Dead Island 2 Development Still Going, Says THQ Nordic In Financial Call

Dead Island 2 development is still ongoing, according to THQ Nordic, but will we see it at E3? Lars Wingefors just tells us to stay tuned.

THQ Nordic has said that Dead Island 2 is still in development, even five years after its original announcement at E3 2014 with no news since then. The news came from a statement by THQ Nordic CEO Lars Wingefors in THQ Nordic’s most recent financial call, where he said to stay tuned.

Dead Island 2 was previously announced at E3 2014, but since then we’ve heard essentially nothing about the game other than platitudes that it was still being worked on. However, we’ve seen no gameplay or any other sort of information about the game since then.

The original Dead Island game came out in 2011, and had an expansion pack, Dead Island: Riptide, in 2013. An arcade game, called Escape Dead Island, was released in 2014, and all three games were eventually bundled together.

Dead Island 2 development has been quite contentious since it was originally announced; the game was originally being developed by Yager Development, but since then has been switched over to Sumo Digital. However, around that time we also got news that it was being delayed indefinitely.

That might change with what Wingefors said. If he wants us to stay tuned, we may end up seeing something about the game at E3 2019, this month. However, there’s nothing to actually confirm that, and platitudes like that have been given out before.

We might be getting a similar situation to Crackdown 3, which was also announced at E3 2014 and only recently came out after a huge number of delays and studio shifts. Crackdown 3 disappointed many after years and years of waiting, and Dead Island 2 might follow the same path.

Either way, we’ll likely have to keep watch at E3 2019 to see if anything comes of Dead Island 2’s five years of development. If it turns out to be an improvement over the originals then so much the better, but THQ Nordic and Sumo Digital will have to work to get people’s hype back up.

Dead Island 2 is supposed to release on the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC.

Hunter is senior news writer at SegmentNext.com. He is a long time fan of strategy, RPG, and tabletop games. When he is not playing games, he likes to write about them.