June 17, 2014 by Paul Curtin
Dead Island debuted with one of the most touching and memorable trailers ever back in 2011. And while the trailer did wonders for the overall success of the title, the game itself ended up not feeling anything like the trailer and was almost comical with its poor voice acting and story. With Techland, the original creators of Dead Island, now working on another serious open world zombie game that we also got to see at E3, Deep Silver has put Yager in charge of the series and debuted Dead Island 2 with a visually stunning CGI trailer at Sony’s E3 2014 Media Briefing.
In the trailer, it becomes clear that Yager will not be taking the zombie apocalypse so seriously and instead will be having fun with it. As we were told in the hands-off demo behind closed doors by Senior Brand Manager Rupert Ochsner, this is hell-on-earth and a dream come true for the crazy survivors you’ll be able to play as. As Rupert went on to explain, “We are not dark and depressing. We are cool and kick-ass.”
Taking place in California where the virus hasn’t completely taken over yet, players will be able to assume the role of unique characters who are immune to the virus. One of the new characters named Max has a pet cat called Rick Furry and drives around in a pimped-out van. Yager’s devs even jokingly announced that they’re proud to be the first studio ever to motion capture a real live cat for a game.
We got to check out a sneak peek of the gameplay from an older build of the game and from what we saw, the game looks absolutely stunning and takes full advantage of its beautiful sunny San Francisco setting. In the demo, we were shown action taking place in a suburban California neighborhood that was crawling with thousands of zombies. From the trees and grass outside to the level of detail inside every house you can enter, everything comes together to create the feeling of a real living, breathing open world filled with the walking dead. With crazy customizable weapons like the Dead Rising series and wild melee maneuvers that can launch zombies hundreds of feet up into the air with the swing of a sledgehammer, Dead Island 2 is looking to be the ultimate zombie playground.
Yager assured us that their new technology will even allow for unique looking zombies with no two zombies ever looking the same — an impressive feat if they can in fact pull it off. And at the very end of their presentation, the developers even teased what the latest build will look like on next-gen systems, which looked even better than everything we saw and close to the CGI trailer’s impressive environments.
Most gamers would be satisfied with just the older demo we saw… so the final product should be enough to really get people excited when the game launches in spring 2015 on only PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
