Meet the Whipper and the Clotter

Dead Island 2’s second expansion introduces fans to SoLA, the festival turned bloodbath of the dead. Slayers will be showcasing their skills backstage and in the moshpits, tackling some particularly frenzied crowds. And they share the stage with two new ‘apex zombies’ that push their splatter skills to the max.

Get ready for the Whipper. She’s the last word in Californian boho chic, if only she hadn’t felt compelled to claw through her own flesh and grab a handful of juicy zombie guts. Now she’s flailing away with her intestines, or causing blindness with hurled organs, making it harder to take her out at range.

And if that doesn’t give you nightmares, the Clotter definitely should. This bad boy can melt into a pile of hideous fleshy goo. He can then reform at will without warning, just where you’d least expect him to. Clotters are savage and relentless, making it tricky for slayers to dominate the play space or find any kind of breathing room. There’s no running away and hoping for a break.

Whipping up the crowd

‘Both of the new apex zombies provide a new and compelling challenge for players, even if they’ve beaten the main game’ says Lead Technical Enemies Designer, Aiden Bains. ‘We’re pulling them out of their comfort zone a little bit, and – at the same time – encourage their creativity and let them experiment with different tools.’

With the Whipper, for example, their intestinal whip gives them serious melee moves that work at an extended range, putting players who just like to slug it out in a tough spot. Worse, their self-mutilation abilities block slayers from entering their Fury state. With a Whipper around you can’t rely on your supercharged moves.

Meanwhile the Clotter gives slayers something entirely new to think about. ‘They’re there, from a gameplay standpoint, as a zombie with a teleport ability’ says Bains. ‘And, to start with, this can be quite disorienting. The player is unable to track the enemy and they can’t always escape them. They can simply melt away.’

‘They don’t need to spend a long time traversing or climbing up and over stuff’ he adds. ‘And when the player tries to run away, they can reappear in front of them to cut them off.’

Still think you can conquer the Clotter? He also packs a secondary ‘bloodstream’ ability, where they’ll stop, draw on their undead strength and unleash a putrid ten metre wall of death against you. This capability combo makes them really tough and unpredictable to fight.

Where there’s a will, there’s a slay

Yet even against such challenging new apex zombies, players always have a chance. Maybe the Whipper’s signature move won’t be so effective if you take away the limb that’s doing whipping? And while the Clotter can reform and even regrow dismembered parts, hitting their stability bar with high force weapons might force them to collapse. Pick your moment, and you might even find them in a vulnerable position.

As Bains puts it, ‘We always start with the core mechanic – what this enemy is about – but that means both the ability the zombie can use against the player and how the player can flip it back in their own favour if they choose to.’

‘We talk about our players starting out as survivors and ending up as slayers – mastering the combat and the enemies. And these new enemies try to deliver that. They’re very powerful, but they’re also falling apart at the seams.’

What’s more, each new apex zombie brings new ways to spread the splatter around, with just a little zombie friendly fire. That means smart players can use the Whipper’s whip to their advantage. ‘If you’ve got some weak shamblers around, it can act as a lacerating weapon’ says Bains. ‘They’re suddenly getting bisected everywhere! We get the gore extended out!’

Fresh blood and gore

Dead Island 2 has a varied cast of deadly zombies to keep slayers busy. Where does the team go to come up with new ideas? ‘All of our zombies need to be grounded in the gore’ says Bains. ‘We start off with these gameplay mechanics, but we need to contextualise them within the gore. Once we’ve got that, we feed that back into the design, and see how we can push it further.’

With the Whipper, the whipping move set and self-mutilation came first, and her grisly organ-chucking antics were a sort of natural progression. ‘All the abilities stem from a personality even if we didn’t start with a person’ Bains concludes.

‘All the zombies we’ve delivered in Dead Island 2 have these interesting quirks’ he says, ‘but in SoLA we had this real opportunity. We’ve got all those established zombie types with their established tropes. They’re not going anywhere. But now we’ve put together zombies that will make players say “Wow! I never played a zombie game where a zombie has done that before!”’