A few days ago, Techland announced the upcoming launch of Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition. This version of the game features all content released post-launch, including the premium Bloody Ties DLC, and debuts today alongside the big (and free) Firearms update, considered the largest to date by the Polish studio.
They’re probably right. Here’s an overview of everything you can expect to find in the patch:
- The introduction of firearms: pistols, SMGs, rifles, and shotguns
- 50 additional Legend Levels, with players now able to reach the Platinum tier and unlock new upgrades geared toward firearms
- Around 10 hours of new gameplay between the firearms introductory quest, board quests (including the return of Tolga and Fatin from the first Dying Light), and repayable Survivor missions meant for co-op that also have an optional Elite difficulty
- Graphics overhaul: updated lighting, weather states, improved skyboxes, upgraded foliage, improved water reaction, improvement of interiors, cars, looted objects, and zombie faces
- A new enemy variant (the Renegrade Grenadier) and 11 new nocturnal weapons
- Fixes for bugs such as those that affected Crystal Cores
To top it all off, there are also ongoing celebrations for the second anniversary and a free weekend on Steam. I talked about Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition and what’s in store for the future (Techland has promised five years of post-launch updates) with Franchise Director Tymon Smektala. You can read the transcript of our 45-minute-long conversation below.
Since the community already knows about the existence of Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition and the Firearms update, what was the early feedback you got from the reveal?
The feedback was full of excitement and very positive. But obviously, players are waiting to see the real thing and experience the firearms update for themselves. We have also released some of the release notes to our influencers.
So, judging from what they’re saying, it seems that the community agrees that the update that we have for them is the biggest in these two years and probably the most important or most game-changing. I think if I were to maybe distill two elements of the feedback, the first one is that the players appreciate that we are giving them a range of firearms similar to the first game.
They get the pistols, they get the SMGS, they get the rifles, they get the shotguns. We’re not a military shooter, so what we have works and our community appreciates that.
Another thing that’s appreciated is that we have actually spent some time embedding the reappearance of guns in our lore, which by the way was the biggest challenge that we had to face when we were working on the introduction of firearms with Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition.
Speaking of the firearms, arguably the highlights of this update, how did you settle on these four weapon types?
First of all, it was a conscious decision not to do sniper rifles because one of the fundamentals of Dying Light is that we want players to get that really visceral, in-your-face feel of combat. With sniper rifles, it’s not that exciting. You just see a dot on the horizon, you look at the dot, you shoot it, and that’s it.
So we wanted to look at weapons you could fire at short and mid-range. Obviously, in real life, you can shoot a rifle at two kilometers, I think. But we weren’t interested in simulating that. What we were interested in was finding weapon types and building the whole firearms mechanic so it kinda maintains the design fundamentals of the series which were always based on very up close, very physical, very brutal combat, with tension and pressure coming from having the enemies fairly close. Looking at all of the possible weapon times, we decided we wanted to have the pistol, which is basically like a classic Resident Evil type of situation where there’s a slow-moving zombie in front of you and you try to score that perfect headshot so you can kill him.
We were looking at shotguns which again are this very up close, very direct type of shooting. We also tried to match them with some specific enemy types. We have two enemy types that synergize in a way with the shotgun. So that’s virals and bunches. Both are quite small, both are very agile, very fast, very mobile, and they jump a lot. With the shotgun, it makes sense that this monster jumps at you and you wait until the very last moment so he’s right in front of your shotgun to basically blow the zombie to pieces.
And then we use SMGs and rifles as weapons that are good against the big bodies, the militias, the guns, the volatile as well. SMG is more of a crowd-control tool where you don’t really deal that much damage, but since you shoot a lot of bullets within a short amount of time, you can basically shoot a lot of guys around you and stop them in their tracks. Some of them will fall to the ground, allowing you to slow their progress towards you. Rifles, obviously, are the killing machine.
If you face a big monster like a demolisher, it’s good to have a rifle nearby. So you can unload the whole clip which does the most damage but at the same time not risk being very close as with a shotgun. Those big guys are very dangerous at close range.
That makes sense. Actually, I was thinking about sniper rifles. As you said, they don’t really fit. Is it fair to say they are probably not coming even in the future?
As long as we stay in Villador, which is a city environment, this won’t be high on our list. If the community suddenly pushed extremely hard for this, then we might reconsider.
But aside from the coolness of shooting a sniper rifle, it wouldn’t be that useful in Dying Light 2 where you are often surrounded by zombies very close to you. You don’t really care about the guy that’s on the other side of the map.
Indeed. If you are about to be swarmed by zombies, a sniper rifle won’t help you that much.
Exactly. It makes sense in a game like HITMAN, where you play a silent assassin who has to kill a target without being seen, staying in a relative calmness of the environment around you, or in some missions in Call of Duty where they also try to mimic the experience where you’re far away, you’re hidden and you’re just taking enemies one by one. But Dying Light 2 is not that. It’s built on fighting with hordes of zombies up close.
What about LMGs? That does sound a bit more possible, perhaps.
We already have something like this, more or less, not quite the same thing but something similar. We have those stationary things where you shoot the rolling blades. We actually already spent some time on that feature to make it a little bit more juicy. We added some new animations, new sounds, and improved the aiming a little, making them nicer to use.
But no, we don’t have light machine guns yet. Still, when you look at our list of things you would like to have in the game, they’re definitely much higher than the sniper rifles.
In the presentation, you said the ammunition is not craftable yet in Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition and this firearms update, right? Could the feature come later?
We’ll see the balance of the economy around ammo when we can see the real data coming from the live game. We will check how much ammo is consumed by our players and how efficient they are with finding ammo by themselves. Some additional features might be coming. We just need to see the reception of the initial introduction of firearms.
Right now, ammo is looted in the open world. We wanted to ensure the players understood where to loot ammo, so we used a very simple visual code. If you see something that looks military, there is a chance that there will be ammo. This relates to all of the military cars that we have in the city. But we have also introduced some military zombies, virals that wear military uniforms. If you kill them, there’s a chance they will drop some ammo as well.
There’s also a bit of a challenge. Around these cars, there’s a big chance that there will be quite a few zombies around. So, sure, you can loot the ammo. But first, you need to solve the problem of those zombies being around, right? You can try to approach such military convoys using stealth, you can try to distract the zombies.
So ammo is found in military cars but can also be looted from military zombies, correct?
Yes.
What about mods for guns?
They’re not part of the initial release. For now, we wanted to keep the fantasy pure and just focus on the reintroduction of firearms. That’s also due to worldbuilding. We have a world which didn’t see guns for almost 20 years. Now they reappear because someone finds them. I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, but someone finds them.
The civilization needs to readjust a little, the people living in the city need to spend some time with those firearms to kind of come up with clever ways how they can craft them or kind of modify them. But I’m sure that very soon, we’ll start introducing some modifications to those weapons.
Another big part of the Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition update is the new quests and missions. Can you talk about them?
Yes, of course. At the beginning of the interview, you said that firearms are the big thing in this update and they kind of are the celebrity because the update is named after firearms.
But actually, I think that the new quests and Survivor missions are at least equally important for the reason that in all of the previous updates, we were mostly focusing on gameplay mechanics. We didn’t add as much new playable content. With this update, we are actually doing that.
Players will get at least 10 hours of additional gameplay, almost like a full-size DLC. First, there’s the firearms quest which takes you on a journey that allows you to find out what happened with the firearms.
And then you also get the return of Tolga and Fatin from the first Dying Light, which is another adventure that lasts for about three or four hours. We went crazy with this story. We grew into being this big company, so every decision is taken by lots of people, but for Tolga and Fatin, we really wanted to keep the indie spirit alive. They were created when we were working on the first Dying Light with a team of about 80 people, maybe 100, so definitely a way smaller operation.
We asked two of the guys who were originally responsible for their creation (Piotr “SiCK” Pawlaczyk, Lead Level Designer, and Adrian Sikora, Executive Producer) to take care of this questline and if possible, to not say too much about what they were doing as we also wanted to have a surprise. If we did otherwise, I think then it wouldn’t be as crazy as it turned out to be. Toga and Fatin are their babies and they really went wild.
Then there are also the new board quests, of which there are over fifteen. They’re small, but some of them are really, really interesting. We wanted to twist the mechanics or the narrative or find something interesting in the world-building that those quests could explain. Quite a few of these quests occur in two different parts of the city. Then, the Survivor missions are a new type of content. They’re short, repayable, and created mostly with co-op players in mind.
The best reference here would be Left 4 Dead. You get a very simple objective: go to this place, kill those enemies, make this machine run, or protect it because it’s important to power something. Those Survivor missions can also be soloed because we want all our content to be soloable.
Probably, it will be a little harder if you do them on your own.
Does the difficulty scale with more players?
That’s a very good question because all of the missions come in two varieties. The regular one where the difficulty scales to the number of players in hopes of giving players something exciting and fun to play, but also not so difficult that they rage quit the game.
But then all of those Survivor missions have an elite version that gives you the most rewards. These are targeted at endgame players, changing the parameters of the enemies, the spawns, and more to make the most challenging version of the mission.
After bringing back Tolga and Fatin, are you open to more NPCs returning from the first game?
Of course, but I have nothing specific to announce at this stage. We did Tolga and Fatin for the second anniversary because these guys are beloved by our community. They were created as this kind of comic relief, and when there’s an anniversary, there’s a celebration. During a celebration, you want to have some fun and feel good about what you’re doing.
Having those two feel-good comic relief guys made a lot of sense, so that’s why they are returning for this anniversary. I’m sure the reception from the community will be extremely positive because those characters are great. We really paid them respect for what we’re doing with them in Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition. The story is really crazy. Players will experience some unexpected things.
Obviously, we love all our characters. Maybe for the next anniversary, we’ll get back some other ones, but nothing is set in stone yet. Still, there are tons of characters that we would like to bring back.
In our previous interview, you said that while adding firearms, you also had to consider balancing them around noise. Is this also a relevant factor in these Survivor missions coming with Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition?
Yes, because they take place in the open world, so if you make noise, the zombies will come. The open world systems are still active. Of course, we deactivate some elements. For example, you can’t progress the regular story while in the Survivor mission. That wouldn’t make sense, as we want you to focus. These missions are about 10 minutes long, though there’s a longer one of about 20 minutes, which is a bit inspired by Lethal Company.
What kind of rewards can players expect from these missions, especially the elite ones?
We already have a system where a guy gives you missions. If you complete those missions, you get some reputation points. If you increase those reputation points, you get access to better rewards, and you can buy those rewards for tokens. It’s the same system, though the new NPC gives you access to more advanced firearms, some cosmetic items and additional items like crafting resources and ammunition.
Did you consider allowing some military zombie types to shoot firearms?
No, we want players to feel the difference between a human and a zombie. We tweaked the zombie sight to make them react more meaningfully or pose a bigger threat to players. For example, the spitters, the ranged attack zombies, were tweaked so that the cooldowns of their attacks, the series of shots they do, correspond well with firearms.
For zombies actually using firearms, I think you can always bet on our community mapmakers. Their output is something that deserves a lot of respect. We are thinking about how we can make community maps more visible to players because right now, it’s just a line in the menu and you may not care. We really need to promote that better. The quality is obviously variable, but the top 50 maps are worth playing. I’m also saying this in the context of the firearms update because we have asked our community mapmakers to create special maps just for this release that use firearms.
We gave them early access to our build so they could play with the guns, see how they work and understand the mechanics. We asked them to create maps that use firearms. Today, I think we’ll have about five or six of those maps. There are some ideas that surprised us. One map, for example, is basically Duck Hunt, the classic game from NES, but made in Dying Light 2.
Another one is inspired by Half-Life. Yet another references a classic Polish-made shooter, Painkiller. The creativity there is boundless. They can do anything they like.
Speaking of zombies, you’ve also announced a visual overhaul for them, right?
Yes. That’s one thing I forgot to mention when you asked about the community reception. It seems that the visual enhancements that we are doing with this update got the community even more excited than we thought. It was something that we wanted to do, obviously, but it was maybe fourth or fifth on the list of priorities in this update. But it seems that the community is really hyped for what we have done, and we actually did quite a lot.
We have changed the skyboxes. We have also changed the lighting in the whole game. We have improved tons of textures and meshes for objects present in the open world. We spent some time improving the environmental storytelling in locations like safe zones and hubs.
We have improved or added new types of foliage, like plants, to the open world. The quality is better, there’s a bigger variety. And yes, we have also changed the visuals of our zombies mostly focusing on biters, the slow moving ones, and the virals, which are the fast moving ones. We focused on the details of the clothes and also how modular they are, which allows us to create more and more and more of their models.
But I think an even more important thing was overhauling their faces. We have realized that our initial design was very bloaty and bloody. Because of that, it also wasn’t very clear. When you were grabbed by a zombie, you got scared, but you felt that you were being grabbed almost by this kind of flesh monster. We wanted to make sure that those faces were clearer but also more expressive, more emotive, so you can feel the determination, the hunger that those guys have when they grab you. With all of the changes we made, we tried to achieve a higher quality without impacting performance.
Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition bundles Bloody Ties, the previously premium DLC. Are those people getting anything for compensation, like Dying Light points?
To be honest, we don’t plan to do anything special at this moment. I think it’s actually quite fair since Bloody Ties was released a year and a half ago. I think it’s quite common in game the industry, in any industry to combine products within the same line for a lower price at a later date, there’s nothing unusual about this.
But of course, we respect the voice of the players in our community. If we see that this is really a problem, then yes, we’ll think of a way to make the situation slightly better for them. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s unfair. Most of the games work like that. There’s like an enhanced edition that combines all of the DLCs but the price is the same.
I think we are in the right here because it’s not like we didn’t do anything in between. We are constantly adding to the game. I can understand the emotion and the outlook of the players who bought Bloody Ties a year and a half ago. But at the same time, I think if you invest in Dying Light in general, you get a return from that investment, and it’s a return that keeps coming and coming and coming because it’s not just something you buy and that’s it. You buy the game and it constantly keeps evolving.
You just mentioned the continued evolution of the game. A couple of features, the Nightmare mode and Tower Raids, won’t make it to Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition and will launch later. Why is that?
Back in October, we gave players a sneak peek at what we planned to do over the Fall and Winter period. It seems that we will not manage to deliver two of those features within the Winter time frame, which ends on March 21st. We will deliver the Nightmare mode a little bit later, in Spring. We just want to make sure that we test the feature a little bit more.
Both of those decisions were made because of our willingness to ensure that the final features and content satisfy players. With Tower Raids, we have realized that we can actually do more with them than what we wanted to do at the start, so they grew a little compared to our initial plans. But I think because of that, players will be more satisfied when it’s going to be released.
Currently, we are focusing on DLC 2, that’s our big priority. But those two features, Nightmare mode and Tower raids, require a little more work and polish. The tower rates will also come soon.
Are the Tower raids releasing before DLC 2?
Yes.
The second Dying Light 2 DLC is also very, very anticipated. Are you still targeting a release this year?
Yes, absolutely.
The second DLC was delayed, too. I believe it was originally supposed to launch last year. Can you share the rationale behind this decision? Was it also a case to make it bigger than anticipated or is it just due to polish?
For DLC 2 we just want to make sure that it is right, that it is the DLC that our players deserve. The goal is quite ambitious because we are hoping that every Dying Light 2 player will want to play this. Everyone who has been with the series since the first game and the second game, all of those players will find something interesting and conclusive in that DLC. We want to make it kind of a must-have for our community. Because of that, we just need to make sure that the polish is as high as possible.
Earlier, you said that the first Dying Light was made with a much smaller team. How many employees do you have still working on Dying Light 2 right now? I know Techland also has announced a fantasy game.
I think a fair answer is about 50 to 60. Of course, it fluctuates because we don’t need a full team of animators or 3D modelers. We look at those developers as shared resources for the whole studio. But I would say the core team that works day to day on Dying Light 2 is 50 to 60 people.
Then we have more projects. We are working on different things. Obviously, the big priority is the fantasy project. There’s a whole studio built just for that in Warsaw, while we are in Wrocław. We have our hands busy.
Can’t wait to hear more about it. Thank you for your time.
