Why Isn’t Techland Making Dead Island 2?

Considering Techland developed both Dead Island and its stand-alone expansion Dead Island Riptide, it would have been reasonable to expect them to develop a full-fledged sequel too. As most of you probably already know, that didn’t actually happen, and the sequel to the zombie-focused open-world first-person action-RPG is instead being developed by Yager, the folks behind Spec Ops: The Line. Eurogamer’s editors were clearly curious about the reason the property was given to another developer, and decided to ask Techland and Deep Silver directly.

Given Deep Silver decided not to answer to the query, most of the answers come from the Polish developer, which is currently busy working on another open-world zombie game for Warner Bros. called Dying Light. A couple of snippets:

What happened – did Techland and Deep Silver fall out?

“Well, you know, we 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.

“It was a bit tough,” he added. “I would love to make a direct sequel, but at some point a decision was made.”

It sounds like Deep Silver turned Techland away. Was Deep Silver unhappy with Techland’s work?

“Well you’d have to ask them.” Deep Silver declined comment.

But the two companies didn’t fall out?

“They were very… You keep digging!” Binkowski replied.

“They had a lot of ideas about how they wanted to run the franchise,” he went on. “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.”