Appreciating Dying Light

Competitive online clips have been sourced from the amazing “ Sam The Pig Man” and “ MrEdxwx”!

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Do you have These games you find yourself Always going back for? It can be anything really, for many that game is Minecraft, for some it could be a Sid Meiers game and even others play games that have been specially designed to be a dedicated sandbox experience. For people like me however, certain games that weren’t really meant to be perpetual sandboxes, become such a kind of experinece, with Dying Light being a prime example!

I maintain that Dying Light is among the greats of the Zombie category, posessing incredibly satisfying combat, a fun movement system that isn’t just a gimmick and a beautiful artstyle that is just oozing with grit and grime, the world through Kyle Cranes eyes almost looking like it was filmed with an old CCD sensor camera, with spilling and blooming lights aplenty and a down to earth mediterranean aesthetic which is not just held up by tired cliches. Harran, the fictional city Dying Light is set in, is filled with interesting landscapes and buildings that Kyle and runners like him can explore and while the story is a bit simplistic, I would highly encourage you to play this game if you like gory melee combat mixed with high mobility gameplay, as it does not get much better than Dying Light really, especially if you played through the game and gathered all the unlocks this experience has to offer…

New Games and Plus!

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Where Dying Light shifted from a cool experience to a nice comfort game to put on whenever I feel like it, was after already completing the game once. Every area of the game is traversible and even the map of the following can be explored at your leisure without any iooming time limits. You can keep finding or purchasing powerful weapons, take in the beautiful world around you and most importantly, get to hacking and slashing your way through the zombie apocalypse.

Dying Light’s combat is beautiful. There is variety in arms, responses and gadgets which depending on your personality can form unique loadouts. For instance, your loadout can consist of only bladed weapons, molotov cocktails and a shield, or can be a mix of firearms and baseball bats, or for the more stealthy among us, can be made up of silent compound bows with special arrpws to boot. If you really wanted to you could even become a pugilist, only relying on your fists, takedowns and stamina to take down zombies, either or, the combat is incredibly engaging. You can for instance maim zombies in various ways, like breaking their legs so they cant walk anymore, you can chop their limbs off, you can trip them by sliding into them and you can even dropkick them into the abyss, which never gets old.

What makes this entry into the overall series so special, is how much weight and believability is in the Zombies and humans bodies. Joints aren’t just flopping around when a ragdoll is activated, but they are constrained, having a natural bend to them. Zombies nd humans tend to react when falling off somewhere, flailing around and seeming to try to protect themselves from a fall, or when Crane delivers a mighty head obliterating kick to the head, the body seems to actually react to the kick, with arms flying upwards but being constrained by the shoulder joints, and knees buckling, resulting in a rather natural descent to the floor, one that seems constrained by an inner biology. The game also expertly blends animations and these constrained ragdolls, to the point where it becomes difficult at times to discern where one or the other begins and ends. This system is seen virtually everywhere, like when zombies stagger towards you lunging at Crane, or when they stumble themselves over an obstacle, or when they plain forget that roofs have ends and walk themselves off a cliff for no particularly good reason.

Cool combat alone doesnt make a nice game though naturally, and exactly that also applies to Dying Light. The game possesses resource gathering mechanics, many sidequests, challenges to complete and multiple environments to explore. Some of the content the game has on offer, I admittedly did not interface that much with, such as the Volatile nests you can infiltrate, or the invasions are something I’m genuinely disinterested in for now, although it may be a cool mechanic for you and your friends… Speaking of friend, the coop in this game is much fun too and is compatible with the entire campaign too, a much welcome carry over from Techlands prior game Dead Island.

Intergenerational Differences

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What makes Dying Light a far superior experience to Dead Island when it comes to casual sandboxing, is the vast set of tools at your disposal. Dying Light also is a faster paced game which keeps some of the strengths Dead Island had to offer but also tremendously expanded the game world’s reactiveness.

When it comes to the similarities, Dying Light still is a “melee first” experience and keeps RPG elements, this time split into three main skill trees, Survivor, Agility and Power. Power is all about fighting, agility revolves around the mobility skills in the game and Survivor handles skills such as using the grappling hook, building various tools and other fun things like additional bartering skills. What is much more interesting for your subsequent replays and sandboxing in Harran though, is the fourth tree which contains the Legend skills. This one operates in a bit of a different manner. Every level you get skill points to distribute in various stats which will permanently affect the player’s abilities. For instance, health regeneration can be boosted, or the amount of stamina you have, even percentile damage increments exist for every type of weapon in the game, single or two handed, bow or gun.

Those legend stats can be respec’d at any time, so you can tailor your experience however you like at any point in the game, and leveling is heavily affected by the difficulty you choose to play the game on. Leveling the legend tree takes an ungodly amount of time, which is perfect for a perpetual sandbox game as there always is something to play towards. A difference however to Dead Island, is that Kyle Crane is a Jack of all Trades and a Master of them All, eventually being able to max out all of the skill trees and being proficient in not just one, but all disciplines the game has on offer, unlike the more heavily RPG influenced predecessor which splits proficiency in different fields across multiple characters.

The difficulties also are perfect to tailor your experience however you like, with Dying Light offering a more casual hacking and slashing experience on the lower modes, while delivering an uncompromising survival experience on Nightmare. Many of the tools at your disposal are arguably not even worth using much of the time on the lower rungs of difficulty. I play on normal, as I appreciate the power fantasy of slicing through hundreds of Zombies without much thought, however playing on Hard can transform the game into more of a survival experience, with medpacks healing over time instead of instantly and stamina mechanics being escalated. Nightmare mode is the fourth and most masochistic difficulty of them all, especially if you play solo. Biters can obliterate you very quickly and all XP progress towards a legend level you gathered is lost on death, but it also is the difficulty that gives you the highest experience rewards. If you want my advice, I think Normal is the go to for messing about in the game, while Nightmare and Storymode are both not recommended. Especially Nightmare is just not that fun if you aren’t into the disproportionately difficult challenge it is centered around, but hey, the option is there and if you are up for such an experience, it is there for you to explore!

Another similarity to Dead Island is the use of elemental weapons. Any weapon can pretty much be upgraded into some kind of contraption that either zaps, burns, freezes or poisons the zombies, in addition to the bleeding and impact blueprints which come with their own interesting effects. Burning blueprints can ignite zombies and electricity blueprints can zap them, but if you aim a swing at a puddle of oil or water, the respective mods can turn an environmental spill into an enemies final destination. What is cool is that these modifications can be paired with another set of upgrades that can be put into a weapon’s sockets, which can extend durability, handling and/or damage.

Where Dying Light starts to become more of it’s own thing when compared to it’s predecessor, is in the open world.

Dead Island was much more constrained when it comes to environment, while Dying Light features three open world maps which are freely traversible both horizontally and vertically. Especially the old town is fun to run and jump around in, featuring tall architecture and many opportunities to send zombies and Rais’ henchmen to a one way trip to hell. The main game’s maps don’t allow the player to drive cars around, which Dead Island allowed, but The Following introduces the buggy Crane can race around in which becomes yet another tool for fun zombie obliteration and it also is a surprisingly satisfying driving experience, so if you fancy a fun rally like experience with vehicular zombie slaughter, it is time to check out The Following!

How the Past compares to the Future

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Then there are the sequels to Dying Light, which to be honest, are not that great for the type of gameplay I keep coming back to experience. Dying Light The Beast just released and it seems to be a much needed improvement over the second entry into the series, however it is still lacking in some important spots.

To first get to Dying Light 2, first and foremost I would like to stress that it is far from a bad game. I spent around 33 hours in it, I did not play it through and it is a rather competently made game. It features a sprawling map that has a lot to explore, and this sequel also puts a significantly stronger emphasis on story. The game tries to move back into a sort of RPG heavy experience and at least in my opinion suffers greatly from it as I felt that the gameplay loop slowed to a crawl, especially with the combat and movement amendments that complicate the game. The sequel tried to expand the beautiful “lake” Dying Light was into a big imposing ocean, with an attempt to make it as deep as one, and Techland just flat out failed in their attempt here. The game was marketed to be some kind of “your choice matters” experience, similar to what Cyberpunk 2077 tried to do before failing miserably by having one of the worst launches known to humankind and having severely overstated how much a choice actually mattered. A similar thing happened to Dying Light 2 here, where the “big choices” essentially boiled down to what seemed to be binary decisions that come with binary outcomes, that didn’t really have that much of a felt atomic impact you experience throughout the world, but rather more generic changes like what faction gets to control a part of Villedor or whatever.

Even the Demo footage back when the game was revealed made such promises, showing a Dying Light 2 that is unrecognizable to the final version we got, and mind you, a game that most of us Dying Light fans I believe would not have wanted in the first place. We do not need an all encompassing RPG, we do not need a “Zombie Dwarf Fortress” that combines Hack and Slash RPG with a choice based procedural colony simulation, what we need, at least according to what I think Dying Light is, is a strong combat and mobility core which can be backed up by strong setpieces and activities and an engaging enough story.

Speaking of a strong core, the sequel diluted what Dying Light had quite significantly, to the point where I just kept going back to the first game to get my fill of what it had to offer. Dying Light 2 had issues with the zombies and melee combat, things felt much more stilted, robotic and artificial, with the zombies especially not being nearly as reactive as in the first game. Ragdolls did not have this eerie quality of seemingly being constrained by an inner biology, the combat had much less motion as camera sways have been largely eliminated in the combat and at launch when I played the game, there were NO GUNS in Dying Light 2, which to this day is a baffling thing to me. Many animations also felt a bit weird in comparison, like the head stomp being a good example. Kyle would target a zombie and bust it open in one quick move which wile being locked into an animation, did not feel quite as restrictive, while in the second game, Aiden performs a weird double footed jumping stomp. Moves like the drop kick also are slower and don’t have quite the same believability as in the first game due to the Ragdolls not being quite that good, so yeah there are some issues for me that are foundational and difficult to fix.

Now The Beast is a game that was not on my radar at all, but for the reasons above, I will also not get the game for the time being. It looks like an improved upon Dying Light 2, with an attitude that seems to be more reminiscent of the pilot entry into the series. It made graphical upgrades, it has a reminiscent artstyle to the first game, Kyle Crane is back as a protagonist, but what is not is the weighty and slapstick combat which sees zombies tumble and eat shit in quite the way I like it. At least in my case it seems that Techland might have created something they are not able to top, at least for the time being, as this new game does not seem to have what I expect from the perpetual sandbox that I grew to love in the first game, although I appreciate the addition of driving through the gameworld and the fact that Techland seem to actually listen to their loyal followers, which is not a quality most development studios have these days. Sadly.

And hey, Techland have supported Dying Light for 10 years by now, updated Dying Light 2 quite significantly post launch and judging by their track record, much of the same could be the case for this very new addition to the franchise! But sadly, if the strong core of the first game is missing, it is a journey that I am not going to follow from day one.

Reflecting

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You might think about what the point of this video is. We started at Dying Light, we compared it to Dead Island and then we just ended up in deconstructing the new games a bit and saying that they are lacking in comparison to the first.

I think this is more about appreciating what we have and not feeling forced into jumping straight into the next big thing just because everyone else around you seems to be doing so. We live in a very consumerist world where, to some of us, not playing the next hot thing, may be seen as strange by our peers. Or with many players defaulting to a need for a new experience, which frankly is almost exactly like the game that came before but with a new coat of paint. Maybe instead of buying a game that you will most certainly be disappointed with, it can be best to just stay where you are at at times and enjoy what you already have.

I already got my perfect Dying Light game, and I think I will stick to this one for a very, very long time.