Dead Island: Riptide - Interview

Strategy Informer has an interview with Dead Island: Riptide's Creative Producer Alex Toplansky.

Despite causing a lot of controversy with grotesque busts, Dead Island Riptide is still just a game, and one that’s not really easy to define either. It’s not an expansion, as those aren’t really a ‘thing’ anymore for multi-platform games, it’s not really a spin-off, as it’s heavily connected to the original game, but it’s not a sequel either, as everything is still pretty the much the same, just tweaked or enhanced in certain places. We decided go talk to Creative Producer Alex Toplansky to find out what the hell is going on:

Strategy Informer: How do you guys view Riptide Internally?? It’s not really a sequeal, nor is it a standalone expansion or anything… doesn’t seem to fit neatly into any definition.

Alex Toplansky: This is a big question – I think the most important thing is that we never went into this thinking “oh, can we do DLC” or anything like that. We always came at it with the viewpoint that there’s a lot more we want to do, a lot more we want to show people, but we don’t want to start reinventing the wheel. You know? We weren’t like “oh let’s re-do the combat system!” or anything like that, which is something you’d do for a sequel I think. So we wanted to make it clear to players that they are getting more of the core gameplay that they enjoyed in the first game. I think that if we’d decided to go in this sequel direction it would have confused people a bit as to what was going on with that.

But we did want to add a lot of original stuff, like we really wanted to add another island, and we wanted to continue the story that was laid down with these four characters. We wanted to show that this is still connected to the original experience. By the time we were done with the game… I think when we started there was about ¾ of the amount of content the original had [in Riptide], but by the time we were finished, we had a game that had just as much content as the original game. So it’s definitely not an ‘expansion’, but I think it would have misleading to say It was a sequel.