Dying Light 2 – Chris Avellone and Adrian Ciszewski Interview

Dying Light 2, Techland’s upcoming zombie survival game, will try to offer a satisfying branching narrative to its players, and this VG247 interview with the prominent RPG writer Chris Avellone and the game’s creative director Adrian Ciszewski confirms that. The interview goes over Avellone’s humble pen and paper RPG beginnings and the lessons they taught him, as well as Dying Light 2’s branching nature and open world design. Here’s an excerpt:

“Having a reactive world is really important for what we want to achieve. Ours is a game where decisions are made through actions, and not just through which option you choose on a dialogue tree. Do you remember the Peacekeeper occupying the water tower in our E3 demo? You could have pushed him off the tower and that would have consequences.”

Some of this was helped along by Avellone, who has learned a thing or two over his years of working on RPGs about the unexpected things players can do to mess with your carefully crafted narrative.

“The big one is learning that you shouldn’t funnel the player – they’re here to explore the space; let them, don’t shackle them,” Avellone says. “It can be a challenge to tell an open-world story if you’re not considering what the player brings to the equation and allowing them to assume an equal role in the events taking place and even better, causing the events that lead to the story progression.

“It’s easy to imagine a story that takes from A to B to C with a set series of events, but in an open-world game, you have to put the player agency and their ability to affect the world at the forefront. So for example, rather than A to B to C, you take a step back, assume the player starts at ‘A’, and then can do all manner of events to cause ‘B’ to come to them through the actions they do in the open-world – or, a number of different ‘B’s, not just one. Or even better, the player creates ‘B’ all on their own, and the entire world reacts to it. When a player can literally see themselves as an agent of change, it empowers them even more.”

This design ethos balks at the idea of making you follow a breadcrumb trail. Instead, you are free to experiment and your actions shape the world and your character, rather than a story shaping the protagonist in a pre-defined way. The idea behind Dying Light 2 is to create “an open story that complements an open-world game.”

The concept has been the same since the very beginning, and Avellone has been on the project since that planning phase. He created the lore for Dying Light 2, he co-created the storyline along with the other talented writers, and he developed many of the game’s critical characters. The reactivity, which Techland dubs the ‘World System’, was also co-created by Avellone, working closely with designers and programmers at Techland. His grubby, gamesmaster mitts are all over everything.