An early, unfinished build of Dead Island 2 has leaked online and now folks are playing and sharing footage of this old corpse of a game.
As spotted by Eurogamer, this build appears to have leaked in the last 72 hours or so via 4chan. The build is dated June 2015 and was being developed by Yager, the studio that was originally tasked with making Dead Island 2. Later in 2015 Yager and Dead Island publisher, Deep Silver would part ways and Sumo Digital was given the job of making the sequel. And then just last year Deep Silver dropped Sumo Digital and seemingly moved the game to one of their internal studios, Dambuster, the folks who developed Homefront: The Revolution. So, yeah, this game has and continues to have a rocky and messy development history.
The build that has leaked is clearly unfinished, with placeholder assets everywhere. But it is playable and gives us a glimpse of what the original version of this sequel looked like. It has a colorful and cartoonish vibe and does remind me of a lot of that first Dead Island 2 trailer that was released back at E3 2014.
And a lot of people seem to have found this leak and started playing it because Youtube and Twitter are flooded with gameplay videos and screenshots of it.
Jan David Hassel, who worked on this version of Dead Island 2 back when he worked at Yager, was surprised but happy to see this version of the game “release.” He explained in a few Tweets how it was neat to see folks finally getting to see what he and his team worked on before they “got the axe.”
As for the current state of Dead Island 2, according to Deep Silver, it is still being developed and they still have plans to release it. One day.
Meanwhile, the original developers behind the first game have gone to make Dying Light, a spiritual successor to Dead Island published in 2015 by WB Games. A sequel for that game is also in development, but like Dead Island 2, it seems to be having some issues.
Zombie games set on islands seem hard to make.