Dead Island 3 teased by developer – ‘the outbreak is far from over’

Dead Island is returning from the dead, as developer Dambuster hints at both a new director’s cut and a full blown sequel.

Sometimes it’s hard to work out exactly why a game has been quite so successful. Hollow Knight is a good game but there’s no obvious reason why sequel Silksong has generated quite as much hype as it has. With Dead Island though it’s very easy to see the appeal, since the original came out when zombie games were still relatively novel and it had one of the best, and most misleading, trailers of all time.

The resulting game was not very good but, surprisingly, the 2023 sequel Dead Island 2 was. Created by British team Dambuster Studios, which is all that’s left of TimeSplitters developer Free Radical Design, it was a critical and commercial hit, but nothing has ever been heard of a follow-up… until now.

Celebrating the franchise’s 14th anniversary, Dambuster posted a graphic on social media, hinting at a new location for the next game and implying that there is much more to come in the future.

The posts on Steam, X, and elsewhere are short but pretty unambiguous, recounting how the series has ‘crawled from tropical shores to the sun-drenched chaos of HELL-A in Dead Island 2, where over 20 million Slayers have left nothing but carnage behind.’

‘This isn’t the final cut though. Dambuster Studios are already carving out what comes next. For now, the details stay under wraps, the outbreak is far from over…’

A press release sent by publisher Plaion is even more straightforward, stating that ‘Dambuster Studios has confirmed, today, that the team is already hard at work on the next chapter in the Dead Island saga.’

Although that doesn’t leave any doubt that there will be a sequel there’re only hints as to where the new one might be set or what it will involve, other than killing zombies.

There are travel stickers for Ireland, Rome, and Australia on the character’s case, as well as the previous settings of (fictional) Banoi and L.A.

But then there’s also an image of the Moon on the guy’s jacket, so maybe it’s set there. Which we wouldn’t be opposed to at all.

What there isn’t any clue to, is when there’ll be new information or whether the phrase ‘final cut’ means that there’ll be some sort of new special edition of Dead Island 2 first.

That does seem perfectly possible and since Dambuster hasn’t announced or released anything since 2023 it’s quite possible that could be released fairly imminently, perhaps even this year.

It’s impossible to guess when a full-blown sequel might arrive, but the series has an (unintended) history of announcing new entries far in advance of their actual release. So there’s also a chance you could get some kind of teaser this year – perhaps as a coda to the implied director’s cut.

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