Dead Island 2 Director Talks About Gore & Making A More Zombie-Focused Game


Dead Island 2 it’s been out for a long time, but it’s almost there. It’s awesome in more ways than a few, and ComingSoon Senior Gaming Editor Michael Leri recently spoke with Design Director Adam Duckett about some of its more awesome features including the highly restricted world design, the bloody FLESH System, the absence of analog combat in the first game. , and so on.


Dead Island 2 has gone through enough teams and years of development to make it seem destined to fail. This…

Michael Leri: Dead Island 2 is set in medium-sized interconnected hubs instead of a large and more traditional open world. Can you tell why the team took that approach?

Adam Duckett: It was a decision we made early on. We want to focus on quality over quantity, both in the content that we can add, the quality of the environment, the quality of the visuals, and also to make sure that we focus a lot of attention on the core of the game, which is our brutal zombie combat . We really want to make sure that the environments are great playgrounds and great sandboxes for players to interact with zombies up close and personal.

It’s refreshing for a developer to not try and make an endless, 120-hour game.

I have two children. [laughs]

With this setting full of superficiality, it’s easy to think that the characters will be grating. How do you write it to make sure the play is funny, satirical, not annoying, and has heart?

This is a good question. And I want to make sure I do that answer justice because I’m not a writer. Men look at it through a Hollywood lens. So it’s not a straightforward take on Los Angeles. It’s done through that kind of Hollywood lens so they can really lean into different kinds of caricatures from LA.

Dead Island 2 has a lot of options during combat. Can you talk about the process of making all of these, maybe in the hope that players don’t burn out?

Again, it was an early decision we made that we didn’t want the worlds to be static. We want to physicalize them and we want to give players opportunities in any combat scenario. Again, it’s quality over quantity and having more refined playing fields allows us to do more within those playing fields. We are looking at different types of fluid, so we have many methods of getting different fluids into the scene, it is through pipes, Curveballs, or through the environment. And then we want different elemental opportunities again through Curveballs, weapons, the environment, or skill cards that come together to give people more opportunities to participate.

One of the first design meetings, I remember sitting there and going, “Killing zombies in interesting and new ways. Here we go. How do we do it?” The key is to take everyday things or everyday things like water and fuel in the sandbox and really look at them from different angles – player, environment, weapons, zombies – and how let’s put it together. In any given scenario, there are many ways to overcome the zombie challenge. And I think for players on the second and third playthrough will discover something that they didn’t notice the first time they visited the environment. And I like that and being able to interact with things all the time.

Can you talk about the FLESH System and where it started, where it ended, and what you think it brings to the game?

We started seeing zombies in a lot of zombie movies and a lot of zombie games when we started Dead Island 2. And we really want to write a zombie game for zombie fans. And if you look at them, especially the references to the film outside, they have a lot of gory stuff and we had to find the right tone as well, so that it wasn’t uncomfortable, which I think we did our pulp method. this. We want to push it as far as we can and do things we haven’t seen before in games. And so it’s not just about, “Well, how many pieces can you break the arm? Two? Three?” It should show where you hit it. You want that instant feedback, that feeling, that connection, so when you cut the arm, it shows [the damage] anywhere above. So that’s how it started.

And after a whole bunch of tech investigations later, we started working on the gameplay angle from it as well. And we want the gore to show the damage the player has done to the zombie. We really want to give players immediate feedback. So if you, for example, to completely turn off the HUD and continue hammering the zombie, you will see the damage and understand how much damage you have done.

If the arm starts to feel weak [it was probably about to get cut off], especially the Crushers zombies where if you remove that arm, they can’t do the overhead smash. We look at Runners’ legs and if you take that away, they can’t outrun you. And like any good idea, it starts with a lot of references from pop culture and you just think, “Well, why can’t we do this? And what does that mean for the players?” I now look back on the memories of the first design meetings and how it all came together for sure.

Dead Island has an inventive analog combat system. It’s not here in Dead Island 2, so can you tell why it’s not in this sequel?

There is no real choice. I think, this is a part that we haven’t put in yet. I don’t like talking about things we haven’t covered yet, so let’s just leave it at that.



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