Dying Light 2 update
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Dying light 2 is about to celebrate its first birthday, and instead of demanding gifts, developer Techland is giving us, the players, something: glorious updates. The team sets out to revolutionize the deadly nights of the open-world zombie game. And I, for one, couldn’t be more excited.
“The plan for 2023 is to focus on delivering what the community needs and expects,” Dying light 2franchise director Tymon Smektala told us. “We are ending the experimentation phase and trying different things. We now know what our community wants.”
This year looks packed Dying light 2 content, as a new DLC was hinted at in the anniversary live stream (opens in new tab) along with battle system upgrades that will “add physicality and more brutality and be even more immersive than it already is,” says Smektala. The increased brutality will affect every aspect of Dying light 2.
Lights out
One of Dying Light’s most memorable features is its day and night cycle. UV light weakens the zombies in this apocalypse, so they are quite docile in the sun. However, this gives you a horribly false sense of security. When the sun goes down, these once docile creatures flip a coin and turn into destructive killing machines. Supermutants like the veined and shredded volatile that can tear you apart in seconds also venture out of their dark lairs to prowl the streets.
However, Techland didn’t always mean the Dying Light series to be so scary. In the first game, it wanted to “make the night a little bit more accessible to casual players,” Smektala says, but it turns out fans prefer hardcore.
“Fans just want to have a night experience that makes them real; sorry to say this, shit in their pants,” says Smektala. The developers have taken this advice from the community to heart, and this will give us more challenging evenings.
Previously, the roofs were relatively safe at night. While it wasn’t a good idea to hang around, if you perfected your parkour and traveled fast through the air, you’d arrive at a safe house with almost all of your limbs intact. However, the rotten and deserted streets were a chaotic and bloody mess of mindless hordes and super mutants that would immediately overtake you. This separation of top and bottom led to a very binary experience, which wasn’t what Techland wanted, so the team changed it.
“It will be scarier on the rooftops; it will be more challenging,” says Smektala. “Rooftop travel will not be the final solution for everything”. So prepare for chaos above and below; with this new update, nowhere is safe when the lights are dimming.
Tough love
Scarier Twilight news may not be what you want to hear; I can hardly handle the confusion and terror that the current darkness brings, but making the night more horrific is excellent for that Dying light 2.
Your brilliant parkour skills, malleable swing of the grappling hook and calm zombies make the days Dying light 2 pretty easy. At first Smektala and his team thought this was what their fans wanted as they “realized that about 50%, maybe even more of our players skipped the night”. However, after you become the ruler of the sun, there’s not much left to remind you that this is a zombie apocalypse. That’s where the nights come in.
Having the night like a scary bogeyman makes Dying light 2 pretty intimidating. It’s a good thing “if people don’t play the night because it acts like the forbidden fruit,” says Smektala. “They’re probably thinking, ‘Okay, one day I’ll be brave enough to do this. One day I’ll face the horrors of the night.’
While I’m not sure the heightened fear of the impending darkness will make me braver, I can’t wait to see how far I’m willing to go down this dim rabbit hole. Dying light 2 is a horror survival game, so these updates could be a home run for the terrifying apocalyptic game.