In what is becoming a trend among games these days, Dying Light 2 has four years of content planned post release, which looks to keep players engaged in the world long after its initial release in 2020. In an interview with the lead game designer Tymon Smektala, the overall vision was laid out for what the game offers its players on release and years later through additional DLC.
To begin, Smektala describes how the main story of the game could be completed in as little as fifteen to twenty hours, but one should place a large asterisk beside those numbers thanks to the nature of the genre. On the one hand, Dying Light 2 will be like its predecessor, which is an engaging survival horror action role-playing game. On the other hand, the sequel will have a far larger open world to explore, wander, and simply get lost in a deep system of side quests.
Thanks to this enormous world, Smektala notes that those fifteen to twenty hours would require a player to follow only the main story and ignore everything else of interest that might pop up, which is a significant amount. In his opinion, clearing all of the content in the game would take over one hundred hours. By comparison, many players laud the depth of content available in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which also boasts roughly one hundred to one hundred and twenty hours of content if one were to clear everything included.
Smektala then goes into greater detail about how this disparity is part design, and part player decision making:
“What’s important is that it’s not only the story that has different branches and where you reach different endings, it’s also how you shape the story around you. What we did is we looked at all of our gameplay elements and all of our interactive elements that you can have in the city… So it’s like, ‘20% of those elements are something we want every player to experience’ so everyone will see that. But the rest of them are connected to your choices.”
This explains how one could speed through the main story and experience the minimum necessary elements, but could also take their time to become enveloped in everything the developer has to offer.
This eventually led the interview towards the topic of DLC, which appears to follow both in the footsteps of its predecessor, but also fits perfectly into the how Smektala envisions the game being experienced over the long term. He states that, “Dying Light 1 was supported for 4 years after its release, and the plan for Dying Light 2 is exactly the same. We want this game to be supported after its release. We know that a lot of fans will be waiting for DLCs, updates, extra stuff they can get their hands on. And we promise to deliver them just that.”
Dying Light 2 will release in 2020 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Source: Prankster101.com