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One of the most defining elements of Dying Light 2 was its lack of guns. In a post-apocalyptic world where manufacturing had all but ground to a halt, it just made sense that humanity had to make do with what they could actually get, and what’s easier to make a spikey stick or an AK-47? But it seems like Techland is going back on this bold decision.
“For Dying Light: The Beast, we decided, let’s give the players the guns if they want,” Tymon Smektala says in an interview with GamesRadar. “But also let’s focus on the guns so they really feel on par with melee combat in terms of how physical they are, how brutal they are, but also balanced they are, so they don’t feel too overpowered.”
Now this makes me kind of sad. My pet peeve in post-apocalyptic games is an overreliance on guns. It may make killing the undead easier, but I’ve always felt like it was a bit of a cop-out. ‘Oh no, we have to fight an entire horde of monsters, here’s a double-barreled shotgun and an MP7, good luck soldier’ is something I never want to hear in a zombie game, give me a bit of pipe and a sharp stick and let me be on my way.
But I don’t envy Techland’s difficult position when it comes to guns in Dying Light games. “If Dying Light and guns were on Facebook, their relationship status would be, ‘it’s complicated’,” Smektala says. After the first Dying Light game was released everyone was yapping about why the devs would bother to add guns in a melee-focused game. So “In the second one, we didn’t,” Smektala continues. “But then the first thing we heard after the release [of Dying Light 2] was ‘But, where are the guns?'”
The devs even tried to add guns to Dying Light 2 in patches and updates, but that posed a “lore and narrative challenge” because “we specifically put that in the world building, in the lore, that there are no guns in this world,” Smektala explains.
I may not be happy to see more guns added to a Dying Light game, but I am very excited about Dying Light: The Beast. During a preview at Summer Game Fest, Morgan Park said that the upcoming game “looked excellent”, something he wasn’t necessarily expecting.
Smektala also told Morgan how excited Techland was for the release of The Beast, and how it’s a real return to form: “The benchmark for which we try to compare the experience and balance the experience is Dying Light 1, because, in that game, you really felt like you were alone in this big city, on this big map, surrounded by zombies.” Now that’s a vibe I can get behind.
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