The sequel to Dead Island may be gone forever, as it’s Steam page was removed entirely from the website. According to the Steam DB page, the change took place about 11 hours ago at the time of writing this.
Which isn’t a good sign, given the game’s tumultuous development history. It was initially announced by Deep Silver back in June 2014 during E3, stating the game was going to have a Spring 2015 release according to their reveal trailer. The video showed a jogger’s morning through a California-like setting, and around him the zombie apocalypse was slowly unfolding.
EuroGamer Czech told videogamer.com via Twitter that their internal sources had pushed the release date of the game back to September 2015.
@VG_Dave been told from our internal sources few weeks ago that DI2 is now set for September date.
— Eurogamer_CZ (@Eurogamer_CZ) April 7, 2015
Then in July 2015, news came out that Yager Development was no longer involved with the project despite working on it for the past three years. According to gamesindustry.biz, the decision was somewhat a vision problem between them and Deep Silver. According to manager director Timo Ullmann:
“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.”
By March 2016, it was revealed by MCVUK that Sumo Digital was going to take over production on the project. According to Paul Porter, Sumo COO: ““We’re looking forward to exceeding fan expectation with an ambitious design that we’re confident will take bone-crunching, visceral, zombie action to a whole new level.”
But it’s unknown whether or not the project still continues.