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.’

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