When the team at Dambuster Studio started work on Dead Island 2’s New Game Plus, they knew they didn’t want to make it just the same campaign with a higher level cap. ‘We want players to have a reason to replay the game with the characters they love’ says Tim Donks, Senior Designer.
In fact, Patch 6’s New Game Plus mode gives fans a whole bunch of reasons to head back onto the gore-soaked streets of Hell-A. As with most NG+ modes, you can start the game again with your favourite slayer, equipped with all the skills, abilities and weapons you built up during your first run. But New Game Plus isn’t taking any prisoners. It’s ready to mix up enemy encounters and make damn sure that even skilled DI2 vets face a serious challenge.
Once players arrive in Bel Air – New Game Plus skips the campaign’s prologue – they’re going to find the action very different. They’ll encounter familiar zombies in new locations, and some tougher zombies where they wouldn’t previously expect them. Even the basic walkers have had their health upgraded along with their damage, while Apex Zombie variants aren’t going to wait for their turn in the spotlight. ‘Before you had to wait until the end of the game to start seeing mutators or anything like that’ says Associate Lead Level Designer, James Gamlin. ‘In New Game Plus, they’ll be appearing very early on.’
And then there are the new Revenants. These killer new takes on your favourite Apex Zombies don’t just have a dark new look, but new behaviours and tweaked capabilities that make them deliberately hard to slay. ‘This combined with the changes from New Game Plus are going to push the challenge all the way up to 11’ says Donks. You don’t need to kill them all, adds Gamlin, though you’ll miss out on some great rewards. ‘We don’t want them to be roadblocks and we didn’t want to add huge difficulty spikes. But if players want that challenge, thay’ll find it.’
Don’t even think about power-levelling and cheesing through the action, either. New Game Plus is designed to more closely scale the zombie threat against your slayer’s current level, and every big boss zombie is guaranteed to be a higher level.
Luckily, players come in with a few advantages. Not only can they bring in their existing skill cards and capabilities, but they’ll have more slots to fill in every category. This allows for builds players couldn’t create before, where they can explore new tactics and killer skill and weapon combos. Meanwhile, every weapon that drops in New Game Plus will be more powerful than those in the main game, with more fixed-rarity weapons to collect and wield. The team hopes this will encourage players to make the most of weapons that they might previously have left behind.
New Game Plus is going to be a test of guts and skill, but that’s just going to inspire Dead Island 2 fans to think up with new slayer builds and strategies. And if it’s not tough enough, players can fill one of their additional skills with the Masochist card Dead Island 2 introduced earlier this year, making the walking dead even tougher to put down. As Donks puts it, ‘New Game Plus with Masochist is the ultimate Dead Island 2 challenge.’
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