It's hard to believe, but it's been about a year since the release of Dying Light 2 Stay Human. The long-awaited sequel to the beloved 2015 original landed with a lot to love about it, but also a few blemishes. Much like with the original,  however, Techland got right to work on fixing what was broken, improving what was there, and laying out a roadmap of quality content. 2022 was just the beginning, though. Techland has plenty of plans to keep Dying Light 2 Stay Human going, including many fan-requested changes to combat and parkour systems. Hardcore Gamer had the opportunity to sit down with Franchise Director Tymon Smektała to reflect over the past year and learn about what to expect in 2023 and beyond.

[Hardcore Gamer] It's been it's been a year since Dying Light 2 launched. Reflecting back on that date, what was the launch like from your end? How do you think about it now?

[Tymon Smektała] Wow, to be honest, it’s a little bit hard to remember that day because so many things have happened over the last year. If I'm to be honest, it was extremely emotional for the whole studio. Of course, the release was a was a moment of great excitement, but also curiosity about how the game would be received. Then there was amazement over how many people have started playing the game at release and after

There was also a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations, and uncertainties that we had in ourselves as the game developers. You never know how the community is going to react. We saw such an amazing interest like the game to the point it was the 25th most played game on Steam in it’s history. No one expected that, and we had some problems because of it. With so many people playing the game, our co-op network infrastructure started breaking a little here and there.

So, after the moments of extreme joy, happiness, and excitement, we had to get back to work to start amending the issues and addressing the feedback we started getting from the community. The work continues from that day on for the past twelve months.

Community has always been important for Techland and the Dying Light franchise. You look at the beginning of the PS4 and Xbox One era and you saw a lot of developers and publishers promise games the last ten years, but that rarely happened. Dying Light was one of the rare ones that did. How do you plan on transferring that kind of success to Dying Light 2 this year and the coming years?

It’s a real growth process for us as game developers. With Dying Light, we didn’t expect it to last eight years, but through the process we learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work. We developed new ways of engaging with the community and are using that experience with the second game. What the community can expect is that soon they’ll start seeing that Dying Light 2 offers the same amount of interesting things as the first game. We definitely want to take this game even further than the original.

I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but I want players to understand this is a long-term commitment. We are listening and we will be getting them stuff they want to see.

DLC is likely part of that plan, and you guys delivered an excellent DLC for Dying Light with The Following. That added a new playable space, a new story, and a new mechanics in the form of the go-kart. Do you have plans to release a The Following style expansion for Dying Light 2?

I can’t say anything specific. At this point, we have said a couple things about the next DLC which is that it’ll be open world, narrative-driven, and focus on the infected. Unfortunately, that’s all I can say right now.

Let’s talk about Villedor. For the past year, players have gotten to explore every crevice of the two available locations within the city. Are there any plans to expand the city with new explorable areas or sections?

Nothing like that is on the roadmap. We are focusing on the game’s systems and squeezing as much as possible from the map. I feel there’s still plenty that we can do with the current maps and that we’ll be able to provide something new within them.

Let’s dive into those systems. Tell me about combat. What kind of upgrades and improvements can players expect for battle?

The first direction we’re taking is the physicality of combat. We want the reaction of enemies to match the type of weapon they’re being hit with. We believe basing impact on physics translates to more emergent gameplay. Another direction is combat immersion and how the whole package (i.e. video, sound effects, etc.) comes together. The third direction is combat variety. We want enemies to present new, unexpected behaviors. We want more impactful moments from combat, and that’s all the general goal for it.

Any new weapon types?

Yep. I can’t talk about it right now, but we’ll have new weapons and maybe some new offensive toys. There’ll be new weapons from the current types in the game, and, along with the gear transmog system, we’re adding a bit more player agency over the type of weapons they carry.

Since the reveal, you’ve been pretty adamant about there being no guns in Dying Light 2. Is that still the case?

Yes.

Moving on to parkour. Players loved the Dying Light parkour. Dying Light 2 brought many changes that felt great and looked great in motion, though there’s quite a bit of players in the community prefer the older system. How are you planning on expanding parkour in a way that pleases both bases?

We’re actually taking two opposite directions at the same time. In Dying Light, parkour was more hardcore. Dying Light 2 is more seamless and accessible. So, what we’re doing for fans of the original’s parkour, we’re going to give them that experience in an update this year. That’s our first direction.

Our other direction is taking the current parkour and pushing it further. We’ll be looking at the moves we already have and make them more fluid than they are now. For example, currently when you perform certain moves and they don’t connect you lose a lot of momentum and the flow is gone. We want to make that flow more consistent as long as you aren’t failing a jump or smashing into an object. We’ve already identified 20-25 moves or connections we could change to improve the flow. With these two directions, we hope to give players the parkour setup they want to play with.

Let’s move onto night gameplay. Dying Light’s world was terrifying at night with all the horrors running amok. Dying Light 2 streamlined that to be more accessible, making traversal easy as long as you stuck to the rooftops. Can players expect changes here to bring nighttime more in line with the original title?

Yep, so definitely the easiest thing to point out is the roaming volatiles. We’ll see a lot more of them on the streets and rooftops hunting. Asides from that, there will be a lot of additional tweaks to make the experience more scary, including a darker atmosphere. Players can expect plenty of gameplay, visual, and atmosphere changes throughout the year.

Can you say anything about how Aiden’s story will evolve over these updates?

I don’t want to say much, but we want to continue Aiden’s story. Players will definitely learn more about him.

When you first revealed Dying Light 2, the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S were not revealed. Do you feel like you were able to properly take advantage of them? Do any of your future plans involve updates or graphical overhauls exclusive to these platforms and PC?

So, we promised from the start to support the game regardless of platforms. We’ll continue to support all the platforms Dying Light 2 is on. We are thinking about doing some changes for the current-gen platforms, but there’s nothing to announce at this time. I think its safe to say that we will do whatever we can to improve the quality of the game’s visuals. There are already different modes on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. So, no promises, but we definitely want to make the visual experience a little bit or significantly better on current-gen consoles.

With all the years of development, the launch, and now a whole year past behind you, what would you say you’re most proud about achieving with Dying Light 2?

There are a lot of things for us to be proud of, but I think the thing I’m most proud of is how we’ve managed to build a good connection within our community. We’ve invited them into our design process so they can help us take Dying Light 2 to higher places. Even though I understood that some areas of the game weren’t as good as the community expected, we managed to start discussing them and figuring out what specific areas player though should be improved. We want to continue that over this year. We create unforgettable experiences with our players by keeping our ear on the street and staying tuned into what they’re saying, and we’ve succeeded by doing that last year and I think that relation will grow even stronger this year.

Dying Light 2 Stay Human is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, PS4 and Xbox One. A cloud version for the Switch is currently in development.