Dead Island 2's development cycle was a troubled one, evidenced by the fact that the game was announced in 2015 and didn't release until 2023. The game also had three different developers, with the third and final studio on the project, Dambuster, finally shipping the game.
In a talk at Develop:Brighton, former Deep Silver (publisher of Dead Island) head of communications Martin Wein was very candid in speaking about the development of Dead Island 2, explaining that early play test feedback was "horrific" (reported by GamesIndustry.Biz).
"We had a major milestone with [Yager] that was in charge at the time. And boy, that game sucked," Wein recounted. "It had nothing to do with what [made] the original Dead Island [...] really fun. So we commissioned a playtest and got horrific feedback. And we set down the development team and said 'Okay, what's the course of action?' and they said 'Yeah, leave it with us.'"
Unfortunately, Yager hadn't fixed the problems by the next check-in period, so Deep Silver moved development of the game to Sumo Digital.
"Sometimes you have to make the hard decisions," Wein explained. "Because we could have, at that point, put out a sh*t game. It...
