Dead Island 2 Hands-on and Q&A – Devs Comment on Game Length, HELL-A Setting, and Open World Boredom

I've played Dead Island 2. Granted, it wasn't the first time that happened since I was able to go hands-on with the original version of the game nearly ten years ago, at Gamescom 2014, when Yager Development was still the developer.

Not long after that, the first troubles started brewing. There was a delay from the Q2 2015 release window, and publisher Deep Silver later revealed to have parted ways with Yager. In March 2016, we learned that Sumo Digital had taken over the reins of the Dead Island 2 project. For the next three years or so, everything surrounding the game went quiet until Deep Silver announced yet another developer change, with Dambuster Studios (Homefront: The Revolution) brought on board.

At this point, fans and critics alike had all but despaired that this sequel would ever see the light of day. However, the game is at long last coming out in just five weeks, and I can confirm that it's real and also pretty good, although fairly conservative in what it tries to do.

Deep Silver allowed us to check out a few hours of the game from the very beginning when your chosen Slayer (out of a roster of six) crashlands back in quarantined LA, or HELL-A as more appropriately named by Dambuster, along with a group of people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.

It's not long after that the main character gets bitten by a newly turned zombie. Luckily, they quickly find out they're immune, making them invaluable to the rest of the survivors once they regroup at a movie star's mansion to figure out how to escape the nightmare.

Each Slayer has different starting attributes and a couple of exclusive innate skills. Ryan, the one I picked in my playthrough, has a lot of health and gets bonuses when blocking or knocking down enemies. Do note that depending on the Slayer, the defensive move will only be either block or dodge. Ryan can only block, so if you're more into dodging, you should pick an agile character instead.

Other than that, though, the skill card system seems to allow for a lot of customization of all kinds of moves, including dropkicks. Cards can be swapped any time, which is great, though being able to save different loadouts would be even better. Cards are found throughout the environments, which also contain a ton of resources that come in handy to craft and repair weapons. As with the first Dead Island, all weapons have a certain amount of durability, but you can repair and mod them in various ways. The higher quality ones can be modified to deal elemental damage (such as fire or electricity), and there's also a perk system that makes the play style selection even deeper and more precise. If you like a certain weapon, you can keep using it as you level up with the level matching feature.

There's a lot of melee weapons in Dead Island 2, from hammers and axes to knives and swords, not to mention more unusual ones such as the Wolverine-like claw extensions. Each weapon feels very different in your Slayer's hand, but they all feel good in their own ways thanks to the Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, also known as FLESH. That's the procedural dismemberment system designed by Dambuster specifically to make melee feel great, which is a resounding success. Rarely have games shown such intricately detailed dismemberment, and it goes hand-in-hand with the gameplay since you can and should chop the legs out of Runners, the arms out of Crushers, et cetera.

When played on Hard difficulty, Dead Island 2 didn't feel like a cakewalk either. It was relatively easy to get swarmed if not careful. On the other hand, there are plenty of opportunities to exploit the environment to your advantage, such as luring zombies to traps and other area-of-effect hazards.

All that said, the game did feel a bit repetitive after a while. Perhaps playing co-op could ameliorate the situation, but it wasn't an option in the preview build. The story appeared to have some potential, at least, thanks to the surprisingly solid voice acting and a few standout characters.

A couple of things: Dead Island 2 doesn't feature a day/night cycle, moving from day to night and vice-versa only when the story demands it. The maps are also very much old-school in that they are separated from each other by load times, and they're quite small by today's standards. Very often, you'll encounter roads blocked by large vehicles and similar age-old level designer tricks to limit the playable area.

That said, there's a fair amount of exploration available for those interested in getting into locked rooms and the like. The rewards are usually worth it, ranging from new blueprints to readily usable weapons or rare resources.

Visually, Dead Island 2 makes a good impression, at least on PC. The animations are fluid and the rendition of LA is convincing in terms of details. However, this preview build did include quite a bit of stuttering. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4, and we all know that some games based on it recently had problematic launches due to lacking shader compilation. Hopefully, the review build will include this critical feature.

After the preview, I also had the chance to speak with Art Director Adam Olsson and Narrative Designer Lydia Cockerham about Dead Island 2. As a reminder, the game is out on April 21st for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X.

Can you walk us through your entry into this troubled development project?

Adam Olsson: Dambuster started working on this project in 2018. We had a clear start and free reign on what we wanted Dead Island 2 to be. Besides keeping the setting, we decided to start from scratch to make sure that we could do the game that we wanted to do.

That makes sense. As you said, the setting is the same. Can you talk about that and the narrative, which seemed more involved than in the first Dead Island game from so many years ago?

Adam Olsson: I can answer about the setting, and I will leave Lydia to talk about the narrative. For us, not only is LA a city filled to the brim with character, it's also a city that lives somewhere between reality and fiction because all of us have, in one way or another, been living in LA through movies, TV, media, and so on.  The great diversity also allowed us to have a postcard journey.

Lydia Cockerham: In terms of the narrative, what we thought would work incredibly well with this picture of LA that, like Adam said, is constructed from what we all know from movies and from what we've seen in types of media we knew we wanted the tone to be this whole irreverent tone that is a love letter to B-movies from the '80s and all these kinds of things that we all have in our psyches.

We felt that tone would work so well with the characters, the setting, and the location rather than going down this kind of dark and serious direction that a lot of games picked. We wanted to make ourselves feel different with the setting and the tone in that way.

Do you have an estimate for the duration of Dead Island 2?

Adam Olsson: I don't know exactly. I think we do have guidance stating that if you take part in some secondary missions and other activities, the whole experience is around 20 hours. That's what we have.

That's considering the side quests, then?

Adam Olsson: Some of them, yeah, but on top of that, we have collectibles, and you could always replay Dead Island 2 with a new character if you feel like it.

The FLESH system is very intriguing. Did you have to work hard to do this kind of in-depth procedural dismemberment system? Certainly, not many games reach this level of detail in the dismemberment.

Adam Olsson: That is absolutely one of our core systems. It is something that we spent a lot of our time and expertise on for a multitude of reasons. One is that it fits well with the Hollywood B-movie theme, but there's also the fact that it really gives that feeling of cause and effect. When you hit something, Now you can actually feel that you've cut through something. Because our focus is on melee combat, we wanted to spend our resources on a system that would make it feel good.

Do you have an estimate on how many weapons are available in Dead Island 2, or is it just more than you can name offhandedly?

Adam Olsson: A lot. Definitely more than I can name!

Are there also any ranged weapons, such as traditional firearms, in the full game, or is it just not a focus of the game?

Adam Olsson: We offer a range of options for the player.

Lydia Cockerham: But the focus is very much all about getting up and personal, close and personal with the zombies, and be very much in their face. So, yeah, there are ranged options, but we really wanted that the player can't just run away or can't be on the sidelines. They have to be up close with zombies.

In the preview, I only encountered zombie enemies. Are there also going to be any human foes at some point?

Lydia Cockerham: The focus is 100% on Zombies. It's all about killing zombies. Again, we wanted to distinguish ourselves. This isn't a deep, introspective question about 'Oh, the real monster all along was the humans!'. No, we're not fighting humans in Dead Island 2. It's all about focusing on the true monster, which is the zombie, which is this horrific creature you've seen in the movies. But this time, you can tear them apart yourself with your hands and weapons.

I've also noticed that there is a skill card system. Can you talk a bit about that?

Adam Olsson: Sure. Our skill card system is something that I personally enjoy a lot. Going away from the classic skill systems, we have a myriad of cards that can support different play styles. We're going to go with them because it just enables you to change on the fly and try out of the way.

Lydia Cockerham: Yeah, you can change any time and keep trained to find that method that works for you and matches the way you play and how you want to slice.

I think each survivor has a unique card. Is that right?

Adam Olsson: That's correct.

I guess that's to help distinguish the Slayers.

Adam Olsson: Yes. Whatever Slayer you choose can be tuned down for the play style you want. The cards that are connected to them, that's kind of the cream de la cream of various play styles that you can experiment with.

So you could select a tanky character and spec it for damage, correct?

Adam Olsson: Absolutely. We want the player to be able to set how they're going to play.

Sounds cool. In the preview build, the environments weren't very big. There were some rooms that you could unlock with keys or by rewiring generators, that kind of stuff. Will the environments in the final version of the game get larger, though, or is it just a design choice to keep it small?

Adam Olsson: Because our game is a story-driven action RPG, we wanted to put our focus on these semi open world areas. We want to be able to focus on quality over quantity.

We also don't want that moment of people running away from zombies. As Lydia was saying earlier, we want them headlong into battle to fight zombies.

Lydia Cockerham: Yeah. It's really important to us that it does feel like LA and there's all these exciting things around every corner to look at and notice. There are so many open world games these days that just kind of feel a bit boring. And it's just so much expansive there's nothing to do. So we wanted Dead Island 2 to feel full of life, despite there also being zombies everywhere.

Can you both comment on what your favorite part of working on the game was, whether a feature or maybe a character, something that you particularly enjoyed?

Adam Olsson: Do you want to go first?

Lydia Cockerham: Okay, I'll go first. For me, this is kind of a personal thing, but this was the first real experience I had of writing dialogue where I got to be in on the recording session with an actor saying those lines. Just having that was a really amazing personal moment for me and hearing them bring to life these eccentric characters and interesting dramatic moments we've written. That was a real highlight. I'm so excited for people to get to know all these strange characters they're going to meet.

Adam Olsson: And for me personally, it was creating a living world. LA may be brimming with undead, but our game is also filled with Easter eggs and nods to all the Hollywood-made B-movies we have loved. We're keen to just hit those postcard locations.

Thank you for your time.

The post Dead Island 2 Hands-on and Q&A – Devs Comment on Game Length, HELL-A Setting, and Open World Boredom by Alessio Palumbo appeared first on Wccftech.