FIRSTTTTT!

No more emo-reverse video game trailer? Okay.

bro, no Far Cry 4 thread?

Techland created the first Dead Island, a sun-soaked zombie action-adventure that wasn't all that brilliant but did very well commercially. So why aren't they involved with the sequel?

In an interview with Eurogamer, Techland game designer Maciej Binkowski shed some light on the situation. "Right from the start, the IP was theirs," he explained, referring to publisher Deep Silver. "At that point we weren't really in a position to negotiate, so that was the best deal we could get."

As a relatively small studio, the Polish team had to negotiate and ultimately compromise. "It's like playing poker," Binkowski continued, "you have to make a decision with the information you have now. If you play the game thinking that something might happen, you're going to lose the game. At that point, that was the best decision we could do."

Techland did manage to create another Dead Island game, Riptide, but now the property has been handed over to Spec Ops developer Yager. What's the deal?

"Well, you know, we (Techland and Deep Silver) had our ups and downs," Binkowski said. "There's always tension between the publisher and developer. For us it turned out well, because being forced to come up with a new IP... We can't just make a Dead Island 2 and change the name; it's got to be something fresh, it's got to be something unique.

"They had a lot of ideas about how they wanted to run the franchise," he continued. "Even with Dead Island there were a lot of moments where we would disagree on the creative vision of the project, so this might have been one of the factors."

Binkowski was unwilling to elaborate too much on the tensions between developer and publisher , but it sounds like the two companies had very different ideas about which direction the franchise should take. In any case, Techland is now working on its very own project, the parkour-happy open world zombie game Dying Light. Now the studio's task is to keep casual players informed about what the team behind Dead Island is really up to.

"We're trying to keep our communication clear that this is the team behind Dead Island and we're creating this thing now. There was a lot of miscommunication, misconception, misunderstandings. They're like 'this is Techland's new game, right?' (referring to Dead Island 2), and we're like, 'No.' "

Dying Light got an official January 27 release date on PC and consoles earlier this week.

I hope Dead Island 2 would be much better.

Dead Island: Riptide was really bad, horribly repetitive.

agree with repetitive, but doesnt stop me from finishing the game, love to kill zombies while my wife watching way too much but no 2nd playthrough for me, not in a billion years.

We have always set ourselves a big goal for Dead Island 2: to create the sequel that takes Dead Island to the next level. A game that takes what our fans tell us they love about Dead Island – multiple different characters to play with, co-op, and turning a paradise setting into a zombie slaughter melee – and a game that adds a ton more content and combat options on top of that.
And we wanted to have all of that that done for release in Spring 2015.
We have been looking at the game long and hard, and we have decided we didn’t reach that goal we set out to achieve quite yet. This is why we have decided to delay Dead Island 2 to 2016.
Right now we are focusing purely on development, and we will have more info to share at a later stage.
We know that our fans will be disappointed by this news, but by giving Dead Island 2 more time we are confident that everyone will get a better game to play as a result.
-Team Dead Island 2