Hopefully a proper reveal of the co-op will illustrate how Yager is trying to outdo the likes of Borderlands in the scale of this zombie shooter RPG. This sounds kind of cool, but without any evidence of it in this first reveal, it's hard to figure out how Dead Island 2 will convincingly accommodate so many players. Kempson said this is necessary for the eight-player co-op and “MMO-like” feel to playing within that space. So the artists had a really great time of finding all those beautiful locations." Kempson likened it to buying postcards at Santa Monica pier and rearranging them in a logical order for the purposes of the game-and the areas will be a lot bigger than in the original Dead Island. “The approach we took with California as a game space is, there's so many different geographies and landscapes within California, all equally as beautiful as the next but all actually very different. “It's going to be regionalised,” Kempson said. Expect snapshots of the Sunshine State, but not a sprawl. More exciting to me than zombie lolz is the choice of setting-vague tropical islands don't have California's broad range of iconography. Eight-player co-op is the ambitious endgame of what will be possible in Dead Island 2, hence the larger scale of setting-but it's too early for Yager to show right now. The emphasis seems to be on sillier possibilities than those seen in Techland's Dead Island titles.
After a pretty but basic on-foot combat demonstration, in which we're shown how weapons can instantly be combined on the spot now a la Dead Rising 3. Dead Island is set in hubs across California, including San Francisco and Santa Monica. I saw the player being driven around in a hippy-style van around a middle class neighbourhood by a slightly creepy guy called Max, who also has a mo-capped cat called Rick Fury (they made a fairly big deal about that during the reveal). What I was shown of the game encompassed a lot of that pitch. “As it happened, we heard a little bit later on that Deep Silver were looking for a partner for Dead Island 2, and we said, 'well, we're finishing up this game-we could put together a pitch for this.' So we weren't thinking we'd definitely get it, but you don't get what you don't ask for.” Even though it wasn't released in Germany, people, by any means possible, were getting that game back to the office.” An office culture built around the original Dead Island's co-op. “We were doing Spec Ops: The Line and the first game launched, and yeah, was just the game that was always on in the office, we really loved it. “It's probably not a straight connection after our last game, which is what most people have been saying,” producer Michael Kempson told me.