Dead Island 2 - Interview @ Red Bull

Red Bull posted a interview for Dead Islands 2 with Senior Gameplay Programmer Isaac Ashdown of Yager who answers a few questions. Here is a small sample.

Gone is the plinky-plonky piano of the first trailer. Gone too, the tragic couple deliberately burning themselves to death in the cabin of a boat surrounded by an impenetrable moat of ghouls (as featured in the trailer for Dead Island's not-quite-sequel, Riptide). In their place, we get a trailer starring a fraudulent fitness instructor, obliviously going for a jog as other Californians are set upon by zombies in the background, before graphically mutating into a lolloping corpse himself (his bicep implants flopping out from under his putrefying skin as he does so). Yager are making a point: in Dead Island 2, the zombies are played for laughs.

"The trailer definitely matches the tone we're going for," Isaac Ashdown, one of Dead Island 2's senior gameplay programmers tells Red Bull. "It's a kind of lighthearted take on what would happen if a zombie apocalypse came to California, and all the people who stayed behind saw it as an opportunity for a new way of life. When you looked at the first game and the tone of the trailer, and then at how people were playing it, there was a kind of disconnect. There was a disconnect between what the game was trying to get them to feel, and what they were actually doing. So we've gone the direction of creating a game with a tone that matches how people actually played."

That's not necessarily a cop-out, or even a bad thing. Dead Rising 1 and 2 showed that zombie games don't have to be gruelling to be fun – largely by letting heroes Frank West and Chuck Greene strip off all their clothes and pedal full-tilt at zombies on tricycles. Dead Island 2 is more restrained than that (the 2009 movie Zombieland is a tonal inspiration, says Ashford), but po-faced it is not. This is a perverse postcard picture of California: the sun is shining, the Hollywood Sign sits bright on the hill, and when you take an enemy's head off, the corpse might plod around in board shorts for a minute before keeling over.