How Dead Island 2 pushed Unreal Engine 4 beyond its early limits

A bug appeared early in development as Yager filled their world with more than half a million physical objects.

Design director Bernd Diemer opened up on the development of Dead Island 2 detailing some of the design philosophies, features, and concepts of the co-operative zombie slayer.

An interesting anecdote came out of a discussion stemming from Yager Developments being one of the first licensees of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 technology.

"We built LA and it was super big. You know level designers, if you don't watch them levels grow," says Diemer. "That's what they do. Then we looked at it and we had this really super annoying bug that the player would fall through the world. Randomly. You know you are walking around and all of a sudden you fall through the landscape into eternity. Our guys couldn't find what was wrong with it. You know it happened sometimes, sometimes it didn't. And then we finally started talking to Epic and said ' hey dudes, we have this weird error, falling through the world' and they said 'hmm, we've never seen that before. Let us take a look'. We gave them a build and one of their guys looked at it and met with our guys and then they said 'actually, what's happening is we have a limit of half a million physicalised entities in the world and you guys are past that'. And then we said 'can we have more, please?' and then back and forth Epic and our guys did deep metrics shit. That's the proper scientific term. And talked to Nvidia cause it was related to GPU as well and now we can have more."