As if surviving the zombie swarms in a horror game wasn’t enough of a challenge, Dead Island 2 weapons will eventually break if you use them too much. The news isn’t all bad for fans of durable armaments, though. Dead Island 2’s design director, Adam Duckett, told VG 24/7 that the goal is encouraging players to step out of their comfort zones and experiment with the game’s wildly diverse range of weapons, which even include Amazon’s Alexa AI.
“Ranged weapons have ammo, so melee weapons have degradation,” Duckett said. “ we’re generous with it; we want players to explore the full arsenal of weapons – so we have so many great mods, and so many perks, and so many other things in this game that we want players to cycle through.”
Unlike some games, such as Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dead Island 2 makes it plain when a weapon is about to break.
“You can quite easily turn off the HUD and be able to see the weapon degrade in front of you, in various stages,” art director Adam Olson told VG 24/7. “So players can look at their weapon and think ‘hm, that’s looking a bit crude’ and know they’ll need to switch it out.”
Players can switch between eight weapons at a given time and keep another eight in reserve. Duckett also said that, aside from guns, axes, and the like, players will have access to a wide variety of tools they can use, which, presumably, won’t break, or at least not as frequently.
This emphasis on detail is part of the team’s broader goal to make Dead Island 2 as realistic as possible, including a unique visual system that shows how much damage your zombie targets have suffered just by looking at them – no health bars required.
Dead Island 2 launches Feb. 3, 2023, for consoles, excluding the family-friendly Nintendo Switch, and PC, and if it’s anything like the Dead Island 2 preview version we played earlier in 2022, it’ll be worth the wait.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF