While Dead Island may not have entirely lived up to the hype created by the game's award-winning teaser trailer, the first person action zombocalypse title went on to sell over 1 million copies - despite widespread reports of game breaking glitches at launch (encountered in our review).

As a result, it's no surprise to hear that not only is a film adaptation on the way (who could resist the rich Dead Island story and stable of complex characters?[sarcasm]), it sounds as though Techland and developer Deep Silver are already preparing for a potential sequel to the title.

According to a report from Siliconera, Techland (the game's Poland-based publisher) has already filed a U.S. trademark for the title, Dead World.

The story implications are obvious, the Banoi island outbreak has reached the mainland - and all hell has broken loose around the world. Assuming the report is accurate and Dead World is actually the sequel to Dead Island, which seems incredibly likely - given the wordplay in the title - it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to assume that the Dead World story will feature globe-trotting protagonists that battle zombies in a variety of diverse locales.

Dead World is an obvious evolution of the primary concept, as gamers will no doubt expect more variety and larger sandboxes in the sequel. Dead Island presented a confined storyline that relied heavily on the survival elements (scarce resources, melee combat, etc) - as a result, it'll be interesting to see how the gameplay is affected by a larger-scale storyline. It'd be much harder to justify the minimalist combat approach of the game in a big city environment - where, no doubt, more resources would be available for the player to unitize.

The Left 4 Dead series was able to offer very different experiences because of its self-contained B Movie-inspired levels - so weapon scarcity as well as the various gameplay experiences weren't dictated by a single story line. As a result, the developers could do a swamp level, a sewer level, etc - without having to justify the settings with a connected storyline.

If Dead World is a real thing and the developers stay true to the gameplay established in the first title, it'll definitely be interesting to see how they take advantage of a larger batch of environments - without undermining the game's core mechanics.

Follow me on Twitter@ benkendrick and let us know where in the world you would like to fight-off hordes of zombies?

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Dead World hasn't been officially announced yet but we'll keep you posted as we hear more.

Source: Siliconera