
While unfinished, the build provides some insight into what the original game was aiming for, with a “cartoony” art direction and a similar playful tone to the final product. In 2020, an early build of Yager's original version of the game was leaked online.It was then transferred to Sumo Digital, where the same thing occurred, resulting in it eventually falling into the hands of Dambuster Studios.

Deep Silver then hired Yager Development to create the game, which was set to be released in 2015 and had gameplay shown to the press before being dropped from the project. Techland intended to develop the game before disagreements with Deep Silver drove it to pull out of the project in favor of working on Dying Light with Warner Bros.

Another reason the game is already proving to be more popular than previous Dead Island titles is that it has far fewer bugs, with Techland's original game and its sequel Riptide being notoriously broken with their generally janky mechanics and a hilariously long page dedicated to glitches on their fan-run wiki.
