Though there won’t be branching paths to explore on playthroughs, Worrall notes that those dialogue changes will recontextualize parts of Dead Island 2 a bit depending on the character. They’ll pick one to follow through the story and largely go through the same beats with distinct dialogue. Worrall clarified that players don’t control all of them during the story. One notable detail shared during Gamescom is that the game has six playable characters. We wanted to get players running into the fray headlong.” The zombies kind of become this background wallpaper against which the interhuman dramas play out. There’s lots of zombie games and movie properties out there that are about surviving. “We’re doing a lot of laying the ground in Dead Island 2 for future releases.

“In many ways, this is almost like an origin story for a kind of superhero,” Worrall says.

He wants players to feel like powerful Hollywood stars that take down hundreds of enemies with a smirk to keep the focus on dismemberment. Worrall compares the game’s approach to its heroes to movies like Die Hard. But also, you need that relief … One minute you’ll be slaying zombies and the next you’ll have a little bit of schadenfreude as you glimpse the remains of the human mind in that zombie as they try and stagger or fall off something comically.” “I think that any game that has that level of violence, particularly in a contemporary setting, you need to balance that with a strong moral framework,” Worrall says. If you saw its Gamescom trailer starring a hero lazily slicing up the undead on their way to the grocery store, that’s exactly what the game feels like in action. I could have cut them down just as easily, but I just wanted to mess with them. In one part of my demo, I lured a few toward an exposed electrical wire in a wet room just to watch them fry. Characters feel overpowered compared to zombies, clearing them out as if they were taking down a pack of rats. Tonally, it feels a bit like Sunset Overdrive, another apocalyptic zombie game that trades in tense horror for sandbox violence. This is almost like an origin story for a kind of superhero.

Dead island 2 gameplay 2018