Dying Light 2 has been out for over a month now, and while some are likely at the end of the game, many are probably not. Dying Light 2 is a huge open-world game, said to take 500 hours to fully complete, and it’s one that Techland looks to continue growing. Prior to release, Techland confirmed it would be providing five years of post-launch support for the game, and it stands to reason that the Dying Light 2 of today and the Dying Light 2 of 5 years from now may be completely different beasts.
Game ZXC recently spoke with Techland’s lead designer on Dying Light 2, Tymon Smektala, about what’s next for the game. Fans only have a few months before everything known thus far is out, but of course, there’s more coming. Interestingly enough, while Smektala could understandably only shed so much light on what’s coming next, it seems fans could have a big impact on that.
When talking about Techland’s approach to this 5-year plan, Smektala mentioned that there is a “very solid, very reasonable plan” for how the company will go into that. Part of it, as it is more detailed now and less detailed going forward, is how Techland wants “to see what players engage with most and what players get excited about most. We’ll reevaluate and tweak those changes and evolve those plans” in response to this feedback.
As Smektala later explained, the first content drop is planned to experiment with the game and garner fan feedback on content. This is something Techland intends to do even with tone, whether something is too goofy or perhaps too serious for Dying Light 2. Fan feedback like this is also something Techland is taking in already, with Smektala addressing several current fan requests:
“You can see some common themes appearing and then requests for some specific features. So, one of those things is, for example, New Game Plus. Another one is a higher difficulty mode. Definitely, those are the things we also have planned and we will try to deliver to players as quickly as possible. Yes, so this and also maybe like a photo mode, which is also on the table, and we are just thinking when we should introduce it and to what scope.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that any of these features will be here in the next Dying Light 2 update, for example, but it’s good to know that Techland has taken many of these requests into consideration already. It speaks well for future requests, as Dying Light 2 marches forward, and there’s nothing Techland wouldn’t consider, it seems, for the most part. As Smektala mentioned,
“I think that, in those five years, every request from the community, no matter how crazy, will be served from us, either by actually providing the requested feature or getting inspired by those requests and creating maybe something slightly different but still fulfilling the same needs of players.”
Indeed, Smektala mentioned that part of this plan was listening to fan feedback and respecting their time and investment in Dying Light 2. Because of this, it seems nothing that fans want is off the table. It’s hard to say, of course, what will make it—especially when and to what scope—but for fans asking for these features or more down the road, it’s clear that the 5-year plan for Dying Light 2 includes their feedback.
Dying Light 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. A Switch version is in development.
