I’m in a real weird place with Dying Light. I had always intended to get Techland’s parkour zombie survival game out of my backlog at some point, but its lackluster story has kept it permanently frozen on my to-play list. Now that I’ve come away from E3 having seen the great strides being made in Dying Light 2, I’m so warmed up to the sequel that I’m not sure I can get invested in the original.
You may not hear about Dying Light all that much, but the game was a “tremendous success” for Techland. According to DL2 lead designer Tymon Smektała, it has attracted some 13 million players. Three years after launch, there are “half a million players” per week still logging onto the servers.
With Dying Light 2, the studio hopes to keep what worked, fix what didn’t, and expand wherever necessary. For my purposes, the main takeaway is a more compelling approach to storytelling. The game is set “15 years since humanity lost its war with the infected.” You’ve just arrived in a fictional metropolis called The City, “probably the last human settlement still struggling to survive.”
Source: Destructoid Dying Light 2 makes me regret sleeping on the first game