It’s been nearly a year since the release of Dying Light 2. The game just received its second Community Update, which is chock-full of new features or improvements and adds DLSS 3 support on PC. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, though, as developer Techland has an ambitious plan to take Dying Light 2 to an even higher level through its 2023 and beyond roadmap.
Wccftech discussed all that, including the upcoming 2023 open world DLC, with Franchise Director Tymon Smektala.
One year in, how successful was Dying Light 2 compared to your estimates?
I think the release actually exceeded our expectations. Dying Light 2 was an amazing success on the day it was released. It was something that really overwhelmed us. This also created some problems for us because we suddenly realized that the huge number of people playing negatively influenced our co-op system.
It was a very short moment of complete amazement. But then we realized that we needed to get back to work because there were a ton of players, millions just in the first few days, who loved our game and we needed to improve it.
Over the past year, we have released a lot of new content, free content, and one DLC. This represented our approach for the first year, which was a lot of experiments, different projects catering to different types of players, trying to see where who are the players are buying,
We have learned a lot from those experiences. We have heard a lot of feedback and many requests, with players pointing to the areas they feel we should upgrade in our subsequent Dying Light 2 updates.
We are entering the second year of Dying Light 2 knowing way, way more about our game, our players, and ourselves than a year ago. I think we’re very well prepared to handle the next year and take the game to a higher level.
The upcoming updates will add a lot of new features and improvements made to some of the core systems of the game, combat, parkour, and the night experience. We’re also working on the next DLC, which will be open world, narrative-driven, and focused on the Infected.
Would you say the updates scheduled to hit Dying Light 2 in 2023 were mainly driven by user feedback?
Yes and no. On the 2023 roadmap, we have new features we came up with ourselves. There’s definitely stuff coming that we feel will address some of the community requests and expectations, but maybe in a way that’s not directly as the community expressed it.
I think we have managed to come up with some ideas that will surprise our players because I believe that the element of being surprised by the game that you like is very important to keep you interested in it. But at the same time, we will provide some tweaks and updates based on community requests.
The first update will bring many quality of life improvements to the core Dying Light 2 experience. That’s just the first stage because we also have another update with some additional tweaks planned for a little later. We will look at the end game. We are introducing Legend levels, which our players have asked for a very long time. They will now be able to take the progression further after completing the main skill tree.
In the first game, it was quite easy to cheat the system on PCs, tweaking some of the game data to suddenly present yourself as a Level 250 character or something. We have taken measures to kind of limit that, to not allow for those levels to be tweaked so easily, because we understand that this is an endgame leveling system. It needs to represent the players’ actual commitment to the game.
Another thing that we will be doing perhaps a couple of months later is a new round of physics improvements. We want to make combat more brutal and physical. We are already doing some of that stuff with the first update, especially focusing on the combat with Biters, our most common enemy.
Again, this is something that players have asked for a lot. They want to feel even bigger physicality, even bigger realism of a mace hitting a zombie on its head. We will also be delivering the gear transmog system, another feature that’s requested. We have found a very cool way of delivering not just that but also some additional ways to interact with players, gear, and weapons.
The next update will offer players a new way to play our parkour. What we did with Dying Light 2 made it more seamless, but because of that, maybe even more casual than in the first game. So we want to bring a little bit of that extra realism from the first game. This is the goal of our next update.
At the same time, we’ll be looking at our night experience again. It’s another area where we made the system a little bit more accessible in the base game. We made it easier and less scary to play during the night.
But then we’ve heard from our most dedicated players from the first game that they want to experience the hardcore stuff in Dying Light 2 as well, so we will be bringing that back.
At some point this year, we are also releasing the new DLC we are working on. It’s currently quite advanced in production and will see the continuation of the main character’s story.
Does the current 2023 roadmap also include changes or tweaks to the main story and quests of Dying Light 2?
There is nothing like that on the road map. We will be doing some tweaks to the main story along the way, but as you can imagine, this is the most complex thing to change.
When you change one element of the story, then suddenly, it becomes a problem later in the story. It may require you to invite all of the voice actors to re-record their lines, for example, if you want to change something, so nothing like that is on the roadmap.
The community is also interested in knowing if the improved grabs will come with this next Dying Light 2 update.
Yes. We took a step in that direction with the last update, where we made Biters are being more aggressive, but it also means that we asked our players to start playing Dying Light 2 in a completely different way because they weren’t used to this level of intensity coming from fighters.
And we heard those voices. This is an example of us listening to our community. It’s easiest to say that it will rebalance things, but it’s not actually about rebalancing. They will be grabbing you, but definitely, you will have way more control over those grabs.
If you just stand next to them, you will be grabbed. But if you’re moving around in combat, you will not be grabbed. We have tweaked the Biters logic. We have tweaked players’ attacks so they can cancel the grabs from the Biters. We have also added a new skill or maybe upgraded one of the existing skills, allowing you to instant heat break from a Biters grab.
Late last year, you also added mod support for the PC version of Dying Light 2. How is that going so far?
Along with the mod editor on PC, we have also started a competition for our players to, like, get a try at creating new maps and new things to play in the Dying Light universe.
And it’s a very successful competition. The funny thing is that we had a lot of maps for the competition in the last few days, but yesterday and today, it seems that people are just dropping them like crazy. It’s really amazing.
We believe that’s because the creators didn’t want to expose their ideas to other creators. We plan to go through all the competition entries shortly, looking at them, playing them, and trying to see what’s interesting and which one of those creations is the strongest.
I have already played some of them. Sometimes, even as a game developer, you look at those things and ask yourself, ‘How was it done? How was the creator even able to do that?’
I think a lot of the maps can already be played by the players. There’s a lot of very nice stuff there. Of course, as with all user generated content, it usually takes time before it reaches a level of completion and quality that you could call it almost like a new level. But I’m already seeing that several of those creators are quite dedicated, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they will see the creation till the end, putting the effort to make the final product something they can be proud of.
It worked well for Dying Light, I think it will work well for Dying Light 2. The whole package will grow because we have a team of people working on and supporting this, and we’ll add new features to the tool. We are thinking about ways how to make those maps more easily accessible to all of our players.
Then, maybe we’ll even invite some of those creators to join us, be a part of our family, and help us develop and take Dying Light even further with their ideas and dedication.
Let’s say that a mod is so great that you decide to bring it into the actual Dying Light 2 game. Would it be possible?
Of course, we are thinking about this and working on it. There’s no announcement at this time, but it’s something that we would like to make happen at some time.
I think we can say, and I hope this will be validated by the community, but we try to be a developer with very close ties with the fans. We have direct contact with many content creators, even influencers and modders. These are extremely talented people who bring their passion and their motivation to the world that we created and they enrich the Dying Light experience, even the unofficial mods.
This is something that we support and fully appreciate. It’s people spending their own time, their passion, their creativity on our game. You can’t deny this dedication. So we are supporting that. We want this to be exposed in the game, available, and properly communicated. We will spend our efforts in making sure that this happens.
Do you have a date for when the mods will come to consoles?
I don’t want to say specifically. This is actually quite a complex topic. It’s easy to do on PC, on control on consults the like.
The environment is way more controlled by the platform holders, so there are a couple of additional legal and technical gates you have to go through. It’s not entirely in our hands, but I can surely say that this is something we want to happen. We want to have it in Dying Light 2. We want to have those maps that our community is creating easily accessible in the game on every platform.
Today’s update also adds NVIDIA DLSS 3 support to Dying Light 2. What’s your take on this technology? How does it improve your game?
Sometimes the numbers are amazing. With an open world game as complex as ours, the frame rates vary between different regions. It depends on the complexity of the scene, the number of meshes, the number of polygons, and the logic that’s present in that specific location. But in some areas, we have seen positive frame rate per second spikes which are double or even triple the previous numbers. This is really crazy stuff! I’m almost sweating here because I’m not a technical person, so for me, all of that is just like magic. Like, a group of magicians from NVIDIA came and met with a group of magicians from Techland, they did this little Sabbath and out of it, we got this crazy increase in frames per second.
I’m not a gamer who is overtly focused on technical stuff and specifications, but just playing the game and just seeing that increase and seeing how this increases the fluidity, the responsiveness of everything; this is really something important. I hope it will be appreciated by the Dying Light 2 players who have a hardware setup that supports this feature.
Usually, when we play at our studio, we have a little FPS counter visible at all times to maybe catch frame rate dips. When you’re playing on the PCs with DLSS 3 enabled, then you really see humongous increases. So if you are capable of using that, then I think you will appreciate the changes.
In the past of the Dying Light franchise, you also tried some PvP stuff, such as with the Bad Blood standalone game. Are you still evaluating ways to reintroduce PvP to Dying Light in the future?
Of course, the thinking is still there. We’re not focusing on this right now, however. There’s nothing PvP on the roadmap. But I can also say that we are still thinking about how to make PVP meaningful in our world and how to make it even more exciting than all of our previous tries on the topic.
Our game is mostly melee-based, which is quite different from most shooters. For this to really make sense, you would have to emulate a lot of the blocking, the attacking… This is different than something like Call of Duty.
So this is one of the difficulties that we are facing. But yes, we are considering more online options, including PvP. Yes, we are experimenting with different approaches and takes, but this is not our focus right now. We’re ensuring the community is happy with the direction we are taking Dying Light 2. The community is expressing other directions than PvP right now.
But I’m sure that at some point, when all of the current requests are delivered, we’ll see Reddit pages and Discord channels full of requests for PvP. And I hope we’ll be ready to give users what they want when they ask for that.
Dying Light 2 was Techland’s first self-published game, correct? How did that go?
It was a great learning experience. It’s not that we were completely new to this, having been a part of the game industry for many, many years. Techland is a company that has 30 years of history. A huge part of those 30 years has been spent on game development and being a part of the business, so we have a lot of connections and a lot of partners all around the world.
But of course, whenever you do something for the first time, even if you kind of see other people doing it, it’s not the same. And when you spend time discussing this with your partners, you learn a lot of new things. I think we have learned that lesson quite well. We have passed the exam.
Of course, we see some things that we could improve for any next project like this. But I think generally, as a studio, we are very happy with what happened. Dying Light is our IP, our royal treasure. We look at it with the highest level of esteem, respect, and understanding that this needs to be handled in the best possible way.
Self-publishing Dying Light 2 also allowed us to make sure that we retained full control over everything that was happening with the game. We have achieved that goal and learned a lot while doing so. The experiences coming from this project will be beneficial for the whole company for many years.
Before Dying Light, you worked on another zombie game called Dead Island. The sequel is finally coming out in a few months after a very troubled development phase. How does it feel? Are you worried due to competition, or are you just happy to see your former creation come back to life?
Of course, in business terms, it’s competition. But to be honest, I think that you wouldn’t find a person at Techland that wouldn’t like to play Dead Island because it’s our baby. It’s the game we created and we are extremely interested in what the release will bring. Knowing how difficult it is to make games, I have nothing but fingers crossed for the developers of Dead Island 2, and I hope they succeed. I believe that Dying Light has its own identity so even if, on some level, it is a competition, we are doing a couple of things quite differently. There is space for several games within the same genre with a similar style as long as they stand out.
So nothing but good luck to the developers of Dead Island 2. We know that the development was extremely difficult. It started a long time ago and was handled by a couple of studios, so I hope the game will not suffer in the end.
Honestly, I’m extremely curious about the final product. At Techland, we are as interested as anyone else in Dead Island 2. Once again, nothing but goodwill and support. It’s difficult to make a great game, so I hope it all goes well for Dambuster studios and Dead Island 2 turns out to be a good game.
Thank you for your time.
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