14 DAY TRIAL // Dead Island 2 producer Michael Kempson, of German video game maker Yager Development, says that the upcoming shooter will be the world's smallest massively multiplayer online game.
In an interview with GameReactor, he explains that the story behind how they jumped from the depressing war story game Spec Ops: The Line to the comedic overtones of the zombie-infested paradise island is "more boring than everyone would like."
"Dead Island came out and was a pretty big hit in our office. We had a lot of communal areas with a lot of dev kits set up, and when Dead Island came on it was on for weeks and weeks. You couldn't get away from it."
"Everyone loved it, loved the co-op. It was the game for lunch break, every day. And then we got wind that Deep Silver were looking for a partner, and we thought 'hey! we can pitch for that,'" Kempson explains.
He says that the need to recover from the intensity of Spec Ops: The Line was what pushed them to take up the development of the sequel. The team liked the first game immensely, and as such they are all dedicated to carrying over the best things about Dead Island, and develop on what they feel was the shooter's biggest draw: cooperative multiplayer action.
Getting together with friends at any time was what Yager loved most about Dead Island, and as such the team wants to expand on the concept, providing a persistent world that houses up to eight players at a time on a dedicated server, which Kempson compares to how massively multiplayer online games are, only on a smaller scale.
"You're going to be in a persistent world that you can always come back to with your friends... we feel that ease of use and social nature of it was a real core thing to Dead Island. And that's where we're going to take it," he points out.
The team intends to offer an open-world adventure where players will always find new survivors, resources and challenges, with something different to do each and every time, and with a lot of choice in regards to how to tackle the objectives, without locking players in a certain area until they complete a certain mission, affording players a lot of freedom.
The character classes will be similarly balanced in order to offer a lot of choice depending on the different play styles of all players and to organize gameplay by assigning each member of the party a certain role, such as medic/support, ranged and melee characters, and a close range tank that can take on the hordes and protect allies from their aggression.
Dead Island 2 is slated for release in the spring of 2015, coming to the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One platforms.