A story that focused on the people rather than the monsters. Techland also wanted to tell a more serious human story compared to the campy nature of the first Dead Island. The team got to work on its pitch for Dead Island 2, using the codename "Dead World." As the higher-up says, the team never got far enough into development to explore what "World" meant fully but knew it wanted to make a game "bigger and better in every dimension." It was a "no-brainer that we should do another one," a former higher-up from Techland says. According to people Game Informer spoke to, plans for a sequel were immediate. By December 2011, Deep Silver announced it'd shipped more than 3 million units, saying it was "thrilled that it has sustained a robust level of sell-through since launch" in September of that year. No one expected the original Dead Island to be as successful as it was. Everyone we spoke to did so under the condition of anonymity to share what they know, not wishing to publicly break non-disclosure agreements. To make sense of it all, sporadically, between 20, we spoke to numerous people from the development and publishing side to find out exactly what Dead Island 2 was in its first iteration at Yager and what went wrong along the way. Understanding what went wrong requires understanding many different factors – how Deep Silver makes deals, how Unreal Engine 4 works (or didn’t, at the time), and how unprepared the team at Yager was for the project it'd taken on.
Until it resurfaced in late 2022, a seeming sign that Dead Island 2 would see the light of day – which it finally did, being released in 2023. Its publisher, Deep Silver, spent many of those years saying little to nothing about the game other than vague confirmations that it was still in development. What briefly began in the early 2010s at Techland, the developer behind the first Dead Island and similar open-world zombie game Dying Light, then moved to Yager Development, then Sumo Digital, and then finally, Deep Silver's Dambuster Studio, was for many years a giant question mark in the game industry. Initially revealed on stage during Sony's 2014 E3 press conference, Dead Island 2 had an infamously rocky road to release. From announcement to release, Dead Island 2 was supposed to take less than a year.
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