Dying Light 2 Stay Human was released on February 4th with mostly positive reviews and huge player numbers, especially compared to the first Dying Light. It is still one of the highest scoring games Game informant reviewed this year, get 9.5 out of 10and in less than 24 hours after release, Dying Light 2’s PC player count has surpassed Dying Light’s all-time high.
Overall, Dying Light 2 is a huge success for Techland, which has been working on the sequel for years. However, achieving that success is not easy. After an indefinite delay in 2020, Gamer released a new report that paints a picture of lack of leadership, lack of direction and atmosphere of demoralization at the studio. Less than a year ago, the studio released a statement announcing that it had parted ways with narrative designer Chris Avellone after… allegations of sexual harassment surfaced.
With the game now out and in the hands of players, ideally Techland, will continue to play the game for at least five years the studio has been planning content for the zombie parkour titleThe team passed from the excitement of pre-boot suspense and anticipation to a state of excitement.
“I think people are really happy that we can release the game,” said Dying Light 2 lead game designer Tymon Smektała. Game informant. “The game was very well received. We announced that in the first weekend it reached over 3 million players and that is an amazing number. As you can imagine, the number is only growing and it has come a long way. ”
Smektała says Dying Light 2 is a difficult project due to its sheer size and complexity. It’s not just a sequel to 2015’s surprise hit Dying Light. have received support from Techland for more than seven yearsbut it needs to raise the ante in every way.
Tymon Smektała, Lead Game Designer of Dying Light 2
“It really took our best from it,” Smektała said, “but we are glad it is out there and we are nurturing the positive feedback the community has given us,” said Smektała.
He said the team took a break after its debut but has now returned to working on post-launch content. As mentioned above, Techland has DLC plans 5 years after launch for Dying Light 2, but Smektała says Game informant that the team planned to create and add more content to that timeline than was announced. It was never a question that Techland supported the game for years after launch, but a “five-year” figure was not finalized until late last year.
“There are so many reasons why we feel [supporting the game extensively after launch] is important,” said Smektała. “One of the reasons is that I think we realized we had invented or could discover a formula that would really benefit your community and work with your community and support it. supporting your community… is extremely beneficial to you as a game developer. And as publishers, we are very fortunate to be able to own Dying Light and develop Dying Light as our own. [intellectual property]. So… both sides of our organization are supported and benefit from our long-term game support. ”
When the team decided that it would greatly support Dying Light 2 post-launch, they sometimes felt frozen, Smektała said. But it’s equally encouraging because the team knows that if the content is there, the community will show up, just like they did with Dying Light. It also encouraged Techland to increase staffing, which ultimately created a studio better prepared for the long, Viral-filled road ahead.
“We have grown a lot as an organization and as a studio,” says Smektała. “As a result, we understand our craft better, but we also invited a lot of new people to join our team – people with expertise in experience from different studios and different projects – because So I think we’re better prepared to handle larger projects like this. ”
After the launch date, Smektała said the biggest surprise for Techland was how quickly some players were able to spend 100, 200, and even 300 hours into the game. Perhaps surprisingly, requests for new content from people who have played a lot in Dying Light 2 are so quick. Some of the biggest requests the team have heard include a new Game Plus mode, Photo Mode, and additional difficulty levels.
“Those are definitely things that are currently on the table and are being worked on,” he said. “I don’t want to go into too many specifics here… but very quickly, people will start to see those things being added in one form or another to the game.”
One challenge that Techland, and ultimately every studio that finds success, is facing with its post-launch plans is finding a way to accommodate not just this part of the player base or that part, but ideally is every part of it. Smektała says you have to think about everything and the types of content that will meet the different needs of an entire “very diverse” community. That’s what the next five years of Dying Light 2 are, but for now, Techland is very focused on Year One.
“We have revealed a high-level roadmap for the first year, but as players will soon discover, we will add more to that first-year roadmap..and we will invite them to actually. Discovering more content will drop in the first year,” says Smektała.
Roughly speaking, he said that first-year content will include some content focused on online play, some focused on single-player content, and some focused on the game’s story. Other drops will deal with foundational elements of the game, like the new parkour demos added to the game in the update, while others will be about melee-focused combat. Smektała hopes all of this and everything else planned for Dying Light 2 is, above all, surprising. He likens the team’s hopes for DLC to Forrest Gump’s popular “chocolate box” line in that, with Dying Light 2’s DLC, you never know what you’ll get.
“We don’t want to fall into this repeating pattern where players will know what to expect from us,” he said. “Having said for example, the first story DLC that we were promised, I’ve seen a lot of speculation online about what it will be and I can confidently say that they’re… not up to the mark. .”
Anyone who has finished Dying Light 2 knows that its story ends with some definitive choices. Those choices are up to the player, of course, but it leaves protagonist Aiden and his allies and enemies in some interesting places, especially when you consider where to go with the DLC plot. Now, the team is overcoming that challenge by developing narrative content that happens “on par with the main events.”
“At some point we will actually start adding in events that happen at the end of the game,” Smektała said. “We have some ideas. In theory, when they’re rolled out now, it looks promising, but for sure, this will be a challenge. ”
Despite the challenges the team faces, Smektała says the word he uses to describe everyone’s feeling is “excitement”. The excitement of the game’s launch, the excitement as it resonates with fans, and the excitement of what’s to come in Dying Light 2.
“We really can’t wait to see people interacting with these and some of the ideas we have because some of the things we’re adding are pretty unique,” says Smektała. “Some of them are we bet on ideas that might be a bit out of the ordinary. We’ll see what the community thinks, but I feel really positive about that. All of this will happen within the next few weeks, as I said, a few more weeks and will be in the hands of the players within the next one to three months. “
