Dead Island 2 was re-revealed during Gamescom Opening Night Live. We had a chance to sit down with Dambuster Studios’ creative director to discuss zombie slaying in the City of Angels and the studio’s FLESH gore engine.Our time at Gamescom 2022 allowed us to sit down with Dambuster Studios’ creative director, James Worrall, to discuss the developer’s long-awaited new entry into the zombie-slaying genre, Dead Island 2. Our discussion covered Dambusters’ new gore engine, appropriately labelled FLESH, gameplay reminiscent of 80s horror movies, and hero origin stories. Will Dead Island 2 debut on our best zombie games list in February? The gameplay trailer below certainly shows promise.Dead Island 2 could feature some returning charactersIt’s been eight years since the famed reveal trailer for Dead Island 2 took us for a casual jog along an increasingly chaotic Los Angeles beachfront; an apt metaphor for the game’s first five years in development which saw it pass through multiple studios until Dambuster picked it up in 2019. While both Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide helped build a core following for the franchise, Worrell tells us that working on the title has felt much like a normal development cycle, but “obviously the pressure is there, but it’s good pressure.” Once the team got their hands on the game everything but the Los Angeles setting was scrapped, giving the team a chance to create something fresh. “We thought, ‘what a great location full of character!’ It’s iconic, and everybody knows LA,” Worrall said. “I think that it’s really important if you’re going to do that kind of longing for something that’s just been lost. It has to be fresh in your mind.” As is evident in the reveal trailer we saw during Opening Night Live, the Los Angeles setting shows that the city is still very much the same as it was before the virus spread throughout its citizens; a design choice that Dambuster Studios decided on from the start, by setting the game only six years into the future. “We weren’t really looking to build something that was long dead and way down the post-apocalyptic avenue. We wanted to retain as much of that Los Angeles contemporary feel: the heat, the architecture, but most of all, the cultural vibe of the place,” Worrall said. “There’s something about LA, and London to a certain extent, where you just feel that there’s always this bubbling creativity, which we’ve tried to reflect in both the player characters and the NPCs you’ll meet along the way.”Dead Island 2 is completely focused on zombie slaying, or as Worrall puts it: “Good guys (humans) versus bad guys (zombies).” The story will offer us a new perspective of the viral outbreak that we were first introduced to on the paradise island of Banoi in 2011, and while this sequel does share the same universe as the original two games, Dead Island 2 will be offering its own take on the outbreak with a fresh story for us to uncover. “What are the zombies? How does it affect you? What’s happening to you? What’s the big story?” Worrall said. “It’s that classic 80s horror movie kind of thing, where the monster and the slow reveal about what’s going on is the core of the experience.”Worrall describes the game as a kind of “hero origin story,” which will introduce us to six zombie slayers that call LA — or ‘Hell A’ as Dambuster has amusingly called it — their home. By the sounds of things, Dead Island 2 will set the foundations for additional stories within the series’ universe, offering us some insight into where the virus has come from, with the core experience covering the six playable zombie slayers that are both infected and immune to the degenerative virus that’s plaguing the populace. “Of the narrative we have planned, this game probably covers about 30% of that journey,” Worrell told us about how this game fits in with the planned future of the franchise.Much like we’re used to from the series now, Dead Island 2 will feature multiple areas to unlock as we progress through the game, which you can go back and explore whenever you like to find the many secrets and stories they hold. Worrall describes the areas as “rich, curated places, not big expansive places.” Each offers a myriad of environmental storytelling opportunities when you explore off of the main critical path.Whether it’s broken windows and tiles, or journals left behind by previous survivors, Dead Island 2 will be filled with small details that help you understand what happened in that location. “Wherever you look, there will be a story to glean from whatever happened there, and some of these details will be hints to the bigger story that we’ll be expanding on as we go through the franchise,” Worrall said. The potential for some returning characters was also teased, as well, so we have our fingers crossed for Sam B. Dead Island 2’s six zombie slayers, much like the characters found in the series’ previous games, will have slight benefits to various statistics in the form of two unique innate cards. The card system is built for character customisation, which allows you to swap between various boons for the playstyle you prefer. Aside from the two character-specific cards each slayer starts with, progressing through the story will offer a selection of additional cards, and there will be others available through world exploration. Combat is reliant on two elements: the card system that allows you to map special attacks and abilities to various buttons, as well as weapon practicality. “This is where durability comes into it. We didn’t want players to pick up one weapon and just stick with it and carry it through the game,” Worrall said. “It’s all about having the right tool for the job.” Weapon durability is the system used in many games that slowly degrades an item’s quality each time it’s used, which eventually ends with the weapon breaking and becoming useless to the player. We’ll have eight slots to fill on the weapon wheel, and you’d be wise to ensure you have a range of different weapons available to use against the various types of infected. “You’re a zombie hunter,” Worrall said. There are a “diverse range of zombies, not just looks-wise, but different behaviours and different classes.” Evolution was also mentioned, although Worrall said that Dambuster isn’t ready to discuss that feature yet. Whether that will be something dynamic like the mutation mechanic that’s just been revealed in The Callisto Protocol, or something else entirely, is yet to be determined. It sounds like it could be a new feature we’re yet to see in the Dead Island franchise. Dead Island 2 is designed to be an action-packed ride, where slaughtering zombies is at the very core of the game’s design. To achieve a dynamic combat system, Dambuster Studios worked on AI characters’ procedural reactions and animations to your hits. This is linked to the studio’s gore engine called FLESH (Fully Localised Eviscerations Simulator for Humanoids). “We’ve modelled skin, muscle, bone, and organs — potentially zombie organs — but we’ll be revealing more about that later on,” Worrall said. “We got that working within the first year of operation and it was a good foundation to lay the RPG system on top of for the different moves and different weapons.” “We’ve basically taken the essence of the first game and just turned it up to eleven.” Keep an eye open for our impressions of Dead Island 2’s gameplay, where we had a chance to put the FLESH engine through its paces to see what carnage we could cause on the sandy beaches of Los Angeles (plus a rather stab-happy clown we found). Speaking with Worrall, it seems that the game is currently in its beta stage of development as Dambuster wanted to “make a proper promise to the players,” Worrall said. “We didn’t want to just go ‘here’s another bit that’s coming,’ or ‘here’s a concept’ kind of thing.”Dead Island 2 will launch on February 3rd for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, and preorders are now live. We’d love to know what you think about what’s been discussed here, and whether you’ll be wanting to bash in some zombie brains on the streets of LA. Drop a comment down below!
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