'Dying Light 2' “Is The First Game of Its Type”

Ever since it was first revealed this past E3, Techland's Dying Light 2 has looked ambitious. Not only in comparison to its predecessor, but compared alongside any other game. The more the Polish developer talked about the game, the more it became clear Techland was looking to set a new bar for open-world storytelling. That said, it should perhaps come as no surprise that producer on the game Kornel Jaskula pitches the sequel as the first of its type, which is a very bold distinction to put on your game, but one you can tell the team working on it believes.

"We believe that Dying Light 2 is the first game of its type," said Jaskula while talking to GamesRadar. "It's going to be a game where your choices will have genuine consequences, from how the world looks, to how the game plays, to the events that occur throughout the story. This is an open-world game where you should treat the narrative as a gameplay mechanic."

The producer continues:

"Everything can change. The state of the world is always the result of the decisions that you make. The choices you make allow you to make your own version of this city."

If that sounds a little vague to you, Jaskula says to think of the game's open world and narrative structure as a LEGO set with no instructions. There's an end goal, but it's up to the player how they get there.

"The player does have an overall goal in Dying Light 2, but it's up to you to decide how you get to it," said Jaskula. "It's like having LEGO bricks and being given the goal of building a house. We give you the bricks but not the original set – you don't have the instructions that can take you through it step-by-step. You only have the goal and it's up to you to decide how that house will look by the very end – but it is going to be a house. It's up to the player to figure out how the bricks can connect, how they influence one another, and how the building and its interior takes shape…"

As you can see, player choice and how it impacts the world is a big theme in Dying Light 2, however, unlike some other games, the choices made in Techland's new game aren't binary, nor is the consequence of them immediately noticeable.

"Changes aren't immediate," said the producer. "They can take some time to manifest because they aren't binary changes… when we showed how the vista of the city changed [in the E3 2018 demo] it wasn't based on any one decision, there were many decisions that the player would have to make leading up to that moment and each of those decisions can create something different."

As you would expect from this type of game design, a players' world will be unique to them, which is a perk that Techland hopes leads to players either playing multiple times to see the game's different content that they missed because they made a certain decision, or at least talk to other players about their world or drop by their world via co-op.

Dying Light 2 is in development for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. At the moment, a release date hasn't been revealed, but the game is expected to release sometime this year. For more coverage on the highly-anticipated sequel, click here.

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