After Techland (who since moved on to continue their concept as Dying Light, which also got its sequel out the doors a week ago…) left the IP behind, the story might see its continuation after a LONG period…

Back in June 2020, when an alleged 2015 version of Dead Island 2 leaked, we wrote the following about the quite turbulent development history for this game: “Dead Island 2 is slowly becoming an unwanted person in the family: nobody wants to deal with it. It was first developed by Techland (who then moved on to make the spiritual successor at Warner in the shape of Dying Light). A German studio, Yager took over (previously responsible for Spec Ops: The Line, but they fell out with Deep Silver, the publisher, as their “respective visions of the project fell out of alignment”), followed by Sumo Digital, who also couldn’t finish the game (they flopped with Crackdown 3), and now, Deep Silver’s internal studio, Dambuster is working on it (they previously finished Homefront: The Revolution). This whole scenario could be made into a documentary – NoClip should get on it…” We agree with our past selves: NoClip SHOULD get on the subject if Dead Island 2 ever gets finished!

It’s been over a year and a half since then, and Dead Island 2 is still nowhere to be found, even though it was announced in 2014, an entire console generation ago, by Deep Silver, which Embracer Group has since acquired. And Tom Henderson, a reliable insider, said in a video the following: “According to everyone that I’ve been speaking to… the game decent state and it could be announced pretty soon with some gameplay trailer. A release date expected to be somewhere in Q4 2022, possibly leading up to next year if there are any problems with the development cycle.”

He also revealed the background story: “You’re on a plane, and there’s a zombie outbreak on a plane… eventually the plane crashes into Hollywood, you survive, and it’s then your job to survive on the ground.” (So the setting would be in the Los Angeles neighbourhood… but are they parodying the movie industry and its, shall we say, Chinese kowtow? The story was originally about the US military quarantining California… so the location hasn’t changed much!)

It is all unofficial, but it begs the question: will Dead Island 2 be released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One…?

Source: VGC