Dying Light 2 Here Comes The Sun

Techland Offered Us the Opportunity to Take a Behind-the-scenes Look at Dying Light 2… and We Jumped at the Chance

One day, we will look back upon the last decade and come to realise that the greatest trick developers ever pulled was in convincing players that they had any agency over the virtual worlds that they inhabit.

Our fascination with even the most rudimentary inclusion of choice and consequence metrics makes complete sense; we feel empowered when we feel as if we are in control, be it over the direction of a branching narrative or the characters that populate them. But, the truth is, many of the choices that we make in so many videogames are binary. Pick between a thinly veiled Option A and Option B to immediately receive a reward or response. Basic morality systems leave us to deliberate over the concept of right versus wrong in an arena that is free of any real consequence. Systems bend around colour-coded sliders, having only the most tangential impact on the direction of a story or the way in which a game is played. There has to be another way, right? Techland believes that there is.

If you listen to Dying Light 2’s producer Kornel Jaskula tell it, the studio has one hell of a pitch for the future of open-world sandbox design. “We believe that Dying Light 2 is the first game of its type. 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.”