You could say that Dead Island 2 has had a turbulent development period, although things are starting to look up, as Deep Silver’s revealed that Sumo Digital will start working on the game, which is due to be released for the PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Dead Island 2 was left without a developer when Deep Silver decided to terminate its contract with previous developer Yager back in 2015, because it didn’t think it was the sequel fans deserved.
“With Dead Island 2, Deep Silver has always been dedicated to delivering the sequel that Dead Island fans deserve,” wrote the publisher in an official statement sent to us back in July, 2015. “After careful consideration, today we announce the decision to part ways with development partner YAGER.” Shortly after this happened, Yager unfortunately had to declare insolvency to “protect its staff”.
When the news first hit people instantly thought that Dead Island’s original developers, Techland, would come back to work on the sequel, although it was working with Warner bros. on another zombie open-world first person survival horror called Dying light at the time, which came out back in January, 2015.
After all that, in a statement issued to MCV this morning, Deep Silver’s finally revealed that the team taking over the reins will be Sumo Digital, who are best known for working on Disney Infinity, LittleBigPlanet and Forza.
“Sumo showed so much understanding of the brand, had creative ideas and an excellent, vision that was aligned with our own,” said Koch Media’s CEO Dr Klemens Kundratitz in a statement. “It just made perfect sense for us to move the project to them. We will reveal more details at a later stage, but for now I’d like to say that we are obviously super excited about the progress that we are making with them.”
“It’s an honour to be charged with the evolution of such an important franchise in Deep Silver’s catalogue,” said Sumo COO Paul Porter. “We’re looking forward to exceeding fan expectation with an ambitious design that we’re confident will take bone-crunching, visceral, zombie action to a whole new level.”
It looks like Dead Island 2 is finally back on track…
