I have an hp pavilion notebook with ubuntu 17.10, when I was using windows, I could run dead island. Under linux on the same machine the game crashes at the first wait screen. If for example I run the game with launch options -nologos -safemode I get the Palm screen, the black screen with wait message and then the game just crash. I also noticed that the game does not make any configuration file since the folder settings: /DI/out/Settings/ doesn't exist. I double checked the integrity of game files. I can provide also the crash.log file (very long log file) since I can't figue out the issue by myself.
To fix a glx issue I had in dota 2 I had to sudo apt-get install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 dota 2 works fine, dead island isn't.
Found the solution:
use mesa at version 18 at least.
for example from here:
https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers
the game works