When I sat down to play Dying Light 2, I wanted to make a list of everything it had that the first game didn’t. Within the first 30 minutes, I had to stop trying to keep track of all the changes because there were just too many to count. I’m not surprised to see a lot of Dying Light’s core systems, like melee combat, parkour, and crafting, become more refined in the sequel, but I didn’t expect Techland to change so much - even aspects that I would have considered an essential part of the series’ DNA. Dying Light 2 takes things in a bold new narrative-focused direction that’s a lot closer to Fallout than Far Cry. It aims to be both more approachable and a deeper RPG than the original - competing design philosophies that felt mismatched more than once in my four hour preview session. I’m happy to see Techland expand its horizons, but I’m also concerned that it might be trying to do too much.
Dying Light 2 takes place 20 years after the original in a massive urban environment creatively named the City. Techland calls this setting the “Modern Dark Ages”, which I found to be an apt description. While Harran was a standard apocalyptic zombie wasteland filled with rubble, abandoned buildings, and burning cars, the City is what happens when people shove all that destruction into a pile and call it home. Every rooftop is covered in rickety wooden structures adorned with zombie-repelling UV lights, hastily cobbled together by survivors with minimal carpentry skills. Garbage and anything else that can be used to break a fall have been piled up on the streets below as people have adapted to traveling across the rooftops. It’s not civilization rebuilt by any stretch, but it's the perfect setting for free-form parkour. The City is twice the size of the Slums and Old Town combined, but it's designed with the same level of intention to serve the storytelling and traversal. Parkour challenges are my favorite thing to do in Dying Light, and that means exploring the City is definitely the thing I’m most excited about.
Speaking of parkour, the new skill tree offers almost two dozen techniques and abilities to expand and improve traversal. Some of them are incremental upgrades you’ll remember from the first game - like climb faster, climb more faster, and climb even more faster - but most of these skills are new techniques you can incorporate while running to help you keep momentum and reach new ground. One that stands out the most is the new version of Tic Tac that allows you to run on walls Titanfall-style, but other abilities like the long jump and high jump can help you leap farther/higher as you vault over obstacles. All of these allow more choice about how you move, giving parkour a much higher skill ceiling. There’s also an Apex-style slide jump, but I haven’t had the chance to try that one just yet.
Dying Light 2’s more fluid and active traversal is accompanied by a pretty significant change to the physics system, which I can only describe as having moon gravity. You jump way higher than would seem possible - even with a video game suspension of disbelief - and you fall so slow that it came as a surprise to me anytime I took fall damage. You can easily jump around corners by changing direction in mid-air, and I constantly found myself overshooting landing spots until I got the hang of it. Dying Light 2’s lead game designer Tymon Smektała told me they did this to make the game easier and more accessible, but I personally found it a lot harder to gauge the power and distance of my jumps with such unrealistic gravity.
The game is filled with major changes that make it an easier experience. Nighttime is no longer hunting season for the Volatiles, and in fact, many activities and side quests are easier at night thanks to reduced zombie population in most indoor locations. The only true challenge at night is your Immunity Meter, which drains anytime you're not standing in UV light. When you run out of immunity you automatically die, so there’s a limit to how much time you can spend running around in the dark away from camps and safe houses. I can’t say that the time limit necessarily made the night feel more threatening or exciting, however. If anything, it felt like an arbitrary time limit that pulled me away from whatever quest I was on in order to go stand next to the closest light. Smektala says that Dying Light players were skipping the night phases in the first game because they were too hard, and described a new system where making a ruckus would eventually attract Volatiles on a GTA-like star system, but I never experienced anything like that.
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That’s not to say it wasn’t happening though, because I was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of markers, tool tips, and notifications that kept covering my screen. The UI is fairly cluttered to accommodate all manner of new mechanics, like the Immunity Meter, the stamina bar - which is now used for climbing as well as combat - stealth indicators (yep, there’s stealth now), water towers, Bandit Camps, GRE Anomalies, Dark Hollows, the list goes on and on. For every new thing this sequel adds, it also takes something away. Weapon crafting and repairing are gone - replaced with a more involved mod upgrade system - there’s no longer a Survivor or Legend upgrade tree, and the normal drop kick has been replaced by a combo where you leap over a staggered enemy and drop kick another one. The shin breaker slide kick is also gone, which was a personal favorite of mine. I don’t want to dwell on the things that are missing, but a lot of what I liked about Dying Light isn’t here, and I’m not convinced that the new additions are as good as the things they replaced.
One aspect that’s undeniably seen a major improvement is the story, which now has a choice-based dialogue system. Choosing who to side with at specific moments will reward you with significant changes to the map in the form of new traps or parkour tools, and will sometimes even lead to alternate missions. One mission in the playtest leads to completely different locations and events depending on the choices you make, which feels like a good fit given that a lot of people will replay segmented parts by jumping into lobbies with their friends. The first game had a woefully underdeveloped narrative and some of the most forgettable characters ever conceived. I can’t comment much on the quality of the writing here because, to be honest, because the demo started a few hours into the game and I was having a hard time following the plot at all. I can say that it feels bigger and more involved than before, though frankly that’s kind of a low bar to clear.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Dying Light 2’s new recipe and mod crafting system, which allows you to build, upgrade, and slot three different mods into each weapon. I also didn’t get much experience with the gear loadouts, which involves equipping armor with unique stats and perks into six different gear slots. I wasn’t thrilled about the proposition of managing even more gear in menus this time around, but all of the armor has recommended class builds like Medic and Ranger which theoretically should make it easier to swap gear on and off without worrying too much about incremental changes to stat lines. I didn’t get to use the new grappling hook either, which I understand is more like a Tarzan rope swing than a Spider-Man web-zip. I did fly around with the paraglider though. It’s slow and a bit unwieldy, but there’s a bit of dialogue suggesting it's possible to upgrade it later on.
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I only played the first Dying Light fairly recently, but it's quickly grown into one of my favorite open world games of all time. The momentum and flow of running and climbing is a thrill and the melee combat is second to none. I’m confident that Dying Light 2 will deliver on the combat, but I’m less certain about some of its other changes. Techland is going in a lot of directions at once and I’m not sure how cohesive all of these new systems and mechanics will be. After so many years of delays and apparent workplace dysfunction, part of me expected Dying Light 2 to be a directionless, unfocused mess. I’m overjoyed to say that, based on what I played, that isn’t the case at all. The question that remains is whether or not the sequel will surpass the original. I have my concerns, but I’m very excited to find out.