Dying Light 2's Gut Feeling update now offers players more violent and bloody encounters with the open world's virals, among a number of other improvements and additions. This was all developed following community input, and Techland itself has promised to continue rolling out new updates to keep the game fresh and enjoyable for players, making them want to go back for more Dying Light 2.
Game ZXC recently spoke with Dying Light 2 franchise director Tymon Smektala on the early feedback on the Gut Feeling update, what Techland can do to keep the franchise going, if more original characters will make a return, and if the update was used to compete with the release of Dead Island 2, its genre rival. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: The Gut Feeling update is out, people are playing it. Can you tell me what it’s like to see it out?
A lot of satisfaction, fulfillment, and also from my side a lot of pride for what the team has achieved because we have really worked hard and focused a lot on this update. We have focused on combat mostly, not only, but mostly. And when it comes to combat, we chose two areas that we wanted to upgrade and enhance with this upgrade. The first one is physicality, and I would say this is the most important one where we really tried to take our physics to the next level. What we did is we rewrote the code that simulates how weapons are swung and what kind of forces are applied when they hit the enemy, and then based on that, we have worked on a physics model that simulates what should happen with the body of that enemy when he's hit.
The goal here was to give players tools to create a new set of emergent situations they can create in the game world by themselves. An example of what we were trying to achieve most is the example of you standing in front of a zombie on a rooftop. You run at him, you dropkick him, and he flies away, but then when he flies away and he hits an obstacle, then his leg can get broken or his head can get destroyed because he hits the obstacle with the head. But then if he flies and hits another group of zombies, some of those zombies will fall down to the ground. Some of them will stagger and fall down from the rooftop. And when they fall down, they might fall down on another group of zombies causing even more havoc.
I actually started getting a little bit uncomfortable talking about such gruesome things, but still, it's not the end of it because the other aspect of combat is brutality where we have enhanced our damage model a lot. A lot of new things are possible. You can, for example, swing at an enemy and when you hit him on the top of his head, you can cut off his scalp and see the brain inside. Maybe you cut the belly, and there are guts. It's a lot of very brutal, very graphic, very gruesome stuff, actually. I think it's better to experience that than just talk about it.
Because when you start talking about it, it starts feeling a little bit weird that you are hyping someone to do so many things, but it's cool. It's great to see that our community loves it. We have a lot of very tremendously positive comments from the community, from players, and from influencers. We are very proud of what we have achieved with this update. And of course, combat is just a part of it because it also has other elements. It's not only a pool, but it's also quite broad.
Q: Can you speak to the complexities of overhauling these combat and physics?
The simple answer is everything in game development is complex. I think that sometimes players would be surprised by how complex it is sometimes to just tweak one simple thing in the game. For gamers, they would like something improved in the game, and they say, “Hey, please just do it.” But they don't realize it. Usually, it takes a few people a couple of days to do that. One simple thing with something as robust and as multi-layered as our update this time around, it actually is complex. We started the work basically at the beginning of the year, right after we finished the work on the anniversary update that came live in late January. So it took us about three months – almost – to have this done.
The whole team worked on it. It was a challenge. It was an achievement. It was a monumental amount of work. But I think with focus, we managed to do it. I think what helped us is actually two things. The first thing is that we realized that this is the area of the game that our players would like to see enhanced, that they would like to see taken up to another level, and we always try to deliver to our fans. Maybe not everything is possible instantly, but still, we are consistent in making the game better.
Of course, as with any huge undertaking, what helps you is that if you get success at the start, the initial implementation of the brutality happened very quickly within maybe two weeks of work, and we already saw how big the potential is. Gear transmog happened again very quickly within a few days. We got traction. We felt like the wind under our wings, and it was kind of like the stars had aligned for us, definitely. We put in hard work and with some luck and some motivation from our community, we have managed to have this update, which I feel really enhances the game a lot.
Q: So we're talking about the gore, and players can dismember every type of zombie now. How much does this update – this gore and brutality – add to the feel of its overall combat for the game?
I think this is for the community to say, this is for the players to judge. I can't comment on it. It's hard for me to, and I look at this objectively, but looking at the comments that I read online, it went through the roof. I felt like a lot of people were saying that we have overdelivered. It's exciting. I hope that the next updates that we have in line – the one for parkour and night experience – will keep the same level of quality and the same level of robustness that we have with this one. I can only ask our players to keep their fingers crossed that this will happen.
Q: Could you talk about some examples of the Pilgrim Outpost and why you chose to implement this?
Dying Light, on the surface, is a AAA narrative game, so usually games like this, you play it, you enjoy the story, you finish the game, you put it on the shelf, and that's it. But I think we have proven with the first game, and we are using the same model with the second one, that you can make a game like this: if you keep providing meaningful updates to the game, the community will stay.
I don't want to compare us to Destiny or any other game as a service game, but that's the direction in which we are going. We want to have the longevity of Destiny. We want to have the longevity of Grand Theft Auto Online. We want to have the longevity of other games in that space.
Q: Talking about longevity, do you think, long-term, there's anything else that players will get out of these bounties?
Yes, so bounties are the way to achieve longevity. Now you have a purpose to go back to the game. Actually, it's not even weekly, it's each day because we have bounties daily and we have weekly bounties, which are bigger than that. For daily bounties, they differ in the complexity and effort required for players to complete them. For daily bounties, we're looking at a session that lasts about 30 minutes, but 30 minutes is with casual play where you don't focus on those bounties. Weekly bounties are about two hours, but again, if you are really dedicated, you can complete them quicker.
They are all over the place. We try to touch and use every system that we have in the game so some of them are about killing zombies, some of them dealing damage to them using specific means, and some of them are about interacting with our other systems, like even something as simple as modifying a weapon. There’s a bounty that asks you to modify a weapon. I might say, “Oh, wow, where's the challenge in that, where's the fun in that you just go and modify your weapon?” But actually to modify your weapon, you need to have resources for it. You need to have blueprints for it. For some players, it will be just that I log in, I modify the weapon because I have everything, but we hope they will still stay in the game and maybe complete the weekly ones.
But for other players, it actually can become an adventure where you will have to think of a way, how to get the resources and modify weapons. We're trying to touch every system, night experience, day experience, parkour, combat, everything is there. Currently, we have about 100 bounties in the game. We plan to extend this number as we move along. This is a system that will keep expanding and that will keep drawing players to the game over and over and over again.
Q: Another update in this is the transmog and the weapon crafting. How deeply do these updates impact the gameplay?
Transmog is something that is a very direct answer to the community's request. The community was asking us to have that kind of feature because they were facing the dilemma that every kind of RPG player knows where you have cool armor that has the best stats, but maybe looks a little shabby, a little rusty, and you have another one, which is like golden and you love it, but the stats aren’t there. What do you do? You have to choose between stats and aesthetics. We don't want our players to choose. Our players have told us that they don't want to choose. We have provided them with the gear transmog feature so if you get the one with the best stats, you can apply the cool visuals from other armor to this one.
Suddenly, you get a new piece of armor, which keeps the stats and the best looks. You can modify and customize the character as you want, even with weapons. I hope this will impact the game even more because how it works is that all over the world, there are blueprints that you can find for the weapons. I believe this will motivate a portion of our players to go out again, search for those blueprints, collect all of them, and then bring them back to craft master where they can craft their own weapons later.
What happens is they can either upgrade those blueprints, so this kind of builds another mini-game around upgrading those blueprints, but at the same time, this is also an alternative way for you to have a little bit more control over the weapons that you are getting. You don't need to resort to random drops in a chest from all around the world. You can just go to a craft master and create exactly the weapon that you want.
Q: What has been the early feedback for the Viral Rush event so far?
We felt that it might be a little bit controversial because it makes the game much more difficult. Now when you explore the city, you are getting swarmed by virals, so we felt that for some players, it might actually make the game a higher challenge than it should be, but thankfully we have an event switcher in the game. So if you don't like the event, you can just deactivate it and the game goes back to normal. I think for our hardcore players, this is something that actually makes sense. This is something that is a nice way of kind of changing the rules, adding something new to the game, and adding some new twists to the gameplay they know.
The feedback has been okay, and I think the cool thing is that if you participate in the event and complete the event goals, you can win an outfit that represents a character from the first game, Rahim, a very important character in the first game. It's also a nice show back to the first game for our dedicated players that have been with us since the first game.
Q: Is there anything else that you can add about the significance of adding the Rahim bundle?
This is something that we have realized that there are tons of Dying Light 1 players, and they would love to move on to the next game and experience the adventure that Dying Light 2 currently is and what it will become in the next few years, but it's also very hard for them to let go of the characters they love from the first ones. So what we are doing is we are bringing back those characters from the first game. We did Brecken, Rais, and Crane with the anniversary. Now it's Rahim. I'm not saying there will not be more. Maybe there will be more, but like I don't want to spoil anything at this stage, so for now, it's Rahim.
It's good to see people so connected with the game that they’re getting excited and nostalgic about the character that they met in a game and had some virtual conversations with eight years ago. That's really amazing to see, and I think it also shows us how strong the first game was and how great of a foundation for the whole Dying Light series was.
Q: Going back a little bit, some players have noted that the Gut Feeling update came close to the release of Dead Island 2. Is that a competitive move or was that simply a coincidence?
We announced back in January that we want to have this kind of cadence in our releases. We knew roughly when Dead Island2 would be released, but we didn't know the exact date. They have also changed the date. They moved it a little to not coincide with Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, so it’s from both sides, we have kind of clashed in the same week, but I think it's good for the zombie gamers. If you are interested in zombie games, this period is the best for you. It’s almost like the holidays. I hope players enjoy it.
I also think that both games are great, and both games approach the topic in a different way. Even though on the surface, if you just look at the screenshots, you might say, “Oh, they're familiar. They are similar. They're the same picture.” They're actually not. I think our game has the day and night cycle, which really changes the rules of the games – almost two games in one. Now we have parkour, which allows you to traverse the world with ease, and basically go anywhere you want without any limitations. We have combat, which is very agile, very action-like, whereas there's a lot of movement, a lot of creativity, a lot of emergent situations. I think like we know what our strengths are, we know what makes us unique, and we highlighted this to the players.
Q: Is there anything else that you'd like to add?
One message that maybe wasn't really direct with this update, but something that I need to be said is that Dying Light 2, similarly to the first game, is a game that keeps enhancing and will keep enhancing as you move along. I hope we make players realize that they can expect constant updates as we move forward. There's no stopping this. We are brave enough to look at all the core systems, enhance them, add to them, but also add some new stuff that we can also surprise players with our offerings. Because back during the anniversary we announced some features that will go into this update, and we actually delivered them but there was also a little bit more.
I think there should always be this expectation of a surprise that we might pull out of our sleeves like an ace card. Dying Light 2 as a game, as a series, is something that can take many years, constantly be fresh, and constantly receive something new from us developers. And it’s always based on community feedback, so it's a good game to focus on and make your game because it's a living thing that keeps expanding in the right direction.
[END]
Dying Light 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.