10 Times Developers Admitted Their Game SUCKED

Few players got to see Dead Island 2 as it was originally conceived, because the game we all played in 2023 was not the sequel originally put together for the 2011 zombie RPG. The original game saw players stranded on a zombie-infested island that tested survival skills in the most dire of times, and was a wild success for a new IP.  

Fans of the franchise then were right to wonder what had happened to the second game as, after some months and years of publisher Deep Silver assuring everyone it was on the way, it just kind of fell off the map. The version that did finally appear in 2023 was, by all accounts, an entirely different game from the one that was originally tested by players back in 2015 - and there’s good reason why.

Yager Development was first in line for developing the sequel back in 2012, but was removed from the project sometime after the game’s 2014 announcement thanks to terrible tester feedback. Yager was replaced by Sumo Digital, but this partnership went a similar way and Deep Silver wound up putting their own internal studio Dambuster on the game in 2019, who dragged it to completion some four years later.

And former Deep Silver Head of Comms Martin Wein went on record saying that each iteration had produced “a sh*t game” that was "not fun, not engaging” and didn’t feel like the Dead Island he knew and loved. Yeesh.