Gamers aren't always the most patient customers when it comes to video game development cycles, but to be fair, some games are in development for a long time. Dead Island 2 and Dying Light 2 are good examples. When one adds their development time together, it totals over 10 years, mostly thanks to Dead Island 2. At this point, Dead Island 2 actually releasing seems like a pipe dream for fans, and publisher Deep Silver is stirring up trouble with a recent tweet.
Dying Light 2 developer Techland recently decided to release a comedic video to assuage fan fears over the game's prolonged development. Techland's video poked fun at impatient fans of Dying Light 2 and gamers in general by showing the Techland team reading a series of mean tweets in a style that first originated on Jimmy Kimmel's late-night talk show. One of the tweets references Dead Island 2 as a game that will "never come out." Deep Silver decided to tweet a response to the video, but it was decidedly less informative.
Deep Silver's tweet immediately received a few responses from fans, amused and frustrated alike. Some are hopeful that Dead Island 2 will release before they die, while others aren't convinced it will release at all. Most fans of both franchises will probably know that Techland developed Dead Island and was originally supposed to develop Dead Island 2 way back in 2012, but the development team decided to start work on a new IP called Dying Light instead.
Dying Light 2 fans finally got some new video footage to analyze for the foreseeable future but Dead Island 2 fans aren't so lucky. While Deep Silver's tweet did say that Dead Island 2 "is coming out," fans have already heard this before. The response is arguably more stale now than it was back in 2019 when Koch Media (the company that oversees Deep Silver) gave an update for the game. The Dead Island 2 publisher said "we want to get it right" at the time.
Even though Deep Silver's response to Techland's video was meant to be a joke, Dead Island 2 fans have no better indication of when the game might be coming out than before. Those who pre-ordered the game back in 2014 when it was first available have had too few chances to see that $60 in action, with only one gameplay video surfacing in December 2020 that wasn't even an official announcement. At this point Dead Island 2 pre-orders have outlived some major life moments and it seems like that will continue to be the case until there is some official word from Deep Silver or developer Dambuster Studios saying otherwise.
Dead Island 2 is in development for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.