As is well known, the developers at Dambuster Studios decided not to use any wheels in “Dead Island 2”. A design decision that game director David Stenton discussed again in a recent interview.
One of the features of the first part that unfortunately had to go in “Dead Island 2” were the wheeled vehicles with which we could move relatively quickly from point A to point B in the original “Dead Island”.
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The vehicles were also not taken into account in the recently released “SoLA” DLC or the corresponding update. In an interview conducted by DX, the game director responsible for “Dead Island 2,” David Stenton, discussed this design decision again.
According to Stenton, there were internal discussions about whether the vehicles should return in “Dead Island 2”. In the end, however, the creative minds at Dambuster Studios decided to forego this feature and instead concentrate entirely on close combat.
Your very own zombie slayer experience
“For example, we asked ourselves if we wanted to have vehicles in this game. And we came to the conclusion that we wanted to focus on the melee system. “Here’s to this up-close-and-personal zombie slaying,” the game director explained. “We wanted this very specifically designed zombie-killing experience.”
“And we didn’t want to spend hundreds of kilometers or miles behind the wheel of a car,” added Stelton. “That was the kind of discussion we had back then. It was about what Dead Island 2 should look like. Dambuster just finished the game.”
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Parallel to “Dead Island 2,” another team at the studio was working on post-launch support for “Homefront: The Revolution.” According to Stenton, experiences gained with the shooter were incorporated into the development of “Dead Island 2” and, according to the game director, made for a better game.
Other originally planned features discarded
The vehicles aren't the only originally planned feature that Dambuster Studios scrapped. In an interview published in 2023, for example, the developers pointed out that cooperative multiplayer for up to eight players had also been deleted.
Detours to Catalina Island and other locations were also removed. “Originally it covered all of California, I believe,” said Dambuster at the time. “Or at least there should be parts in different areas of California. That was scaled down to LA.”
Dead Island 2 is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
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