Okay, so I have a theory.
An anon on /v/ made an interesting claim several months ago. That Dambuster are/were making a sci-fi Dead Island spinoff. This could very well be the mystery Dambuster title that has shown up in financial reports over the past few years. These reports clearly indicate two games. Dead Island 2, and something else being developed by Dambuster.
For some reason, Dambuster has recently gone from support studio on Dead Island 2 to lead studio. It is unclear whether Sumo is still working on the game. Something to understand is that Dambuster and Sumo Nottingham are basically up the street from each other. Sumo has been using Dambuster's performance capture equipment all along. They were collaborating on Dead Island 2. Some people are worried about the series being handed to yet another developer, but Dambuster has been working on this game since Sumo started working on it. Sumo was the lead while Dambuster was the support studio. This role has reversed. We don't know why, exactly. But Dambuster is now completely in charge of Dead Island as a series.
Sumo Nottingham is headed by former GoldenEye/TimeSplitters/Perfect Dark developer Karl Hilton. Steve Ellis is also in Nottingham, working on TimeSplitters. He's actually been working for Deep Silver since July. Here's a thought - what if Sumo Nottingham has been contracted to work on TimeSplitters 4 and similar projects? What if Deep Silver made the decision to move all Dead Island development over to Dambuster, leaving Sumo Nottingham, who have a significant number of former Free Radical developers, in a position to focus on TimeSplitters projects?
So what happened to the mystery game? Assuming it was indeed a sci-fi Dead Island spinoff, it could still be coming. It could have been scrapped, which would be heartbreaking for the devs. Or it might end up becoming Dead Island 2 DLC. We'll likely learn the truth at Gamescom.
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