“There were some people who wanted to do a completely new game for a moment,” says Marchewka, Techland’s CEO. It was an attitude echoed by everyone I spoke to. “With that kind of knowledge, and after finishing Dead Island, we didn’t have a choice.” Dying Light was the game Techland had to make. Initially, we were thinking about adding the day and night cycle to the first Dead Island, but we just didn’t have the time to evaluate it more, and that’s why we kept it for the next project. We had so much written material about new enemies, combat, skills, a day and night cycle. “We had a lot of ideas for another zombie game, but we didn’t manage to put them into the first Dead Island because of time and team size. When I asked Adrian Ciszewski, the director not only of Dying Light but Dead Island, why Techland persisted with zombies after Dead Island was taken away from them, his answer was resolute: “We didn’t have a choice,” he says. At the same time, we have this experience, all these ideas – we had to make another game.” There’s not really a lot we could do about it. “Right from the beginning the deal was they keep the IP, and since we had differing ideas, they said they’re going to give the game to someone else. “There were a lot of discussions with Deep Silver, and they had a completely different idea of where they wanted to take the franchise,” says Maciej Binkowski, Dying Light’s lead game designer. We knew the next game would move the idea forward.” That next game was thought of as Dead Island 2, but early on it was clear that developer and publisher wanted to do different things with the fledgling series. We tried to keep with expectations, but the initial idea for the release, for the time of the release and size, were not really planned. Marchewka told me it “was meant to be a big DLC, but while we were doing it the idea to announce the game as something bigger came about. Dead Island was quickly followed by Riptide, a hasty sequel which appeared less than two years after the original. Success only brought new pressures and more deadlines. “We were trying to take the game more into the climate of the trailer, but since the game was working and was in development for so long – and it was more about emergent gameplay – we just couldn’t and didn’t want to turn it upside down just because of the artistic idea for the trailer.” In spite of the trailer raising expectations and some widely-publicised bugs, Dead Island was a hit, yet it didn't buy the team the freedom they desired to work on the next project. It was not our decision.” Bizarrely it even led to the situation where the game was being influenced at the eleventh-hour by a trailer. “We wanted to correct it as much as possible, but because the trailer was that successful, from a business point of view, it was good to maybe not correct it that much. “I think it made people confused,” admits Marchewka. It was the must-see trailer of 2011, but ultimately it had very little in common with the final game, creating yet another source of creative friction between developer and publisher. It was one of the reasons Dead Island was buggier than we thought.”Īrguably one of the most memorable and enduring aspects of Dead Island was the first time we saw it – that haunting slow-motion trailer depicting the death of a family on holiday in reverse. Sometimes other business aspects are important, and you have to keep to the schedule. Sometimes it might not be your only decision to make. Suddenly, your game is more ambitious than you initially thought there are more elements you need to polish. “And that’s what happened with Dead Island. That’s the hard part of working with a publisher. “Working with a big publisher requires you to work to a certain schedule, moving the product even though you might need to polish certain elements. “It can be difficult sometimes, especially when it comes to flexibility,” says Pawel Marchewka, Techland’s CEO. While visiting Techland, I spoke to designers, animators, artists, and even the CEO, and it was clear that after Dead Island, Dying Light was the game they had to make, and they were making it entirely on their own terms. So much of Dying Light began life as Dead Island 2, but it wasn’t meant to be, with publisher Deep Silver determined to take the series in a different creative direction. Those ideas belong to Techland, the ever-growing Polish developer which first experienced worldwide success with Dead Island.
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