“Up until that point you are always kind of asking yourself, ‘Well, I think it's fun, but I don't know how that's going to kind of pan out when we give it to other people,’” Evan-Lawes remembers. “It was torture being on at the end, all these fantastic games coming on before us, but we knew that we were kind of closing the show there”, recalls design director Adam Duckett. How would it be received? Did people even care about Dead Island 2 anymore? It was an exciting time for the studio to showcase what they’d be working so hard and so quietly on, but one that came with its fair share of nerves. Almost a decade of troubled development led to a moment few saw coming - a grand re-reveal at gamescom 2022. We wanted to make it fun, basically, make all the violence fun rather than make you sad.”īefore Dambuster was granted the opportunity to execute their vision, however, the story of Dead Island 2 was a sad one. But that's a different thing to what Dead Island 1 was, and it was a different thing to what we wanted to do. I mean those stories have been told, right?”ĭan Evans-Lawes, Dead Island 2’s technical art director, agrees: “I think they've done a really good job of it in the Last of Us and stuff like that, where they've kind of balanced that, so the combat and the violence does feel really brutal in a way that is quite realistic, I think. “I think over the years, recent years with say, Walking Dead for example, which was a massively popular series, the attention, I think, had moved definitely more to humans, and humanity, and that sort of post-apocalyptic survival, and getting through the trauma of the outbreak. “I think we really just wanted to focus the attention back on the zombies”, explains Dave Stenton, game director at Dambuster Studios.
For them, there’s little more satisfying than the simple thrill of punching a zombie in the face and seeing your fist crunching through the back of its skull.
Despite respecting the stories that those games have to tell, the team at developer Dambuster Studios is much more interested in the latter.
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