Dying Light 2 Interview

There have recently been some rumors swirling around, claiming that Techland’s upcoming zombie-survival RPG Dying Light 2 was mismanaged and stuck in development hell. As a result, the folks over at the Escapist Magazine reached out to the Polish studio in an attempt to clarify things, leading to this interview with Techland’s senior PR manager Ola Sondej and lead game designer Tymon Smektala.

Here’s a couple of sample questions and you take things from there:

What has been the most challenging aspect of making Dying Light 2?

Tymon Smektala: Game making is generally a far more difficult job than many people think. Until your game reaches a wide group of players and gets received well, everything is complex to be honest. For me the most challenging part was understanding that we still need some extra time to fully deliver on our ambitious vision — that we have built a very complex game that requires a lot of work in terms of polish, balancing, etc. This is a non-linear game where your decisions impact not only the story itself, but also the state of the world — and … the sandbox around you has numerous variants, and you need to test and find quality in all of them.

What’s the work-life balance like for Dying Light 2 right now? Is it better or worse than it was six months ago?

Smektala: I think it’s very good. Every half a year the company asks us how we rate different areas of our organization, and work-life balance is consistently rated with very high notes. We occasionally put in additional hours, but it’s an exception here, not a standard and it’s not obligatory. Personally I’m very focused on the topic of work-life balance, I believe good balance is extremely important in creating high-quality work, and I never myself felt that there’s something off about how we approach this topic here.