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All the gory details of Dead Island 2's New Game Plus and Neighborhood Watch modes
J
Julian Benson
New Game Plus will allow you to play through the whole main campaign again with all your skills and weapons unlocked, but you'll have to prepare yourself for a new challenge. You'll want to play for more than just the added difficulty—the mode lets you create new character builds that weren't possible in the original.
If you're looking for a more bite-sized adventure, Neighborhood Watch takes everything great about Dead Island 2's violent co-op combat and stuffs it into a campaign you can complete with friends in just 45 minutes.
Read on for all the gory details.
New Game Plus sharpens the undead's teeth
New Game Plus allows you to continue your zombie-slaying around LA by resetting the campaign while letting you keep much of what you unlocked in your original playthrough. Dambuster Senior Game Designer Tim Donks says the rule of thumb for the new mode was "if you earned it, you should be able to continue playing with it."
When you start a New Game Plus campaign, you'll keep all your weapons, their attached mods and perks, as well as your skills, curveballs, challenges, currency, and resources. The only things that don't carry over are keys and journals, as these story items would break mission progression.
As is standard for New Game Plus, the mode also increases the difficulty. However, this presented a challenge for the team at Dambuster Studios, as Dead Island 2 doesn't feature traditional difficulty modes. Unlike other games with easy, medium, and hard settings, the developers spent years fine-tuning the challenge of their zombie game to a standard setting.
With New Game Plus, the team had to introduce a way of ratcheting up the zombies' power level. "We needed to be able to provide the player with a meaningful challenge, especially during these early parts of the game," says Donks.
One initial change was unlocking all of the endgame zombie enemies. When you start a New Game Plus campaign, you'll face every enemy type right from the beginning of the game.
Another big change builds on an experiment in the SoLA DLC released in April. In Dead Island 2, you unlock skill cards that you can slot into your character build, changing how their abilities work—upping elemental damage, for instance, or increasing a character's armor. While skill cards normally strengthen your character, in the SoLA DLC, you can unlock the Masochist card, which makes everything around you more powerful.
With the Masochist card, you do less damage and recover your health more slowly, and stunned enemies revive much faster. "The research done for this skill has provided us with various ways to increase the difficulty for an individual player in a game that otherwise had no difficulty settings," Donks says. "Some lessons learned from Masochist are now also applied to New Game Plus but for all players and affecting all zombies, so acting more like an actual difficulty setting. This allowed us to make all zombies more challenging than they were at the end of the game, which would help us make combat the earlier parts more fun. "
If you really want to up the difficulty, you can slot the Masochist card into your New Game Plus build. "This, combined with Revenants being some of the most challenging encounters in the game, should give the players that want the extra challenge something to look out for," Donks says.
Rest assured, however, that Dambuster has also been mindful of players who just wanted to keep playing through the campaign. "The goal was not to turn our games into [a] Soulslike," Donks says.
One way you can continue to gain power in New Game Plus to face down these increased challenges is by progressing from level 30 to level 40, unlocking new skill slots as you do so. With new slots, you can equip yourself with more skills and create builds only possible in New Game Plus.
Work together to survive in Neighborhood Watch
While New Game Plus reengineers the original campaign, Neighborhood Watch is an entirely new mode that tests your cooperative mettle. It pits you and other survivors against growing hordes of zombies, fitting these battles into a horde mode structure where you build defenses around your safehouse and prepare for a final mega wave of the undead.
You can see it all in action in the reveal trailer below. In Neighborhood Watch, you play a group of college kids clearing the streets around their shelter, looking for resources to prepare a defense against an incoming zombie assault that threatens your evacuation.
Each Neighborhood Watch run takes place over five in-game days. At the end of each day, you'll earn a reward that could give you a new ability, weapon, or trap to defend your shelter. However, you can only unlock one reward a day, forcing you to make tough decisions about what you need for your final defense.
For these short campaigns, which developer Fishlabs says can be completed in 45 minutes, you select one of three unique character classes and develop them. Each player will start the session at level 10 and will automatically level up while performing tasks and battling the horde. You can find new weapons, or level-match the ones you have as you level. These are all session-based, but you can gain Rank as you play. This is persistent, and will allow you to unlock class-based Talents (like unlocking new crossbow attacks for the Hunter class) between campaigns.
Fishlabs and Dambuster Studios developed the Neighborhood Watch mode for over two years. "The team had been considering a form of co-op multiplayer mode for Dead Island 2 from the early development phase," Fishlabs Senior Producer Johannes Wieland says.
The mode grew steadily more ambitious through development. Originally, it was designed "as a pure 'horde mode,'" Wieland explains, but the team "quickly realized that this becomes repetitive." Fishlabs then "added a mission structure with a set of random rewards players could choose from if finishing a mission successfully. This was much better but still became repetitive quicker than we liked. It took us several iterations until we finally had the current structure, where players can choose between different missions with different rewards that impact their final Shelter Defense mission."
Throughout its development, the team has run weekly play sessions in which they've paired up teams randomly, mixing the experienced players from the QA department with novices from the wider team. It was important to see how players would work together and use all the skills and traps they had available.
"It was very interesting to see which characters and loadouts different people preferred and which mission rewards they tended to select," Wieland says. When pushed, Wieland wouldn't share the best tactics their playtesters discovered, leaving it to us to discover when the mode comes out on October 22. However, they did give two essential tips for Neighborhood Watch: "Use your traps and work together."
You can dive into Neighborhood Watch and start your New Game Plus right now. Dead Island 2 is available on the Epic Games Store, so pick it up today.