Dead Island 2 Setting Always Going To Be LA Despite Development History

Other than Hell-A was never an option.

It was confirmed that the setting for Dead Island 2 was always planned for this particular location.

Dambuster Game Director David Stenton recently spoke with Game Informer to confirm this particular new interesting detail about the game. He revealed that even after three developers had their hands on Dead Island 2’s development, it was always going to be set in Los Angeles. Now, Dambuster has renamed the hellish landscape Hell-A.

“I don’t remember there being a lot of debate about doing anything other than LA,” Stenton revealed. “I think for us, we wanted to apply real focus to the game… to the combat and that also extends to the setting as well. LA is such a fantastic iconic location, we didn’t really feel like we needed to bring in any other areas.” 

Stenton assured the fans that the game will only be in LA and will not move to San Francisco. In the original version of the logo way back in 2014, the D for Dead had the Gold Gate Bridge, which is San Francisco’s iconic landmark. That has now changed and everything in the game will only be Hell-A.

“It just gives us so much opportunity… for the game that we wanted to make, so it wasn’t really a big debate,” Stenton says. 

The first developer to stick their hands on Dead Island 2’s development was the makers of Spec Ops The Line, Yager. Techland had already left the IP and has now passed it on to another. Later on, Deep Silver handed the job to LittleBigPlanet 3 developer Sumo Digital in 2016 but after three years, Deep Silver passed it on to Dambuster Studios. From then on, development was on their home turf now and it has led to this.

Dead Island 2 launches on April 28, 2023 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.