Dying Light 2's divergent paths
Techland's Dying Light 2 lands this week, concluding a long and sometimes difficult journey for the Polish developer. The sequel to 2015's Dying Light features a bigger open world, deep crafting systems, intense melee combat, and, most notably, a new branching narrative that impacts the game's entire open world.
It's an incredibly ambitious venture, one that locks off entire swaths of content to players in ways other games don't tend to risk. High-stakes choices in other role-playing games might lead to the deaths of characters, failed romances, changes to what NPCs are located in what areas or to who the final boss of a game is--but they don't tend to wall off sections of an open world.
A 2019 E3 demo for the game showed off the hopes for this system. In it, a player's choice to bust open a dam or keep it sealed shut would either expose a new section of the city or leave it waterlogged. And if players opened that area, a new type of enemy zombie (they're called "virals" here, but let's be real, they're zombies), would emerge.
No dam opened? No new enemy type. Hours of development, animation, AI work, and more, all unseen by players who walked a different road.
A lot's changed since that demo, and when we last checked in with lead designer Tymon Smektała. In 2019, Smektała explained that writer Chris Avellone would be helping shape their story's branching content. In 2020, Techland parted ways with Avellone after multiple women accused him of inappropriate and sexually abusive behavior. A global pandemic rocked the game's development cycle, and according to Smektała, even made some team members rethink the kind of game they were making.
What kind of game did Techland ultimately make? If Smektała and company did it right, he
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