Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is what is known as a Tabletop Role-playing Game, or TTRPG. A collaborative storytelling and boardgame experience where various dice rolls help to decide how the game and story progress. With the recent release of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves more and more people are becoming interested in how to play this classic game. Currently in its 5th edition (D&D 5e), D&D has never been more approachable or understandable for new players and now is a perfect time to join the fun!
What You Need to Play D&D
People
Rulebooks
Dice
Character sheets
Miniatures and Game Boards
1. The People
D&D can be played with a minimum of 2 people, but often having 3-5 people is an ideal table size. At minimum, you’ll need a Dungeon Master (DM), or Game Master in other TTRPGs, and one or more Players. That being said, there is really no limit to how large an adventuring party can be, so feel free to invite as many friends as you can fit in your house.
The DM will lead each game session, develop adventures, adjudicate the rules, and fill the worlds you adventure in with people, places, and things to interact with! The role of DM can be a daunting task at first, but for people that find themselves interested in building the framework of heroic stories, it’s an unbelievably rewarding experience.
Two books below, the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual, will help any DM get started. There are also dozens of official adventures (modules) that can help jumpstart your D&D Dungeon Master journey!
2. Rulebooks
These are the core books needed to get started on your own adventure, but only ONE is necessary as a Player!
Player’s Handbook – The only book necessary to begin playing D&D as a player! It contains how to make a character, all the needed rules on how to play, and is always useful to reference even for experienced players!
The Dungeon Master’s Guide – For aspiring Dungeon Masters, this book will help you develop Non-player characters (NPCs), cities, nations, and full adventures of your own making.
Monster Manual – No heroic adventure would be complete without some monsters for your heroes to fight! This book will help the DM fill the game with interesting, dangerous, and wonderful creatures that provide challenges for Players along the way.
There are many additional books that flesh out further Player creation options, worlds and lore to help a DM create, and full adventures that can cut down on the DM workload. A great starting point that will have everything necessary to play and run the game WITHOUT purchasing anything more, even the core books listed above, are the Dungeons and Dragons Starter Sets. These include pre-made characters, an adventure, dice, maps. And a compressed version of the rules. These are both available physically AND on most Virtual Tabletops.
3. The Dice
No game of D&D is complete without a set of shiny math rocks! For the game you will need a set of polyhedral dice including a 4-sided die, a 6-sided die, an 8-sided die, a 10-sided die, a 12-sided die, and a 20-sided die. These dice are colloquially referred to as a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 respectively. The Dungeon Master and each player will only need one set of dice, but there is nothing stopping you from developing an unhealthy obsession and collecting hundreds of sets. Check out some of the best D&D dice sets you can buy.
4. Character Sheets
These sheets contain a detailed look at your characters stats, abilities, equipment, and any other pertinent information. A basic character sheet can be found within the Player’s Handbook, but you can also find them online or make them digitally on sites like DnDBeyond.
5. Miniatures and Game Boards
These items are optional, but can help aid in the visualization of the characters and scenes. They are used to show the setting and the placement of characters, villains, and monsters during combat. Game boards and miniature figures are often a fun project for players and DMs to design, paint, and personalize.
Virtual Tabletop (VTT) There are many VTT options, offering free and accessible resources for your game, as well as more powerful paid tools. If you can’t get all your people to one place, these can be excellent options! Use sites like DnDBeyond for character creation and digital rulebooks. For online games, virtual tabletops like Roll20 or FoundryVTT can replace miniatures and maps. Furthermore, tools like Zoom or Discord can help you play online and connect with friends near and far.
I Have All the People and Things, Now What?
How to Play Dungeons and Dragons
Create Your Character: Every player is responsible for creating their own unique character. Using the Player’s Handbook as a guide, you will assign your character stats, features, and equipment that will impact how well they fare on your travels.
Create a Setting or a World: This is usually the responsibility of the Dungeon Master. The DM will inform the players of the details of the world and story in which they find themselves. These settings and stories can come from your DM’s imagination (homebrewed) or from prewritten modules written by other authors.
Wait for Your Turn: Players alternate sharing the spotlight in order to describe what their characters are thinking, feeling, or doing whether it’s drinking in the tavern, exploring the world, talking to NPCs, or fighting a Hydra. The DM controls the flow of the game, if there’s something you’d like to do, ask!
Roll Your Dice: Depending on the actions you take during an adventure your DM may ask you to roll dice to determine the outcome of an endeavor that has a risk of failure. Your DM will set the difficulty called a DC (difficulty check), you will roll your dice and add any relevant modifier from your character sheet. If you beat the DC then you are successful in your attempt!
Combat: Combat is slightly more structured than general exploration play. Each player uses their turn to attack or use abilities to defeat their foe.
Character Creation
Before heading out for adventure, players will need to go through the process of creating a character. This can be a very fun and rewarding experience, but it can also be challenging for a first time player. So here are the steps need to get going:
Choose a Race: You will find information on the various races in D&D within the Player’s Handbook. Many may be familiar to you such as humans, dwarves or elves, but others may be new. Be sure to read through each option to better understand the variety of choices available.
Choose a Class: Classes will determine the lion’s share of your statistics and abilities. A class will inform what a player can and can’t do. Each class will have different advantages or weaknesses. Again there are many options to choose from here such as fighter, rogue, wizard, barbarian, etc.
Set Your Ability Scores: There are 6 ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Players determine how strong each of these stats are for their character by rolling dice to determine the score for each. Other factors like your race and class can also impact these scores. It is important to note there are alternate methods for setting ability scores defined in the Player’s Handbook.
Choose Your Equipment: Everyone loves stuff, so have some! Players will determine what items they are carrying such as weapons, armor and items. You will select from a few possible starting items that will be determined by your class and background, but don’t worry you’ll be looting a dragon’s hoard for magical items soon enough!
Set Your Backstory: Determine who your character is. What is their name, where are they from, what is their tragic backstory that will be dramatically revealed to the rest of the party around a campfire? Add as much personality to your character as possible or play the strong silent type. There is no wrong choice here, but we would suggest working with your DM so they know how best to work your backstory into the world!
Terms and Rules
D&D is expansive and contains hundreds of rules and terms that you will be unfamiliar with. It can even be hard for seasoned players to keep it all straight! Take heart in knowing that every adventure starts with the same amount of knowledge regarding these subjects. Over time you will add to your understanding of the game. In the meantime refer to the rulebooks when in doubt. To get started, here are a few additional items you may want to know to help ease you into the game:
Actions: In combat your character can take Actions. Actions might have designations such as Action, Bonus Action, or Reaction. These are things like attacking, casting a spell, dodging, dashing, and more!
Initiative: During a formal combat setting players will roll Initiative by rolling a d20 and adding on your initiative modifier from your character sheet. This number will determine the order in which players and monsters take action during combat.
Hit Points: Hit points (HP) are your health. When you take damage you lose HP and when you heal you gain HP. When your character reaches 0 HP, you are unconscious and at risk of dying permanently!
Armor Class: Armor Class (AC) is a number on your character sheet that determines how hard a character is to hit in combat. Attack rolls under a determined AC do not hit!
Leveling: As you play, characters will level up gaining new stats and abilities. Leveling is determined by your DM and may be done according to experience points (XP) or via milestone achievements such as defeating a particularly ferocious enemy.
Tips for Being a Great Player
Share the Spotlight: It can be fun to be the hero of the story, but D&D is a shared experience. Be conscious of allowing time for other players.
Be Vulnerable: It can be difficult to role-play as another person. Often you might feel embarrassed or apprehensive. Take it slow, start by describing what your character does or says. Eventually, you can move into first person role-playing including a character “voice”!
Be Encouraging: As mentioned it can be scary to put yourself out there during roleplay. Encourage your fellow adventurers to push themselves and create a space that is welcoming of mistakes and celebratory of successes.
Tips for Being a Dungeon Master
Being a DM can be a difficult and thankless job so here are a few tips to help:
Be Prepared: The more you know about your world the easier it will be to adjust when your players decide to go left instead of right. Having prepared ideas of the people, places, and items in your world can alleviate stress in the moment if improv isn’t your strong suit.
Be Open and Flexible: Plans will go awry. Players will decide to kill your favorite NPC. Remember even though you are running the game this is a shared experience so allow your players the freedom to help shape the world and the story.
Reward creativity: Encourage your players to think outside of the box and not to solve every problem by swinging a sword.
Forget the rules: Sometimes the Rule of Cool is all you need! In the end, this is your table and your shared experience. The rules are more like guidelines. You are ultimately the arbiter of what you will and won’t allow at your table, so play as strict or as loose as you and your table enjoy.
Set Expectations: Before any adventure it is good for you and your Players to establish what kind of game you will be playing. Is it going to be fun and lighthearted, or will Strahd Von Zarovich claim the souls of each person playing? Useful tools for this are Safety Tools, X/O Cards, and Session 0s.
Use Tools: There are thousands of tools online to help improve your game. Use sites like DnDBeyond for character creation and digital rulebooks. For online games, virtual tabletops like Roll20 or FoundryVTT can replace miniatures and maps. Furthermore, tools like Zoom or Discord can help you play online and connect with friends near and far.
Dungeons and Dragons can be enjoyed by anyone from any walk of life. With a little bit of preparation and a willingness to share stories with others you could be well on your way to a fantastic adventure. So light the beacons, summon your party, and roll those dice!
Turning Attack On Titan’s giant enemies and grapple-hooking sword combat into a video game seemed like a tall order (pun intended), and one that a budget Koei Tecmo treatment seemed doomed to fail. And yet. As I explained in my Attack On Titan: Wings Of Freedom review back in 2016, the game absolutely nailed the series’ action.
As of this week, both it and its sequel are permanently cheaper.
Redfall is Arkane, developers best known for singleplayer immersive sims, trying to take a vampiric bite of open world multiplayer pie. It’s out next week and we now know its system requirements. It’s also, perhaps surprisingly, already Steam Deck Verified.
EA now say that they’re “aware that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor isn’t performing to our standards for a percentage of our PC players, in particular those with high-end machines or or certain specific configurations.” They’re working on fixes.
Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over.Today, as TOTK anticipation increases to dangerous levels, Gavin explores why it’s time for Nintendo to go back to a very specific well…
Look, I’m all for originality. The video game industry is lousy with sequels and remasters and reboots and rejigs, and despite its ‘surprise and delight’ MO, Nintendo is just as guilty of re-releasing past works as any other publisher. There’s little that’s less imaginative than giving an old classic a fresh lick of paint and some mod-cons.
The Sims franchise has been an incredible success since its release in the early 2000s and to this day there haven’t been any real competitors. Despite The Sims being truly one of a kind, the life simulation genre is alive and well. In The Sims, you can create your own character (known as a “Sim”), build a home for your Sim, interact with other Sims, and live out the life you want-the possibilities are endless. Players orchestrate the mundane daily activities of their Sims and their success is dependent upon the players’ decisions. While nothing can truly match the full Sims experience, here are just a few games we think you’ll enjoy if you like The Sims.
It’s also worth noting that you can play The Sims 4 for free, so if you’re just looking for the latest Sims game, that’s your best bet.
Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley comes first to mind since it hits all of the right notes in a life simulator game. Stardew Valley is a charming town with plenty to do but focuses primarily on enjoying your character’s life to the fullest by becoming a successful farmer in a pixelated countryside. Besides farming, there’s endless freedom in your day-to-day activities: building up the farm, decorating your home, woo’ing the resident characters, beating up monsters in the nearby caves, fishing, and so much more. This RPG has so many elements and secrets to keep yourself occupied. It even has an achievement system, so if you’re the type of player who enjoys completing everything there is to do in a game, this is for you. The developer, ConcernedApe, has constantly updated the game since its release so there’s always fresh content to explore with a thriving modding community as well to keep the game alive.
Stardew Valley creator Eric Baron has also revealed his next game to be Haunted Chocolatier, which should have a similar feel.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
This simulation game lets you take up residence on a completely deserted island where you can build a home of your dreams with several decorating options that are unlocked through gameplay. You can gift items and personalized letters to the villagers on your island, friends and family, and celebrate any holiday with multiplayer gameplay. Once you progress through the story quests, you will unlock terraforming which will allow you to shape cliffs and water, allowing you to create an island truly of your dreams. But what made Animal Crossing: New Horizons so special during the beginning of the pandemic was the daily tasks: completing the Critterpedia by catching bugs and fish, crafting DIY recipes, improving your home, and so much more.
SimCity
SimCity is the most dated in this list, the first game releasing a long time ago, but you can still play it easily enough on a desktop PC. In this simulator game, you play the mayor, and you can choose to build a world-class city complete with stadiums, airports, universities, and more. While you can’t control your Sims directly, everything you do impacts their lives, and it’s up to you to create a city free from natural disasters and commuter hell. So while you can’t trap your Sim in a pool or in a room with a stove that’s lit on fire, you can choose to let your Sims live the life of their dreams in a perfect metropolis or create a city in which they’ll regret moving to.
Cities: Skylines
Just like SimCity, this simulator focuses more on building a metropolis for your Sims to live in rather than controlling your Sims directly. However, Cities: Skylines is a newer game (released in 2015) and, like The Sims, has had a steady and ongoing stream of new DLC and base game updates. Even better, the modding community (PC exclusive) has continued to churn out amazing content, offering everything from custom assets for buildings and vehicles, gameplay adjustments to increase (or reduce!) realism in the simulation, and even bug fixes to improve performance. Players can engage in urban planning by controlling zoning, road placement, taxation, public services, and public transportation of an area. If building and designing is your thing, then this simulator is for you. It’s astonishing what you can build in this game; in fact, you can build replicas of real-life cities if you so desire. If you’re too overwhelmed with controlling Sims and would rather build a city from the ground-up, then this one is for you.
If managing a household in the Sims is too easy, you might enjoy managing an entire zoo instead! Planet Zoo is the modern successor to Planet Coast and Zoo Tycoon which were really popular around the same time as The Sims and The Sims 2. In Planet Zoo, you can build a zoo from scratch, complete with animal exhibits, food stalls, and managing staff to work at your zoo. The staff at your zoo will gain experience as they become better at their jobs and they have a needs meter just like in the Sims. There are several modes for which you can play each with their own set of unique challenges: career mode, franchise mode, sandbox mode, and challenge mode.
House Flipper
House Flipper takes everything you love about decorating in The Sims and Animal Crossing and throws it all together into one game. You can schedule clients and renovate their homes based on a budget, with milestones to learn new skills like installing ceiling lamps and replacing broken appliances along the way. Eventually, you can make enough money from working with clients to purchase your own homes and give them complete renovations to sell at a profit.
The new House Flipper 2 is scheduled to release in Q3 of 2023.
Disney Dreamlight Valley
This life simulation game features powerful customization tools that let you create the perfect character, the perfect home, and the perfect town. There are multiple hobbies to explore like fishing, gardening, and foraging for materials to use in their crafting. Although, you do have to complete a few quests to get the essentials unlocked — including a lot of Dreamlight Valley recipes.
If you’re familiar with the Sims characters and lore, you’ll be happy to know that Bella Goth makes an appearance in Dreamlight Valley. Since Disney is a family-friendly franchise that caters to small children as well as adults, it’s safe to say that Disney Dreamlight Valley does not allow you to build romantic relationships, get married, or have children. This is an aspect of The Sims that is completely nonexistent in Dreamlight Valley.
It’s been a busy week for the physical distributor Limited Run Games and to top it off the company has now announced a hard copy of GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon.
There’ll be a standard copy ($39.99) and classic edition ($64.99) up for grabs. The classic edition will come with a soundtrack, art cards, an art book and features a classic Konami silver box. Pre-orders will go live on 5th May.
Dead Island 2’s development cycle is infamous at this point. Initially revealed in 2014, its journey has been almost as treacherous as a runner trying to make it along Venice Beach in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Two studios tried to put a sequel together but were met with little more than a gory disaster. But while those projects died, hope did not. And so, the reins were handed to the team at Dambuster Studios.
Over the course of nine years and three developers, the long-awaited zombie-killing sequel has kept running (or walking) on. And now, it is finally at the finish line. This is the Inside Story of how Dead Island 2 was brought back from the dead.
The Dead Island 2 we’re playing today is unapologetically pulpy – a straightforward homage to B-movie horror that builds on the tone established in the 2011 original. It’s both a love letter to the zombie genre and a bite back against the more human-centric stories that have dominated it more recently. Since the release of its predecessor, zombie games such as The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and Days Gone have focussed more on the complexities of humanity in post-apocalyptic worlds than the simple pleasure of taking on the undead headfirst with a hatchet.
Despite respecting the stories that those games have to tell, the team at developer Dambuster Studios is much more interested in the latter. For them, there’s little more satisfying than the simple thrill of punching a zombie in the face and seeing your fist crunching through the back of its skull.
“I think we really just wanted to focus the attention back on the zombies”, explains Dave Stenton, game director at Dambuster Studios. “I think over the years, recent years with say, Walking Dead for example, which was a massively popular series, the attention, I think, had moved definitely more to humans, and humanity, and that sort of post-apocalyptic survival, and getting through the trauma of the outbreak. I mean those stories have been told, right?”
Dan Evans-Lawes, Dead Island 2’s technical art director, agrees: “I think they’ve done a really good job of it in the Last of Us and stuff like that, where they’ve kind of balanced that, so the combat and the violence does feel really brutal in a way that is quite realistic, I think. But that’s a different thing to what Dead Island 1 was, and it was a different thing to what we wanted to do. We wanted to make it fun, basically, make all the violence fun rather than make you sad.”
We wanted to make it fun, basically, make all the violence fun rather than make you sad.
Before Dambuster was granted the opportunity to execute their vision, however, the story of Dead Island 2 was a sad one. Almost a decade of troubled development led to a moment few saw coming – a grand re-reveal at gamescom 2022. It was an exciting time for the studio to showcase what they’d be working so hard and so quietly on, but one that came with its fair share of nerves. How would it be received? Did people even care about Dead Island 2 anymore?
“It was torture being on at the end, all these fantastic games coming on before us, but we knew that we were kind of closing the show there”, recalls design director Adam Duckett.
“Up until that point you are always kind of asking yourself, ‘Well, I think it’s fun, but I don’t know how that’s going to kind of pan out when we give it to other people,’” Evan-Lawes remembers.
The Dead Island 2 revealed that day was nothing more than a pipedream back in 2011, the year the original game was released. Developed by Polish studio Techland, Dead Island placed the focus firmly on butchering its plentiful hordes of zombies in creative ways with satisfying melee combat. A huge commercial hit, it sold over 5 million copies in its first two years and nurtured a passionate fanbase thanks to its over-the-top violence and echoes of classic zombie cinema.
“I think Dead Island 1 was a little bit sort of lightning in a bottle”, says Stenton. “One of my favorite zombie movies is Zombie Flesh Eaters by Lucio Fulci. That had that kind of desert island beach vibe, sort of sparsely populated and with the zombies rising up. Dead Island 1 definitely evoked that fantasy for me.”
The success of the original naturally paved the road for a sequel. But from the very beginning, the follow-up was in an odd position. Techland and publisher Deep Silver had conflicting ideas about the creative direction of a second game – a disagreement that saw Techland take their zombies elsewhere and start work on a brand new zombie game, Dying Light. And so when Deep Silver revealed Dead Island 2 at E3 2014, it came with the surprise announcement that it would not be developed by the series’ creator. Instead, German studio Yager Development of Spec Ops: The Line fame would helm the sequel, with a brand new studio – Yager Productions – created purely to work on Dead Island 2.
But the change in developer wasn’t the thing everyone was talking about. Dead Island 2 was revealed via one of video games’ most memorable trailers – a slapstick stroll with the undead along Los Angeles’ iconic Venice Beach. It made a splash, to say the least – winning IGN’s award for best E3 2014 trailer at the time and sticking long enough in the memory to have been parodied as recently as 2022 by Goat Simulator 3.
“It was a great trailer and it carried on that Dead Island tradition of great trailers”, says creative director James Worrall. “The first one was very striking, and the one set in LA was striking, but the thing that, as a creative and a narrative specialist, I was really struck by was the change in tone, and that kind of really appealed to me.”
“We were actually at E3 at the same time as Dead Island 2 was being shown. I had no notion that these years later I’d actually be at the helm working on that sequel”, laughs Stenton.
The excitement was palpable and things were looking bright for the series. Dead Island 2 was set to build on what players loved from the original – an expanded eight-player co-op campaign, a huge range of weaponry, a plethora of zombie types, a more comedic tone, and yes, lots and lots of blood.
In the months that followed, dozens of video game journalists went hands-on with Dead Island 2 at PAX and gamescom 2014. IGN was among them, and our preview enthused that “Dead Island 2 finally looks to deliver on the promise made by the blood-soaked trailer”. Sadly and frustratingly, though, that promise wouldn’t be delivered on anytime soon.
Dead Island 2 was scheduled to release in Spring of 2015. But by the summer of that year, there was still no sign of it at all, despite it having been playable at multiple game conventions. And in July, Dead Island 2’s first major disaster was made public: Yager Productions had severed ties with the project after three years of development.
In an interview with GamesIndustry, Yager managing director Timo Ullman spoke of a situation that echoed the fallout between Deep Silver and series creator Techland just a few years prior: “The team worked with enthusiasm to take Dead Island 2 to a new level of quality. However, Yager and Deep Silver’s respective visions of the project fell out of alignment, which led to the decision that has been made.” Yager Productions would file for insolvency just weeks later.
Despite this major setback, Deep Silver kept faith in Dead Island 2. The search began for a new developer, and in March 2016 it was announced that Sumo Digital was taking its turn to have its crack at breathing new life into the still-warm corpse. A UK-based studio known mostly at that time for sports games and LittleBigPlanet 3, it was a surprising match, to say the least. Still, Deep Silver assured that things were going smoothly at Sumo’s studio in Sheffield, although very little else was being said publicly.
Meanwhile, in May of 2016, down the road in Nottingham, the team at Dambuster was navigating through a difficult time in their own history following the disappointing reception of Homefront: The Revolution – their ambitious but ultimately flawed first-person shooter.
“I think it’s fair to say it didn’t launch in the state that we would’ve really wanted”, Stenton admits. “It was a complex game, it was an ambitious game. There were lots of emergent systems at play in it. Finding the fun of the game, the kind of simulation of it came quite late, I think, in the development of Homefront.”
“Obviously, that game didn’t launch in as good a way as we’d hoped”, Evans-Lawes agrees. “It was disappointing for everybody who’d been working on it for quite some time. So we were trying to figure out what direction the studio was going to go in and we’d sort of prototyped a bunch of stuff and were trying out various ideas.”
As a studio, we were regrouping, we were rebuilding.
“As a studio, we were regrouping, we were rebuilding”, explains Duckett. “We’d moved from CryEngine to Unreal Engine, so it was new tech for us as well. We’d lost a lot of good people. You know, it happens at the end of most dev cycles, but I think at the end of Homefront, we lost more than we would’ve anticipated. So we were bringing in fresh talent, and with that fresh ideas and fresh knowledge of tools.“
The years following Homefront’s release was a tough learning period for Dambuster. After Homefront’s multi-layered ambitions fell short, the studio recognized that a narrow, focused vision would be key to a comeback success. Learning from the error of its ways, the first thing that Dambuster vowed to do when starting work on its new project, whatever that was to be, was to find the fun straight away. That fun was found in a prototype for the incredibly gross and gory Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, more catchily known as FLESH.
“We’d been working on the FLESH system and the gore. It was only super, super early stuff”, Evans-Lawes remembers. “All of the prototypes we were doing had some kind of concept behind them. I think this was the one that went furthest and it was a zombie-themed game.”
Worrall expands on the mood at the studio: “What was Dambuster going to make? What kind of games do we want to make? But the flesh engine and that kind of exploration really started to make people excited. Now, there was still a lot of soul-searching at that point. What does a gore engine mean for a game and how do you add something to that so it doesn’t just become like a corpse-mashing simulation?”
Dambuster had crafted a fun core, but it needed a game. And that game would arrive in the form of Sumo Digital’s quiet departure from Dead Island 2 in 2018. With no further sightings of the game for years by that point, rumours had rumbled on that the zombie smasher may never see the light of day again, despite repeated statements to the contrary from Deep Silver. But in 2019 the publisher broke its silence and publicly revealed that history had repeated itself and Sumo had become Dead Island 2’s latest victim. No explanation for why the developer left the project was offered, and Sumo’s own vision for Dead Island 2 remains a mystery.
Plagued by development issues that had now seen not only one, but two different studios divorced from the project, it would indeed now be the turn of Dambuster Studios to try and get the sequel into the hands of players. It was an exciting challenge for a studio looking to put their freshly prototyped gore system into play, but a challenge nonetheless.
“Obviously, there’s a certain amount of trepidation of like, ‘Well, this is a game that’s been around the houses, it’s been sort of semi-canceled a couple of times and now we’re taking it on,” says Evan-Lawes. “Is that a bit of a poison chalice?”
It’s been sort of semi-canceled a couple of times and now we’re taking it on, is that a bit of a poison chalice?
Stenton shared similar concerns. “I mean, you’re kind of contemplating that kind of thing very early on in development,” he says. “It just comes with the sort of pressure of the franchise, right? It’s a very popular franchise. There’s a fan base that is really dedicated and passionate about it. Obviously, you want to do it justice.”
But there was confidence, as Worrall explains: “You always worry if there have been a few missteps or perhaps relationships, creative relationships, have broken down with those missteps kind of thing but Deep Silver was really keen to just give us the space to come up with what we wanted to do. We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do, keep it laser-focused, keep it simple. And so, we were just given the time and the space to do just that.”
The fact that Dambuster had been working for some time on the FLESH system meant that it was immediately in a good position to hit the ground running with Dead Island 2. The team had the passion and the drive to make an undead smasher, even before such a massive IP had been offered to them.
Regardless of if Dambuster had secured the rights to Dead Island 2 or not, it seems as if the studio was naturally drifting towards a zombie project. “Quite possibly [we would have made a zombie game anyway]. Nothing was concrete at that point,” Evans-Lawes reveals. “When we heard that Dead Island 2 was maybe coming our way and we had this sort of initial prototype that had lots of elements that we could take across, we were like, ‘Well, that’s great because it fits with what we’ve got.’”
At this juncture, Worrall joined the studio: “I was brought in just after that decision and, basically, Dambuster showed me the gore tech and I just saw the gore tech and the proposals for the way they wanted to switch the tone from the original Dead Island and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is me. This is really, really good.’”
With their desire to make a zombie game already in full bloom, it appeared that the stars had aligned as Sumo’s loss became Dambuster’s gain. And so, sharing an office with zombies of efforts past, the team began work on Dead Island 2. The studio had a clear idea of what they wanted to do from the start – make the zombies, and specifically dispatching them as disgustingly as possible, the star of the show. And so despite having playable builds of both Yager and Sumo’s efforts available to them, the decision was made to rip it all up and start again.
“I guess there were two different sorts of takes on what Dead Island 2 was going to be and we were able to play both of those,” says Stenton. But it was never a realistic aim on our side to carry any of that forward. We just had our own unique take on what our Dead Island 2 was going to be like.”
It was important for us to just do a fresh start and just kind of wipe the slate clean.
“Obviously, some of those builds were quite old by the time we got them”, adds Duckett. “And in order to do the IP justice, and to put out a Dead Island 2 that I think the fans will appreciate, it was important for us to just do a fresh start and just kind of wipe the slate clean.”
Worrall was eager to avoid past mistakes. “It wasn’t necessarily the content or the tone or the stuff like that,” he says. “A lot of it was perhaps they took a too complex approach, maybe. It was something that we focused on and I think this is a problem that’s facing games, in general, is just blossoming complexity and it comes back to bite the studio when they’re trying to get that game out the door. And so, early on when we just decided, ‘Right. No, [it’s] just going to be people versus zombies, we got a gore engine, we’re going to make the combat really, really visceral and tactile and in your face.”
Evans-Lawes also had the past on his mind. “On Homefront I spent a long time working on dynamic day/night cycle, dynamic weather systems, all this kind of stuff,” he recalls. “And it took ages and we got it to a pretty good place, but it made no difference to the game really. It didn’t make any difference to what you were playing minute to minute. And so I was really keen to put my efforts into something that I felt was absolutely a core part of the game.”
There were aspects of the previous versions of Dead Island 2 that Dambuster appreciated, but seeing as they were effectively starting all over again from scratch anyway, they stuck to their guns and decided on a singular, narrow vision – aiming to avoid the bloat that Homefront had succumbed to, but also wary of not falling foul of the same errors their predecessor studios had. For example, Dambuster settled on three-player co-op, whereas Yager’s original vision back in 2014 was to have eight-player.
“We definitely had to evaluate what was there and go, ’Which features do we want to have in the game?’” says Evans-Laws. “And certainly, there were some interesting ideas that we looked at from previous iterations of the game that didn’t make it in, but primarily for scope reasons and trying to get the project done in a reasonable timeframe.
“There was some vehicle stuff, like driving cars, things like that, where it was certainly interesting what we saw in a previous build and there were some quite nice ideas,” he continues. “But in terms of the level design and keeping levels at the scale where the hand-to-hand melee combat works, you design a level differently if you’re driving around it.”
We had discussions of Catalina Island, which is just off the Californian Coast.
Alternative locations were also discussed, as Worral reveals: “We had discussions of Catalina Island, which is just off the Californian Coast. We thought about that as a location but, again, back to that Hollywood lens and the picture postcard, it’s about delivering that familiarity that people the world over are familiar with. That Los Angeles through the Hollywood lens.”
“Originally it was the whole of California I think”, Evans-Lawes adds. “Or at least there were going to be bits in different areas of California that had been already sort of scaled down to LA. Yeah, I think that was pretty much non-negotiable. In terms of the tone, that kind of went a few ways. We had to, I guess, figure out exactly where we wanted it to land. I think it’s landed fairly close to that Dead Island 2 trailer. But we experimented first of all with, ‘Does it want to go a bit more serious?’ And I think it’s definitely landed in a good place.”
Duckett explains that location wasn’t necessarily all-important, however. “Dead Island is known for those paradise-gone-to-hell locations and we wanted to make sure that we doubled down on that,” he says. “We wanted to make sure we doubled down, tripled down maybe even, on zombies at the core, to just really go to town on as many zombies as we could put together. Doubling down on the gore, the FLESH system again, just because as a zombie fan, that’s what I want to see.”
But what did fans of the series want to see from the sequel? The studio wrestled with those expectations. “I think we expected that obviously, people are going to have preconceived ideas about what Dead Island 2 is going to be,” Evans-Lawes explains “They’re going to have preconceived ideas about, ‘Well, it’s been in development for 10 years and so therefore, it’s going to either be a total disaster or it’s going to be this absolutely enormous behemoth of a game that just has everything in it.’
“And in actual fact, we weren’t developing it for 10 years, so we didn’t have all that time to make a huge, huge, huge game,” he clarifies. “And I think one of the things that we learned from Homefront was that you need to be focused on what you’re doing and you need to choose a few things and do them really, really well.”
“It was that laser focus on being best in class, first-person combat”, states Stenton. “I think in fairness to the team, it is really something that genuinely we’ve had right away from day one. Right the way from those very early prototypes and those very early prototypes of the FLESH system, and the weapons, and the enemies.
“It wasn’t based on a trailer, it wasn’t based on a storyboard. It was based on gameplay and the fantasy of hacking apart zombies, and melting zombies in the most spectacular, gory, groundbreaking ways possible.”
From late 2018 to the summer of 2022, the creation of that grotesque, pulpy, and violent fantasy quietly took place behind the firmly closed doors of Dambuster. Not a single screenshot, video clip, or even quote was released to the public; a conscious decision made by the studio to allow themselves to get their heads down and work with as little outside interference as possible.
“It’s partly because we knew with the history of the franchise, it’s been such a long wait for players, and we knew that there’d been a couple of false starts before”, Stenton reveals. “So this time we really better make sure that we’ve got something awesome to play, something awesome to show. Absolutely just prove once and for all when it’s announced this time it’s real, it’s super close to launch, it’s coming soon, you can play it already.”
We didn’t want to announce vaporware, we didn’t want to just come out with a CGI and then have people go, ‘Well, is there really a game?
“The game had had two false starts, right?” says Worrall. “We didn’t want to announce vaporware, we didn’t want to just come out with a CGI and then have people go, ‘Well, is there really a game?’”
Stenton agrees, stating “It can be challenging to read those kinds of comments and sit on your hands and not give any hints or any indication, because as a studio you invest your heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears into the project and you have been doing for a while.”
And so we find ourselves back in 2022, when that silence was broken in the final moments of gamescom’s Opening Night Live. Dead Island 2 made its very loud and very unexpected return from the dead and, to the team’s relief, the trailer was met with a newfound hunger. The long-thought corpse of a game was finally reanimated. For Dambuster, it was a moment of pure relief matched only by the excitement from the fanbase.
Stenton recalls the moment fondly. “It was funny at Opening Night Live because we’d got, actually, Dead Island T-shirts that we weren’t allowed to wear until the moment of the reveal,” he laughs. “Obviously, you know, you’re super pensive at the point that it’s all about to happen. But it’s such a relief once it’s out there, once everybody knows. Then finally we’re able to show the branding and what we’ve been working on for all of these years. It’s just releasing the pressure valve, to be honest, and being able to talk more freely about it and wear the game with pride and show the game with pride.”
“It is really nice to see people’s reactions when they play the game and people’s kind of shock at the gore system and everyone kind of going like, ‘Oh man, bloody hell!’ but then also laughing”, says Evans-Lawes. “It’s really gruesome, but it’s to the point that you just kind of have to laugh. So seeing people actually do that, play the game, whack a zombie in the head, and then just start laughing because the gore is so ridiculous, you’re kind of like, ‘Right, okay, yeah, we got that.’”
The re-reveal at gamescom signalled the light at the end of the tunnel for the long-tortured sequel. Dead Island 2 would finally arrive in the spring of 2023 and thousands of zombies would once again die in all manner of experimentally violent ways.
For the best part of a decade, the first question that came to many when thinking about Dead Island 2 was “Is it a real game?” But for the team at Dambuster, the question is what do they hope its lasting legacy will be?
“I hope they remember that it was fun,” says Duckett. “As a designer, that’s what I want to hear. It was fun to engage with the setups. It was fun to kill the zombies. It was vibrant, it was pulpy, it was different. It didn’t take itself too seriously, and it knew what it wanted to be.”
“I’m pretty confident that players will look back at the launch of Dead Island 2 and see how it’s reinjected a sense of vibrancy, and purpose, and real differentiation to the zombie genre, that we bring something different, and really iconic, and really worthwhile”, says Stenton.
Evans-Lawes hopes “That players think, ‘This is the game that has reinvigorated the zombie genre and taken it back to a place that is trashy, kind of pulpy and lots of fun.’ That’s what I wanted to do with it. And I feel like that’s what we’ve done. We have succeeded where others have not. So yeah, that’s nice too.”
We have succeeded where others have not. So yeah, that’s nice.
Worrall holds hope “that they will think that Dead Island 2 wasn’t such a simple undertaking and I think that was proven with the development cycle but getting it right was worth the wait.”
So yes, Dead Island 2 is definitely a real game, just not necessarily the same one that started life all those years ago. It’s been a long decade for fans of the series. Studios may have fallen by the wayside like dismembered limbs, but neither the head was removed nor the brain destroyed. Dead Island 2 successfully imitated its own shambling hordes as the game that refused to die.
I guess the only logical question to ask next then is… Is Dead Island 3 a real game?
“No comment”, says Stenton.
Simon Cardy would last two minutes in a zombie apocalypse. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon.
When the original Teslagrad released in 2013, the indie game scene was in a very different place. Long before modern Indie Worlds and Nindie Showcases and games from small developers put out by billion-dollar publishers, indie games still felt very much independent. The original game — recently re-released in Remastered form — always stood out as one of the more notable titles from a small dev, especially on the Wii U eShop. Now, a decade later, we’re in a different landscape. With the surprise release of Teslagrad 2, the question then is whether Norwegian studio Rain Games is able to capture lightning in a bottle once more.
Teslagrad 2 follows Lumina, a young girl who gets attacked by Vikings on her travels. She becomes stranded on Wyrmheim, a world heavily inspired by Scandinavia. Here she is tasked with harnessing and upgrading her electromagnetic powers to explore the world and find a way back home to her family.
Welcome back to another edition of What are you Playing, where we give you a brief rundown of the week in Nintendo before discussing what gaming we’re all up to this weekend.
