Dying Light 2 is easily one of the most anticipated 2020 games among open world fans. The success of the first game was so great that Techland was able to support it for years without resorting to any of the more or less predatory microtransactions we sadly see in other games these days.
As we are approaching the release date of this highly desired sequel, Techland's Dying Light 2 Creative Director Tymon Smektala recently spoke to Xbox: The Official Magazine (January 2020, issue 185). In his interview, he expressed the opinion that gamers do not need bigger worlds, they need better ones.
I’m not sure they will get bigger. I think what will change is the fidelity of everything. I
don’t think people really need bigger worlds, they need worlds that are of better quality
and that they feel more immersed in what surrounds them. It’s not that difficult for the
current generation to create huge worlds by streaming as you play. So you go somewhere
and it loads a little chunk around you and another chunk and so on. So you can create
extremely big worlds that don’t really impact the performance. What impacts performance
is the number of NPCs you see around you, the variety of them and how they behave, and the number of animations. The improvements in the next generation will allow us to go further in that direction. This is basically our mission as a studio, we want to create first-person open-world games with high-fidelity graphics and with high-fidelity immersion, where you feel like you are really there.
Interesting words, especially when another creative, Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene, just expressed his desire to make a truly massive game featuring hundreds of kilometers of landmass with thousands of concurrent players roaming on it.
Dying Light 2 is currently still scheduled to hit PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in Spring 2020, though that launch window is looking particularly stacked between March and May. We'll see if Techland opts for a tactical delay of a few months to get a bit more breathing room.
Dying Light 2 will support raytracing on PC and Techland told Wccftech they are also looking into NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).
