Techland's "Dying Light" Announced

[Chambers35]

 

Today, Dead Island developer Techland and publisher Warner Bros. Interactive announced they’re delivering a new next-gen IP called Dying Light. At a glance this first-person zombie-slaying title looks a lot like Dead Island, but Techland is changing things up with Mirror’s Edge-like maneuverability and a persistent day/night cycle. Game Informer got an early peek at the game during a pre-E3 event last week in Santa Monica, California.
 
Techland demoed the next- and current-gen game with a hands-off presentation. Players scavenge for supplies in the day time to prepare for the night. The time of day shifts without load times. Techland says daylight will last about 30 minutes and nighttime will be slightly shorter. It supports four-player co-op and a variety of characters. Melee appears to be the main focus for combat. Work benches are also scattered across the world to craft items like electric machetes. The shared elements between Dying Light and Dead Island are impossible to ignore, so we spoke about that with Techland brand manager Blazej Krakowiak.

The demo begins with survivors holed up in a concrete safehouse. A helicopter soars overhead and drops off two care packages somewhere in the seaside shantytown. This tropical city is just one area of several for players to explore. The player must hurry to these supplies before the competing survivors get there. The dev at the controls sprints through narrow back alleys, deftly mantles obstacles, and strings melee kills without breaking stride. Movement through the environment looks seamless and beautiful. This preview build was running on what Techland described as a high-end PC with power comparable to next-gen consoles. 
 

 
On the way, the protagonist passes by a two-story dwelling and hears a child crying from above. The ground-level doors are locked. Players must examine the environment to uncover unconventional routes through the disheveled town. The dev finds a telephone pole, climbs it, and leaps onto a balcony. In what appears to be a scripted event a zombie grabs our hero’s leg and takes a bite. Krakowiak tells us this bite is of less consequence because this character is already infected. After patching himself up, the dev rescues a little girl from a closet. A voice chimes in over the protagonist’s earpiece, telling him someone will pick up the rescued girl and that he should hurry to the care package. Techland says side-missions like this will emerge organically throughout the game.

Colored smoke billows on the horizon, indicating the position of the closest supply drop. The hero leaps a barricade to cross the highway. A row of wrecked cars holds back what looks like dozens of zombies. It was difficult to determine from the presentation if you could interact with these zombies or if they were blocked off behind an invisible wall. The throng of undead looked to rival the amount of onscreen enemies seen in the Dead Rising series.

By the time he reaches the first care package it’s too late. A group of heavily armed soldiers, under orders of a man named Rais, pull their guns on him. He automatically raises his hands in a nonthreatening display, backing away from their crate. We’re not sure, but our guess is they would’ve opened fire if the player had pressed his luck. 
The sun is sagging towards the horizon so he hightails it towards the second supply drop. The dev at the controls is bee-lining it at this point, only stopping to kill crucial enemies on his way. A recently turned zombie bursts out of an alleyway. He appears more human than previous foes, and screams in agony as he grasps at his remaining humanity. A threat is a threat, and the player kicks the unfortunate soul into a spiked wall behind him. 
 

 
During the sprint we see a full demonstration of the character’s free-running style. He slides under low obstacles, leaps across rooftops, and decapitates zombies while sprinting by. At one point he performs a running kick on a zombie, sending himself and the zombie flying off a building through the roof below. Once on the ground he pulls out a giant hammer as a group of zombies encroach. The player taps into a special ability which activates a powerful, 360-degree attack with the sledgehammer. Bodies go flying in every direction. When the player nails zombies with critical hits like these, the action slows down and an x-ray effect shows bones shattering.

Night has fallen as our hero finally reaches the care package. He clicks on his flashlight, opens the crate, and removes something that looks like a big vial. Techland wouldn’t elaborate on the significance of this prize. When the sun sets, Dying Light shifts from a Dead Island-esque zombie slaying adventure to a tense horror experience. More powerful undead roam the streets, so stealth is key. The player uses a special sonar ability to locate this unique breed – a benefit of having infected blood. Eventually his cover is blown and the quiet sneak back to the safe house breaks out into an intense chase. The extra- nimble enemies close in on the hero quickly, apparently capable of all his parkour abilities. It looks like players will be able to slow down time and peak over their shoulders to see how close their stalkers are. The demo concludes with the player getting tackled to the ground, fending off the snapping jaws one of the swift zombies.

Techland isn’t talking about much else at this point. We know that items found during the day will used in a crafting system that seems similar to Dead Island. The day/night cycle’s promise of nightly hold-the-line scenarios makes us think players may also be crafting defenses. Folks who didn’t enjoy Techland’s unpolished Dead Island offerings may be understandably skeptical about Dying Light, but the project makes a promising first impression. We’ll know more when we get our hands on it during E3. The game is destined for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 this year.
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Dead Island & Dying Light

 

The Dead Island series is polarizing. Hacking apart zombies in first-person is fun, but the games are blemished with technical bugs. It makes sense, then, that developer Techland might want to create distance between Dead Island and Dying Light – a new IP with a startlingly similar premise coming to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and current-gen systems. Players team up with up to three friends to explore a tropical setting, hack apart zombies, and craft items. Dying Light innovates on the formula by injecting free running and a day/night cycle, but we couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room during a live presentation of the game. We asked Techland’s brand manager, Blazej Krakowiak what separates the two titles.

Krakowiak reveals Dying Light is being developed by the core team that worked on the original Dead Island. The more criticized follow-up, Dead Island Riptide, was developed by the company’s studio in Warsaw, Poland. I asked Krakowiak to explain how Dying Light relates to the developer’s past zombie games.

“I hope it shows that we are really trying to build something from a different starting point here,” says Krakowiak. “Zombies as a genre are huge, not just in terms of popularity, but also in terms of potential and where you can take them. Our game, the first Dead Island, was a good example because it was so unexpected for people. You have little beautiful games like The Walking Dead and so on, and so on. There’s a lot of room in the [zombie] space so we feel like we can do something unique and interesting. In this case, this game’s development began back in early 2012 with the original Dead Island team, the big core team that we have. After finishing the first game they really wanted to do something even bigger and better. Not by evolving something existing, but starting a new IP with a completely different focus. This is the case: Dying Light is a new, original IP with no relation to Dead Island whatsoever.”

While Krakowiak says there is no direct relation between the titles, the developer is applying lessons learned from Dead Island to this new IP. Krakowiak didn’t go into specifics, but affirms that, “…there isn’t a single game that we’ve released that we haven’t learned from.”

 

 

Dying Light’s free-running gameplay is one of the core elements that separate it from Dead Island. Krakowiak believes this contribution also helps separate it from all other zombie games.

“Free running, for us, is a survival mechanism,” says Krakowiak. “This is not something those characters are doing to show off. This is something they have to do, because that’s how humans avoid getting eaten in zombie situations. This is something that we believe Dying Light can really contribute to the zombie genre.”

On the topic of survival, we asked Krakowiak if Dying Light will go as far as open-world zombie games like DayZ by adding hunger and thirst meters.
“I don’t think we’ll go that far,” says Krakowiak. “We are looking at options of maybe including something like that as a completely hardcore offering. With the main game this is definitely not our goal so please don’t take this as a promise. We are of course looking at this trend, but Dying Light will be an action-survival game. This has to be a blast to play. We don’t want to punish people. We don’t want them to spend the day in a hideout just trying to dress their wounds, or something.“

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Edited May 23, 2013 by Chambers35

[WolfyRaiden]

Zombies and parkour/free running!? That's what i always wanted! 

[ChickenExotic]

Im actually excited about this title!!

[xVolloxx]

Looks awesome ! 

as long as they're no glitches , no frame rates drops , no lag etc ill be happy !

[ChickenExotic]

Looks awesome ! 

as long as they're no glitches , no frame rates drops , no lag etc ill be happy !

 

Good Point, im pretty sure dead Island even though exteremely repetitive would have still been fun if it didnt have the problems mentioned by Bolloxx

[Myers]

I think this game has the potential to be pretty good. I guess we'll find out eventually.

[Parker]

I'd have to see gameplay, but I wouldn't say this is exciting me from what I've seen so far.

 

 

Parker

[Lady Lilith]

Couch co-op? 

[AndroidFox]

This has the potential to be amazing, don't fuck it up Techland.