Dying Light 2 will feature a massive open world, one supposedly four times the size of the original release. Yet, Techland’s mission was not merely to craft a larger world for players to explore. The team also had its sights set on making said world far more immersive. One of the studio’s developers believes this should be the same across the board. With a new console generation closing in, the focus shouldn’t be on taking advantage of new technology to make open worlds larger. Instead, developers should strive to ensure they are better.
During an interview for the January 2020 issue of Xbox: The Official Magazine, Dying Light 2’s Creative Director, Tymon Smektala, expressed his thoughts on game worlds. As he sees it, the expansion of these worlds isn’t a problem. Current-gen hardware can already generate unbelievably huge environments. For Techland, next-gen technology will allow the team to upgrade performance. The number of NPCs in a world and their varying behaviors are two examples of things Smektala would like to see improved upon.
He shared the following with Xbox: The Official Magazine,
I’m not sure they will get bigger. I think what will change is the fidelity of everything. I don’t think people really need bigger worlds, they need worlds that are of better quality and that they feel more immersed in what surrounds them. It’s not that difficult for the current-generation to create huge worlds by streaming as you play. So you go somewhere and it loads a little chunk around you and another chunk and so on. So you can create extremely big worlds that don’t really impact the performance.
What impacts performance is the number of NPCs you see around you, the variety of them and how they behave, and the number of animations. The improvements in the next-generation will allow us to go further in that direction. This is basically our mission as a studio, we want to create first-person open world games with high-fidelity graphics and with high-fidelity immersion, where you feel like you are really there.
How much of this Techland may accomplish with Dying Light 2 currently remains a mystery. We’ll know soon enough, though. Dying Light 2 will launch sometime in spring 2020. However, a recent report, which remains unsubstantiated, claims the sequel may not hit stores until June.
[Source: Xbox: The Official Magazine via Wccftech]
