Dying Light 2 Stay Human - zombie survival with choice & consequence

[Metro]

Just bought the first game (((on sale))) because I saw Chris Avellone was writing for the sequel. It's alright so far. A lot tougher than I first imagined since all that parkour bullshit looked overpowered. Pretty fun game so far.

its great. I avoided it for years because like most of you i thought it was going to be retarded trash. I finally got it on sale and it ended up being my most played AAA title in a long time, i got 104 hours of it and its expansion, and at least 90 of those were fun.

Your name checks out.

 

[toro]

Where are the zombies?

They were replaced by clowns.

 

[hpstg]

They killed themselves by launching around Cyberpunk 2077.

 

[cretin]

Just bought the first game (((on sale))) because I saw Chris Avellone was writing for the sequel. It's alright so far. A lot tougher than I first imagined since all that parkour bullshit looked overpowered. Pretty fun game so far.

its great. I avoided it for years because like most of you i thought it was going to be retarded trash. I finally got it on sale and it ended up being my most played AAA title in a long time, i got 104 hours of it and its expansion, and at least 90 of those were fun.

Your name checks out.

wow thats a funny one! haha!

faggot

 

[Metro]

Sensitive new-fag, are we? You'll want to head back to neogaf.

 

[fantadomat]

Spoiler

 

[Mexi]

Okay, Dying Light has a lot of fucking potential. Game is fun as hell. Storyline is pure ass, and the voice acting is horrible. The parkour thing irks me, though. Feels like edgy-teen shit. They need to remove all the fucking teens, but overall, it's really good. I had to run away from that huge, sledge-hammer wielding zombie instead of staying to fight him. Not sure if you could kill him or not, but I took two swings that did nothing, and I said fuck it. Tricked him into a corner and finished the mission.

World feels very lonely. They need to bring in some NPCs to make it feel more lively. Chris Avellone's writing would make this 100x's times better. I'd love it if they make a silent protagonist (probably not going to happen) with lots of dialogue options.

 

[Metro]

The first game had potential. Hopefully MCA writing for the second improves on that potential. A lot of missed opportunities and shitty QTEs and itemization in the first game made it mediocre at best. Dunno how anyone could sink 100+ hours into it.

And yes, the world was mostly empty and dead to the extent that I skipped a ton of side missions because they were Ubi-like in nature. If the sequel pulls off the choice-and-consequence stuff and has the world react/change based on what you do then we could have a KWA-lity game.

 

[fantadomat]

Fuck,just watched the E3 trailer and looks like modern political garbage.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Where are the zombies?

They were replaced by clowns.

Oh my Cod! This is even more scarier!

 

[CyberModuled]

so... does this timer displayed in trailer means that play through is going to be limited and you will be encouraged to restart to check different paths aod style?

Considering the lack of time sensitivity in the original game where there were a lot of points in the story that came off like it was an urgent matter but then you could dick around in the open world without concern, I'm just going to assume the wristband timer going down is based on main plot progression than a timed one. It would be neat if there was an option for a timed campaign mode like Dead Rising though (and Techland sure loved their extra game options via post patches for DL1 so we'll see).

 

[hpstg]

Fuck,just watched the E3 trailer and looks like modern political garbage.

In contrast to the imaginary post-zombie one, where they of course would be completely different.

Even the political garbage was given in a terrible way though. Truly an atrocious trailer.

 

[Squid]

The only good part of Dying Light one was running around and stomping zombies. Got halfway through the story and lost interest. The crafting was crafting that's for sure. I guess it was better than Dead Island though in about every way. I spent more time running around architecture and dropping onto zombies than I did worrying about what was going on. Didn't bother with DLC, seemed like too much.

 

[Mexi]

I guess I know why it wasn't as well received. It feels like an experimental game more than anything. The gameplay is really fun, but it gets so damn repetitive. The game is purely a go here, do this game. Every damn quest feels the same. I'm playing on hard mode, and the enemies are a fucking pain in the ass. They take so many shots to down.

The world is really boring. It's all same-y. Feels exactly like RE: 5's village, and it was boring exploring it because all the shacks look the same. It's becoming a bit of a chore to finish. The concept is great, though. Night is pretty fucking boss, especially when you're running away from those fast zombies. Hell, the fast zombies during the day are a bitch too. If you're facing more than 2, you are fucked--end of.

Going to try to finish because Avellone is like my all time favorite developer, so they at least sold one game having him come into their studio.

One more thing, this game takes a pretty solid system to run. I have to overclock my rig to not get crashes. I'm on max settings, though. The graphics are beautiful when you are on top of the roof looking around the city, but when you are deep in running mode on ground level, it's just a bunch of brown.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Metro]

OMG BIG HUUUUUUGE CITY! If it's just empty space then who cares? Smaller with more in-depth content would be better.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-wipe-out-entire-settlements-in-dying-light-2

Your choices can wipe out entire settlements in Dying Light 2
"With great power comes great destructibility."

Dying Light 2 is a very ambitious sequel. Its map, Techland tells us, is four times as big as its predecessor's and players will see about 50 per cent of the game's content in a single playthrough. The reason for this is that players will regularly have to make big decisions about the way the game's action unfolds - the consequences of those choices can be as far reaching as determining whether a character lives or dies, sometimes even determining whether you unlock an entire section of the map or not. Having seen about half an hour of the game in a presentation at E3, I'm very much intrigued.

In the hands-off demo, we are introduced to protagonist Aiden Caldwell and The City - a European metropolis and humanity's last true bastion on earth. Fifteen years on from the events of Dying Light, the uninfected population has dwindled to almost nothing, while the infection has continued to spread and change across the globe. Now, The City is on the brink of collapse with drinking water about to run out. Local tavern owner Frank has taken it upon himself to set up a meeting between The City's two main factions - the Peacekeepers and the Scavengers - and a mysterious figure called the Colonel. The Colonel leads a group called the renegades from a fortified water treatment plant with the means and resources to resupply the city. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the meeting went sour, with Frank getting shot by the renegades who then fled in a truck. This is where we saw our first big choice - stay with Frank and help him seek aid, or chase after the truck?

Frank noooo

Given there's not much parkour involved in treating a gunshot wound, Aiden gave chase, giving us a chance to see some of the new parkour mechanics - a more versatile grappling hook, dynamic platforming elements and some refined wall jumping in particular - and the decayed European architecture of the city district. Eventually we caught up with the truck and infiltrated the stronghold - a well organised base of operations with crops, community projects and a surprising number of children. Fighting our way to a confrontation with the Colonel, we faced another big choice. The Colonel claimed that the water reserves surrounding his stronghold were the only thing preventing his aggressors from invading the compound and killing everyone inside - he was sympathetic to the plight of those living without water and willing to help, but turning on the pumps was out of the question.

Given the choice to trust the Colonel or fend off his goons and turn on the pumps, we took the fight - at one point using the grappling hook to launch ourselves into the air and smashing a massive warhammer down on a hapless enemy. Once the fight was over and water was restored to the city, we saw that the Colonel wasn't lying - with the water drained, his adversaries came swarming in and sacked his stronghold, destroying the community he'd worked hard to build. Woops. On the other hand, shifting all that water opened up a new sector of the city - one that would only have been accessible by diving had we chosen to trust the now deceased Colonel. What's more, a teaser at the end showed a zombie's arm rising from the mire, with spikes erupting from its flesh as it began to claw its way to the surface. Opening up this part of the city, then, also unlocks a new enemy type - one that will then go on to populate the watery areas in the rest of the game map. Oh, and Frank died because we weren't around to help him. Sorry Frank.

The city is very European. And Flammable.

The two choices we saw resolved in the demo, in other words, had an enormous impact on the game's world and story. These choices were cherry picked for the sake of a demo, of course, and I think it's reasonable to expect that not all of your choices in the game will carry quite so much weight, but there's an ambition to Dying Light 2's storytelling that's really compelling.

The gameplay changes are modest, from what I could glean from a hands-off demo, but well chosen - aimed at making the experience more fluid rather than overhauling it completely. The star of the demo, however, was undoubtedly the game's narrative structure and it's left me thinking Dying Light 2 has a promising future, for all the bleakness of its setting.

 

[Metro]

 

[User was nabbed fit]

It is impossible to totally avoid combat in Dying Light 2.

 

[HanoverF]

They make MCA hold his water bottle the whole time like some kind of waterboy. Very amateurish setup.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...ur-dying-light-2-city-and-im-sold-e3-preview/

I've seen how choices impact your Dying Light 2 city and I'm sold

Dying Light, Brendy will tell you, is the best 7/10 game in existence. I’d tell you that too, and add that it could easily have been more. Perhaps if the plot had been halfway engaging, or if the more interesting second area and grappling hooks (yes, there were grappling hooks) had appeared at some point before the ten hour mark. They’re the kind of problems that a sequel could address, through dressing up fundamentally solid melee combat with necromantic bells and whistles. Based on the E3 demo I’ve seen, Techland appear to be doing just that.

We’re 15 years on from the last game, when a virus turned most of the population into zombos. Techland are dubbing the setting a “modern dark age”, which is a semi-new (and arguably more elegant) way of saying post-post apocalyptic. Society still exists, though it’s not in great shape. The wilderness has crept into the unnamed European city where the game takes place – along with much worse.

The road to societal redemption is bumpy. The demo starts with the city just about to run out of water, and new protagonist Aiden Caldwell (no relation) in the bathroom. He’s not in great shape. The virus is getting to him, as it is to all of the cities inhabitants, who wear bracelets to show how close they are to going all munchy.



But Aiden has more pressing concerns. As I said, people are about to get thirsty – and he’s just been told a chap called the colonel is hoarding all the water. Before he can set off to have words, though, a mob of humans starts battering at the base’s gates. Aiden jumps down into the fray, and three people very, very quickly lose their limbs and heads. The slicing is much the same as the last game, where a single well aimed slash can end a fight immediately.

The renegades are dead, but Aiden’s friend is in dire straits. It’s here I see the first decision in the demo, and the first hint that our presenter’s promises of meaningful choices might actually have… meaning. Does Aiden stay with his pal Frank as he bleeds out, or chase after a van that could get him into the colonel’s place? It doesn’t feel like much of a decision, because somebody else is looking after Frank anyway.

So he’s off, leaping between rooftops, wallrunning and sliding as he goes. Now though, Aiden can also whip out a paraglider. The city reminds me much more of the later half of Dying Light, the half with towers and grappling hooks. The first game took over ten hours to give you a grappling hook, and it’s unclear how long it will take to earn it here – when I asked, I was told you get it in the second of the games seven regions. “You can also do more with those tools later on,” creative director Adrian Ciszewsk told me. The grappling hook, for example, can be upgraded so you can chuck it at people to bring them in for a kicking, a la Scorpion in Mortal Kombat.

Spoiler

Without those fancy tools, though, the parkour still looks excellent. It’s Mirrors Edge with zombies, and it works.

Aiden can ride zombies out of windows and to the ground, where they cushion the fall. The movement looks smooth, but technical – a good combination of thought and automation. Not that it always works out. Aiden takes a tumble into a den that’s overridden with the undead, and starts sprinting through claustrophobic tunnels. I see zombies start to pile on top of him, placing their hands on each other like supportive participants in a rugby scrum – but then Aiden whips out a UV flare, and escapes via a ladder as they recoil. Even without being at the controls, I felt myself breath out as Aiden made it outside, back amongst autumnal rooftop greenery.

Finally, Aiden makes it to the truck he’s been chasing, and chooses to kidnap the driver rather than kick him out. That means hearing his nervous chatter on the drive up to the colonel’s castle, which turns out to be fortunate, as the compound has a pass code: honk, then honk twice more. Lo and behold, he drawbridge descends! It’s a neat example of a consequence, though who knows how representative this is.

Once Aiden’s in the compound, he takes a peep through his binoculars and spots a way up to the colonel’s building. A hop and a skip onto the roof, and the friend he’d left holding Frank let’s Aiden know that Frank is dead. The presenter says that he might have lived if Aiden chose to stay behind.



But there’s no time for mourning. The alarm’s been raised, and Aiden goes toe-to-toe with a series of guards as he fights his way to the Colonel’s halls. He makes it, thanks largely to a well-judged foray into some vents, and is soon face to face with the colonel.

He gets chatting, and tries to convince Aiden that he’s being lied to, and that the water can’t be switched on from here. Aiden — or at least, the person controlling the demo — clearly doesn’t buy it, and tells the colonel as much, at which point Aiden is set on by half a dozen guards at once. This is where the combat gets a little more interesting, until it falls apart.

Aiden uses the grappling hook to tug a barrel down onto two guards, then hops up to a man firing from above with a fragile-looking wooden rifle. Aiden steals the gun, but only gets to fire it five times before turning it into a club. That’s fine. He swings over the heads of reinforcements as they flood the room, then turns that swing into a groundslam.

The only foe left is a beefy guy with an electro mace, and he’s a bastard. Against foes that don’t go down in one hit, the combat immediately starts to drag – despite the slow-mo dodges and flying kicks, and despite the presenter’s assurances that the the combat has been expanded on from the first game. This dance seems deeply familiar. The big lad is a bullet sponge, but for stabs instead of gunshots. After far too many hits, he falls to the floor.

The demo has one more trick up its sleeve, and it’s an impressive one. Aiden turns on the water pumps, and watches as the compound’s floodgates rise — flooding a lower part of the city, and revealing an entire new area from where the water drains. Apparently this area has “new quests, new mechanics, and new things to find”. It also changes the story, as a horde of humans rush the freshly de-moated castle – and a new spiky zombie emerges from the swamp.

It’s a neat illustration of how your choices can have a radical impact on the world. Techland are adamant that you’ll only see 50% of the game on a normal playthrough – at least in terms of the story. That’s certainly one way to make decisions meaningful, and Ciszewsk was keen to stress how much you can miss. “You’ll be losing a lot of quests, friends, factions or communities. You can meet a lot of communities, then another player might not meet any of those communities because of the decisions they’ve made!”



It’s ambitious, not least because the impact of your choices can easily be checked by jumping into a friends game. There’s up to four player co-op, which will always take place in the host’s city. In a friend’s game, they might never have revealed that area – but, Ciszewsk said while grinning, they might find it if they go for a swim.

When Brendy returned from E3 last year with claims about how the city and story would change according to your choices, I was skeptical that those changes would constitute more than incidental palette swaps. While I’m sure most of the changes won’t be as dramatic as the one on display here, it does suggest that you can take your game in radically different directions. If Techland can pull this off, those choices could be among the most interesting I’ve made in a videogame.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/dying-light...-choices-will-be-hell-for-indecisive-players/

Dying Light 2's dramatic map-altering choices will be hell for indecisive players
Dying Light 2 has so many decisions to make that players will only see 50% of what it has to offer.

I am an indecisive gamer. Give me a choice between two different rewards and I will tab out to research which one is better. Give me an option between two quest resolutions and I'll scour forums to figure out how each will affect the game. "Do you want to murder this poor, defenseless person for absolutely no reason or reward?" Er, not really, but let me just check a wiki real quick just to make sure.

Based on this fact, Dying Light 2 is either the worst game I could play or the perfect form of immersion therapy.

Choosing wisely
Let's start at the end of the hands-off E3 demo I saw, because it features exactly the sort of big, impactful choice guaranteed to afflict me with gaming paralysis. The mission of the demo was to restore drinking water to one of the seven districts of The City. The ultimate choice is between working with a local warlord—called the Colonel—on a long term solution, or fighting the Colonel and opening the floodgates of the dam he controls. In the demo, we saw the consequences of immediate gratification.

Protagonist Aiden Caldwell battles the Colonel's soldiers, including one heavily armoured beefcake that Aiden needs to stun with a swinging dropkick before he's vulnerable to attacks. Once dealt with, he rushes to the control room of the Colonel's castle, and activates a switch to open the floodgates. In a cutscene we see the water draining, revealing a previously flooded district. The demo ends with a new type of infected emerging from the soil.

Had we instead decided to work with the Colonel, the damn would have never been opened, and the district would have remained underwater. You could still explore it, diving into the ruins, but it wouldn't have the same importance to your campaign. "If you really uncover it then people start appearing there and you get quests from them," explains Tymon Smektała, lead designer for Dying Light 2. "They uncover something within that district which will need your exploration and investigation. So yes, you could still go there [if it stayed flooded] but it's not really the same as what happens when you really uncover it and it's out of water, when you can really freely explore it."

Such big, map-wide changes aren't the only way your choices will manifest in-game. "There are a handful of big choices, and also there are a plethora of smaller things you decide that make each mission different," says Smektała. I see an example earlier in the demo. Aiden's friend Frank is shot by what he assumes to be the Colonel's soldiers. He's given a choice between chasing the truck to the Colonel's island, or staying and helping Frank.

"This is a huge moment because it changes the flow of everything," says Smektała. "You don't try to go to the island at this point. You're just trying to save Frank, so it's a completely different mission that happens. Then you have to find a different way to get onto the island." In the demo, Aiden decides to pursue the truck. Later, he's told that Frank has died.

The decisions in your campaign will also define the gear you can upgrade and the weapon blueprints that you'll find. "If you make specific choices you will not get access to electric modifications to your weapons, or you will not get access to grenades, or you will not get access to some kind of potion that allows you to freeze your stamina or deal more damage," explains Smektała

"A lot of those gameplay elements are things that are connected to choices and consequences, and so it's up to you which one of those you'll be able to have in your game. We've shown the grappling hook and paraglider. Every player will get those two items, and they can be upgraded. But you can upgrade them only if you act a specific way with specific groups that can give you those upgrades. It's another place where you make choices that will impact your gameplay style."

Those blueprints and upgrades are going to be an important part of defining your playstyle, because Dying Light 2 is all about making the most of the limited resources at your disposal. Aiden chases the truck, running across the rooftops that run parallel to the wide streets of The City's second district. Suddenly, a section of roof collapses, and he falls into the skyscraper below. It's dark, and full of infected. In the ensuing escape, I get a sense of Dying Light 2's survival mechanics. Enemies are quick and deadly, weapons are unreliable and prone to breaking, and every action uses your limited stamina bar. Upgrades, crafted weapons and items like the UV flare that can stun infected will all be a crucial part of staying alive.

Giving such weight to your many choices might sound like a nightmare for those of us predisposed to researching our options. But with so many choices, and so many possible outcomes and play styles, Dying Light 2 is saying that it's OK to follow your heart. Because whatever you choose, you won't see everything it has to offer in a single playthrough.

 

[Jenkem]

this game will be more of an RPG than cyberpunk 2077

 

[Makabb]

this game will be more of an RPG than cyberpunk 2077

Maybe not an RPG, but it might have more gameplay.