Techland plans to use the latest Dying Light 2 delay to double-check everything in the sequel, which is full of complex systems. One such system is the reworked grappling hook – which will act less like Spider-Man's web and more like Tarzan's rope.
Tymon Smektala, the lead designer for Dying Light 2 Stay Human, recently spoke with EDGE magazine about what benefits the Polish studio expects to gain out of the delay. In his words, the postponement will allow the team to double-check everything in the game.
"Dying Light 2 is full of complex, intersecting systems created by hundreds of people – at some point in the production they all really click and start working together, but you also start discovering various edge cases where maybe they don't, and you want to fix that," Smektala explained. He stressed that the studio wants to catch as many of the issues as possible – and that's why it needed those extra two months.
Dying Light 2's combat and parkour mechanics will be tightly integrated with each other, and with the multi-level open-world environment around you. Combining this with the sequel's additional equipment such as an enhanced grappling hook – and you can probably imagine the amount of work the team faced.
Speaking of the grappling hook, Smektala noted the tool will be very different from the original one, which was kind of like Spider-Man's web-shooters. In Dying Light 2, the team decided to make the hook much more grounded and realistic.
"It's more like Tarzan’s rope," he said. "You use it to swing on things, and it's more physical. You get the most satisfaction when you do parkour, and you see a huge gap in front of you, but maybe there's something you can attach your grappling hook to, so you swing to the other side of the gap and then you continue the parkour." The team was trying to find a suitable formula for a gadget to return and to make it more supportive of the gameplay rather than changing it.
As it stands, the sequel seems to enhance on many levels that make the original game so successful — it still gets half a million unique players on a monthly basis. How good Dying Light 2 will be we'll learn on 4 February 2022.