Dying Light: The Beast director says there are “areas of perfection” in the series that developer Techland “cannot mess up to any extent” if it wants its games to resonate with fans.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala acknowledges that particularly in a smaller game, “it’s very hard to keep your ambitions in check.” To help with that, he says that Techland has acknowledged “that you can’t be perfect in every area in the game, but there are areas of the game where you have to be perfect.”
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Those are the parts of a given project “that make your game,” Smektala explains. For Dying Light: The Beast, he says that the experience of working on the rest of the series means that the studio knows “quite well where those areas of perfection are.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, for Dying Light “it’s the parkour, and […] it’s also the melee combat.”
Nailing the creativity, freedom, and physicality of combat is a major focus, and Smektala says that “we really spent a lot of time on tweaking the reactions of zombies, when they get hit, how they react to different weapons. This is an element that might be overlooked by many, but this is the element that makes Dying Light games so special.”
While combat, parkour, and zombies are all key to success, Smektala outlines one factor that might be even more important than all three. “The depiction of the main character [is] something we cannot mess up to any extent, definitely, because our fans would kill us for that.” Nailing things like that, of course, is a given “for any game,” but “what you really need to focus on is the core gameplay, the most important gameplay mechanics that make your game unique.”
Dying Light is in the fortunate position of knowing exactly what those core gameplay pillars are, and having built its success around them for a decade now, but it’s advice that a lot of devs would still do well to take note of.
“For us, it really is Dying Light 3”: Techland admits Dying Light 2 “lost the horror, lost the tension,” but says The Beast is “the best Dying Light that we have ever made.”
