As if it weren't already clear that the world is not desperately short of F2P MOBAs, and that dressing a game in the clothes of a known brand isn't attractive enough to players, another branded arena 'em up is closing.

Dead Island: Epidemic [official site], a MOBA-y spin-off from the open-world zombie-slaying FPS-RPG, will close next month, publishers Deep Silver have announced. The game will never have left open beta testing.

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If you've missed word of Dead Island: Epidemic before today, it is - deep breath - a free-to-play multiplayer action hack and slash arena game. It's pursuing a cartoony look and feel and, from a trailer voiceover, it's making no bones about trying to be funny (although I hope the game itself aims a little higher than a silly voice).

There's a little more info on this kinda-sorta-maybe-MOBA in a post we ran all the way back in June, although details will have changed since then. Epidemic has just reached open beta and there's a new trailer to celebrate.

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I had not particularly noted Dead Island: Epidemic's passage into Early Access. I'd seen enough games chasing the dream of League of Legends and Dota 2's success with only a few small new idea. And it had the temerity to coin its own cutesy genre name, Zombie Online Multiplayer Battle Arena! However, after watching a new gameplay trailer explain what it's up to, I'm at the very least interested. Not enough to pay for the beta of a game that'll be free-to-play at launch, mind.

While the majority of MOBAs (do I still need to explain this dreadful name?) seem to mostly duplicate LoL or Dota, Dead Island: Epidemic takes their ideas of per-match progression and slap them into something a bit more like Diablo III with a sizeable PvE side.

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Same-y MOBAs that can't quite manage the raw mechanical majesty of League of Legends and Dota 2 are an epidemic. So how do we cure that pestilence of painful mediocrity? Well, Techland and Stunlock Studios are suggesting we fight an epidemic with an epidemic - a Dead Island: Epidemic, to be precise. It ups the ante with another of the gaming industry's more rampant diseases (zombies) but also puts some fresh meat on the genre's bones with a three-team dynamic and more open maps. Also ramshackle weapons galore, because that is - in the parlance of our time - how Dead Island do.

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My fingers still feel a deep sense of slithering, shivering wrong in the pits of their tiny finger souls when they type out the words "Dead Island MOBA," but here we are. Dead Island Epidemic is happening because Deep Silver's so obsessed with zombies on islands that I think it wants to create an actual, factual epidemic of Dead Island (and Dead-Island-like) games. If that is indeed the case, it's well on its way, and Epidemic is without a doubt furthest off the previously established map. On the upside, it's being developed by Stunlock Studios, the talented team behind the Quinns-approved Bloodline Champions. Also, there's crafting and you capture points all over the map instead of dragging your weary bones through countless base-busting wars of attrition. Other highly unexpected features include zombies, zombies, and also zombies.

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Dead-Island-meets-MOBA might sound like an outlandish pairing, but between the time it took me to write that headline and finish this sentence, it's all clicked into place. The two are exactly alike. MOBAs are, after all, everywhere, and each new series to be bitten by the battle arena bug begets a horde of lane-shambling brothers and sisters. I'm not knocking the genre or anything (LoL and DOTA 2 are both magnificent, among many others), but I worry that we might be coming up on a saturation point. But hey, if anything, Dead Island: Epidemic is proof that we're not quite there yet. I mean, how has no one paired MOBAs and zombies - the two most overdone staples of the current gaming era - yet? How did it take so long?

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