Dying Light 2 is easily one of the games I’m most excited about going into E3 2019. The more I hear about developer Techland’s open world zombie sequel, the more I can’t wait to get my dirty hands on it.
Techland has already confirmed Dying Light 2 will have a presence at E3 this year of course, so we can expect to get a ton of new details on the game during the LA expo next week. With that in mind, now is a good time to look back to last year’s E3 for an answer to one of the most important questions surrounding Dying Light 2; Just how big is the game’s world?
According to comments from Dying Light 2 lead designer Tymon Smektała at E3 2018, the game’s open world is “four times as big as all of the maps from Dying Light combined.” When you consider the first game boasted three, fairly sizable maps, that’s pretty damn impressive.
While a large open world runs the risk of buckets of empty space that offers nothing in the way of engaging gameplay, Smektala stressed that the world is absolutely packed with new people, locations, and quests, and seemed confident that the game offers a lot of replayability.
This certainly tallies with more recent comments on the game. GamesRadar reported last month that it’ll take multiple playthroughs to see absolutely everything Dying Light 2 has to offer. In fact, there are apparently so many branching paths and choices in the game that Techland is having trouble keeping track of everything.
Dying Light 2 producer Kornel Jaskula told GamesRadar:
It’s almost like we are creating several games worth of content right now. We are designing the game with the foundation that some of the players will miss content and we are okay with that. Thanks to the variety of stories, missions, content and assets, we believe that it will make players want to play the game again and again or try to play with other players in co-op to see their worlds. That’s something that we established as a foundation at the very beginning [of development], it’s one of our design goals, and it’s something that we still keep in mind.
Even more recently, GamesRadar shared an exclusive piece of concept art from Dying Light 2 that depicts a dilapidated theme park, demonstrating how your in-game choices can have an impact on entire regions of the map.
It sounds like a massively ambitious game by all accounts, and I can’t wait see more of it next week during E3.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.