Earlier this year, we spoke with Techland about Dying Light 2, their long-in-the-making first-person open world action RPG.
At the time, Rendering Director Tomasz Szałkowski also discussed technical details such as the performance on the older PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles and the perks of the newer PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X consoles.
The “main” consoles have long been our priority. We make every effort to ensure that the game’s quality on PS4 or XBO is at the highest level. We started testing on the older generation consoles much earlier than in other projects. This was related to the scale of changes to the engine and ambitious plans to create an even larger and more complex game than DL1.
The new consoles are great equipment. A lot of progress has been made in the area of CPU performance and IO bandwidth. The new capabilities and GPU speed are also impressive. I think, like any new generation, it takes a while before we learn to get the most out of the hardware.
We plan to allow you to choose: Quality (including ray tracing), Performance (60+ FPS), and 4K. As we are working hard on performance, I cannot provide more details at this point. We try to cram as much as possible onto the next- gens.
One of the most curious tidbits in there was the mention of 60+ FPS in Performance mode. Could Techland really have managed to craft a proper 120 FPS mode for a taxing game like Dying Light 2? As it turns out, not quite. Speaking to MP1st, Lead Level Designer Piotr Pawlaczyk clarified this will be obtained through variable refresh rate, meaning that it’ll offer ‘unlocked’ 60 FPS rather than proper 120 FPS.
For those who, as you, appreciate smooth gameplay, we have prepared the Performance mode, which focuses on a high frame-rate (60FPS + optionally with VRR), making the experience of fast gameplay elements such as a course or combat even more smooth.
It follows that only platforms with VRR support such as Xbox Series S|X (and PC, of course) will be able to exploit these benefits, while PlayStation 5 users will have to wait for whenever Sony adds variable refresh rate to the console.
Dying Light 2 is set to launch on December 7th for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
