Dead Island 2 Survivor Ryan Is A Tanky Sex Worker With A Firefighter Routine

Dead Island 2 features six viable survivors, and it will be available right off the bat. One of them might be Jacob. Jacob is a Lenny Kravitz-inspired character that you may already recognize. re-reveal trailer for Dead Island 2. My cover story trip saw me play Dead Island 2 approximately seven hours, although I did not get to interact with Jacob. Dani and Ryan were two survivors who add their unique twist to the tale of the zombie-pocalypse. I played a little bit with them. 

This cover story trip made me believe Dani was the one who survived, and Ryan, as well. The other four survivors were not present at my play. However, I still want to talk about Ryan and Dambuster Studios (read more about Dani here).

Los Angeles: Where is the Problem?

Los Angeles, as you may already be aware, has fallen to hell. Dani and Ryan, in-game, and Dambuster Studios, affectionately refer to this once vibrant and beautiful city as Hell-A. However, Hell-A remains beautiful and vibrant, but it is only for a few, such as Ryan. 

Dead Island 2 is set in the final days of an evacuation operation to remove non-infected people from Los Angeles. This sequel is set approximately a decade after Dead Island 1. While logic suggests that Dead Island 2 has the same zombie virus as Banoi’s, it’s not necessarily true. Khan, Dead Island 2 narrative writer tells me the evacuation proved to be “surprisingly efficient”. According to Khan, the military has fenced off LA and decided to quarantine any remaining parts of LA to prevent the spreading infection. According to the studio, this is the place where the island element of the game’s name comes into play. Nobody goes in and nobody goes out. 

Each survivor is met on the final plane leaving LA. They discover that one of the passengers is infected. Protocol results in the military shooting this plane down – can’t have any infected leaving the city, after all – and it crash lands into Hell-A. This is when I assumed control of Ryan, my survivor. The game then introduced me to the combat system and its primary antagonists, zombies. Ryan quickly becomes a bit. That’s when Dead Island 2’s story begins. Ryan is infected but not turning. To help you, you must get your blood and this information to someone.  

Let’s now talk about Ryan’s journey in Dead Island 2.

Meet Ryan

Ryan’s story begins like the rest of the survivors, but I actually began playing as him later in his story during my Dead Island 2 cover story trip. I took Dani through the game’s first four or five hours, ending my playtime with Ryan. Ryan and I explored Santa Monica Pier and waltzed through the creepy, funhouse-like atmospheres. Then, we faced Butcho, the clown boss who moves like a spider and uses his sawed down arm bones to make swords and has the ability to regenerate your health. This was truly the stuff of nightmares. 

Ryan, however, took it all in stride unlike Dani. He kept it cool, calm, and collected, which was quite different from Dani’s more in-your-face, I-don’t-care-who-you-think-you-are vibe. In talking with Khan, it sounds like this contrast was intentional and something not just applicable to these two survivors, but something players hopefully notice between all the survivors; they’re different people, after all. She explained how Ryan came to Los Angeles in the first instance. 

“This is a man who not quite peaked in high school, but he was always a good-looking fella,” Khan tells me. “[He’s] not particularly academically inclined, not particularly assiduous or detail oriented, and didn’t do particularly well. In other words, after high school, he didn’t want to go to university or anything like that.” 

He was moving from one job to the next, she says, and not always being concerned. He lost his parents in a “fairly mundane way” during this and was left with a little brother to care for.

“All of a sudden, he’s the breadwinner and the parent, essentially, for this kid who’s a good 10 years younger than him, maybe more, where they live in… Fresno where he’s from” she says. “People always had joked that he was good-looking enough to be a stripper, and he always liked going dancing and that sort of thing. And basically, out of, not desperation exactly but just like, ‘I guess, why not? Let’s try this out. Maybe that’ll work better.’ He started dancing, and turned out he was really good at it, and he liked it, and ended up starting his own little company.”

Ryan’s routine specialty is based around his firefighter outfit, which is fitting given his company’s name: The Big Hose. Ryan was able to go to the bachelorette party in LA because he had his firefighter gear on. 

“He sort of took that opportunity of, ‘Alright, I’m getting on the last plane out of here somehow, people make way for a man in uniform,’” Khan tells me. 

Dani’s goal in Hell-A is to make it out alive and meet back up with her roller derby team for an upcoming match. Ryan’s goal is to survive and reach his brother. Fortunately, his brother isn’t in LA, it seems, nor is he in danger, but given that Ryan is his caretaker, Ryan’s survival in this situation is important.

Ryan’s Innate Skills

In Dead Island 2, you can transform your survivor into any type of character that suits your needs, such as loadout and skills. Two innate abilities are what each survivor has and will guide you in your search for the right character. 

Ryan

• Retaliation: Ryan receives a mild force boost when he uses block or dodge to avoid being attacked. 
• Seesaw: Ryan gains health every time he kills a Zombie. 

Khan says Dead Island 2 is “gameplay first and combat first”. Khan claims the characters were drawn out first as playable survivors. Then, fully-realized characters are created. This allowed the narrative team to “reverse engineer” survivor personalities. Dani is an expert in heavy attack. Why? Khan and his narrative team were able to answer that question through specific details about Dani’s character. Ryan is the same as Ryan. 

“I like to think of [Ryan] as stubbornness personified,” Khan says. “He will set his heels and block and refuse to budge. He’s a wonderful tanky character if you want to spec him up that way. But he’s also just a really good slow steady Eddy – just a, ‘I will not dodge around and I will not yield.’ What makes someone like that?”

Khan says the team initially designed Ryan as the stock hero with a “classic jaw, good looking guy” type of design we’ve seen in countlessvideo games before. Dambuster Studios wanted a different take on that. He was put in an outfit as a firefighter. 

“Can we make it for a fun reason?” Khan says the team asked after putting Ryan in a firefighter get up. “Don’t get me wrong, love firefighters, no disrespect to them whatsoever, but you know, [sex worker with a firefighter routine] is something we haven’t maybe seen. We also needed someone who, even if they were treated as an authority figure by NPCs or by people who met them, would not react that way because that’s not actually what he is. That kind of distance, that kinda awkwardness was what we needed.

“When it comes to the way he plays, again, he’s sort of bullish…he’s fed up, he is sarcastic and pessimistic and he is just Done All of it, nearly from the very beginning. He’s just like, ‘Oh my god, this is just my luck.’” 

Khan claimed that Khan deliberately reverse-engineered his play style to achieve this result. 

“He’s just like, ‘f— all of this, [but] I’m getting through it somehow,’” Khan continues. “And, ‘I’m going to observe and be annoyed at the things that go wrong and be sort of amused and bemused by the things that go right, but I’m not going to expect things to go right.’ That comes out in his playstyle.’”

Do you consider Ryan the Dead Island II a survivor? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!