Dead Islands.

I agree. I quite enjoyed the first two games, and I really hope that Dying Light delivers.