Dead Island 2 is finally coming out on April 28th after changing two developers (Yager, then Sumo Digital, and now Dambuster Studios) over the course of nearly ten years.
With the game less than three months away from its final launch date, Game Informer interviewed Technical Art Director Dan Evans-Lawes to discuss one of Dead Island 2’s chief systems: procedural dismemberment, called FLESH.
Dead Island 2 is a zombie game, it’s all about hitting zombies with things usually a very close range, so we really wanted to make sure that the impacts felt impactful. And obviously, people want a lot of gore so we came up with it as a method for just making the minute-to-minute gameplay more enjoyable, more fun and more visually spectacular.
It’s an entirely procedural system. All of the different zombie types, they’re all sort of set up in the same way so that we can apply damage anywhere on the zombie. It will go through the layers of skin fat and muscle and then break through to the bones and the internal organs.
Obviously, the models are slightly different in terms of like, one of the big Crusher zombies has got much larger guts than a small zombie, but the system is entirely the same across all of them.
I think a lot of other systems that you see in games, they’ll be like kind of decals that get applied or switchable bits that happen. If you wanted to do something different for a sword and then like a sledgehammer, you’d have to make different models for those to figure out how they were going to fit in all that stuff, whereas the precision of the FLESH system is enough that we can just say ‘Okay, well the damage is here and you’ll get a slash and it will look like a slash’, whereas with the sledgehammer you go ‘Well, it’s here and it’s a bit more of this kind of shape and it’ll look like that’.
There’s actually a lot of things that aren’t immediately noticeable when you’re you’re playing Dead Island 2 but they’re there. We can put bruising around the wounds and stuff like that so that you get kind of a different result from different types of weapons.
The Dead Island 2 launch date got busier yesterday with the delay of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, though they’re two very different games. Are you excited about finally playing this sequel? Let us know in the comments.
