Before Dying Light’s early 2015 launch, we had seen first-person parkour in games. Surely, everyone remembers Mirror’s Edge. Yet, Dying Light added something fresh with its zombie-filled open world and greater stakes. At the time, it was ambitious. Risky, even. Clearly the risk paid off. To many, Dying Light is one of this console generation’s better sleeper hits, beloved titles that sale reasonably, but fail to make the commercial splash they deserve. Such positive reception was especially a boon for Techland. Apparently, it gave the team the confidence necessary to be even more ambitious and believe strongly in their ideas.
This is according to a Q&A session OnlySP sat in on during E3 2019. One developer, who was unnamed in the OnlySP article, explained, “From the first game, what we got was confidence to believe in our ideas.” Dying Light’s success boosted the team’s confidence, which then spilled into the development of Dying Light 2. With nervousness gone, Techland was able to take its ambition a step further with the sequel.
Before the release of the first one, we were really, really nervous to see how the game would be received. We tried to do a couple of different things: we had open-world parkour, which basically allows you to climb anything and anywhere; there was the focus on melee combat. These were new ideas back then, so we didn’t know how it would be received by the community, but because the reception was so warm—it was a business success, it was a critical success—we got confidence to follow our own ideas and our own instincts.
With Dying Light 2, the team’s instincts may prove successful once more, especially since few things have changed between the original and the sequel. In the follow-up, Techland is putting greater emphasis on player-choice. It won’t just come down to dialogue trees and main story decision-making, either. The player’s choices throughout the experience will actively determine how the world of Dying Light 2 evolves.
Dying Light 2 is expected to launch in spring 2020, but does not yet have a firm release date.
[Source: OnlySP]
