There’s been a little bit of outrage on the internet lately. A changing of the guard is in progress, and people are afraid the results won’t be good. Deep Silver has decided to pull developer Yager from Dead Island 2 . The game, which slipped into 2016 earlier this year, might have just entered a state of flux due to a decision to switch developers in the midst of development.
Sometimes, swaps turn out alright. Warner Bros. and Rocksteady pulled a switch when it came to Batman: Arkham Origins , bringing in Warner Bros. Games Montréal to develop it. It wasn’t as good as Asylum , City , and Knight , but was more than serviceable. A change of plans can work.
But Deep Silver can’t afford that kind of risk. Warner Bros. was able to take the chance because it was a Batman installment in the already popular Arkham series. It had already proven itself, and people were devoted enough to possibly forgive one entry not being exactly perfect. Dead Island doesn’t have that luxury. The first game was entertaining, but also a buggy, broken mess. Dead Island: Riptide was just an expansion. The company needs Dead Island 2 to not only be good, but better.
Yes, there is a chance that Yager was removed from Dead Island 2 for that exact purpose. Though the company has been around since 2003, its only finished games thus far include Yager , Aerial Strike: Low Altitude – High Stakes , and Spec Ops: The Line . Spec Ops is its only major success story. Dead Island 2 has already been delayed, so there’s always a chance the removal has to do with the developer not hitting milestones Deep Silver wanted.
But, Yager also has a strong fanbase and following due to Spec Ops: The Line . People trusted it because of that game. And that feeling likely carried over to Dead Island 2 as well. Even if there were issues, it may have behooved Deep Silver to keep the goodwill acquired when tapping the studio for the project and not pull them out. After all, one delay has already happened for quality assurance purposes. One more wouldn’t have mattered.
We don’t know how Dead Island 2 is going. It isn’t as though Deep Silver had the game on display on E3 2015 for everyone to see. It could be that Yager wasn’t performing well, or the publisher may not have been pleased at the pace of progression. Regardless, with a series like Dead Island , a last minute swap probably wasn’t the wisest course of action. The series has something of a history when it comes to quality assurance, and moving from a developer known for a good product like Spec Ops: The Line to something unknown is a bad move.