DY ING LIGHT 2

Lead game designer Tymon Smektała talks zombies and parkour

Format PS4 ETA 2019 Pub Techland Publishing Dev Techland

Techland’s Dying Light introduced us to the rather surprising combination of zombies and parkour. Acrobatic motion made sense when avoiding hordes of the undead at street level, and led to some nail-biting, desperate chases. The sequel could be the most thrilling zombie game yet. But how?

OPM: What’s moved on with the parkour system for the sequel? Tymon Smektała: The goal for Dying Light 2 is to create the ultimate parkour game – with the emphasis on “game”. We’re very proud of what we achieved within the first one. […] To repeat the age-old mantra of “easy to learn, hard to master”, that’s something we want to achieve with Dying Light 2. If you want, you can traverse easily using just one basic move, one basic button, as in the first game. But as you earn new skills that increase your moveset you’ll start noticing various pieces of the environment which you can use to travel faster, more effectively, and with greater finesse.

The environment, the cityscape, also evolves as you progress through the game, so this opens up new opportunities for you. This way you are encouraged to constantly change your parkour flow, and if you nail it right it really adds a lot to the excitement. And when you start connecting these parkour skills with various combat moves you get flooded with adrenaline. The rush is addictive, I’m warning you!

OPM: Are you developing RPG gameplay for the sequel? TS: Yes, there’s an RPG engine running under the hood of the game. Each of your actions – be it parkour, combat, things related to exploration – feed into your XP points, which in turn allow you to get new skills that give you new ways to solve problems you encounter in the game.

OPM: In what ways are you improving the storytelling? TS: It’s a new beast altogether. We call the structure of our game a narrative sandbox, and there’s a lot that stands behind the name. So as you play the game you’ll face many difficult decisions, and the choices you’ll make will shape the narrative and the world around you.

The consequences of your actions work on three levels: narrative, systemic, and gameplay. So the first one is easy to explain: you make those choices and they change the narrative; perhaps an important character dies, or a whole settlement gets destroyed, or a new group of survivors appears. These things are their own stories, but they also feed into an overall narrative, sometimes dramatically. Then we have the systemic consequences, and that’s a layer where the game reacts to your doings according to the rules of the world. So for example there’s a faction, The Scavengers, who want to rebuild the city. If you help them take over one neighbourhood of the city, you can expect that in time they’ll rebuild all of the installations that are in it, like a bridge, for example.

And the last one is perhaps the most unexpected for the player, but also the juiciest. Some decisions (and there are actually a lot of them) bring new gameplay elements and features to the game, which change how you play the game. […] This gives another meaning to the narrative sandbox concept – by your choices you actually shape the world around you, the sandbox space the game takes place in. OPM: What do you mean by Modern Dark Ages? TS: It’s a theme that connects all level of the game: narrative, visuals, music, and design. So it’s quite easy to grasp – the civilisation as we know it is gone and the humanity has gone back to brutal, primal Dark Ages. This means betrayal, intrigue, desperate struggle to survive, but the remains of what was before is still there, and serves as a backdrop for all of this. The juxtaposition of Dark Age themes with modern scenery and materials is something that makes the feeling of loss strike harder. So, for example, we looked at medieval illnesses like the black death and leprosy when we designed our Infected. The weapons you use are medieval-like axes and maces, but made from plastic and metal. The malls look like fortresses.

OPM: Can you explain a little more about the combat, and how it mixes with parkour? TS: Combat is one of the areas where we took everything people liked about that feature in the first game – the brutality of it, the creativity of combat – and added completely new layers of depth to it. This time around combat is way more tactical, with a greater significance of various player tools: parkour attacks, interactive environment, throwables, and combat skills. Each encounter is a challenge, a puzzle for you to solve, but you have plenty of ways to find your own solution.

“HUMANITY HAS GONE BACK TO THE BRUTAL, PRIMAL DARK AGES.”