Dying Light 2 – Tymon Smektala Interviews

Dying Light 2, Techland’s upcoming zombie-survival RPG, is fairly ambitious when it comes to its structure. The game will allow us to miss roughly half of its content by offering plenty of meaningful choices along the way. With that in mind, you may be interested in this Gamasutra interview with Techland’s lead game designer Tymon Smektala where he primarily talks about the game’s nonlinear nature. An excerpt:

What have you learned in a year as a game designer since you got to show Dying Light 2 to the world?

What I learned is how complex it is to work with narratives that are nonlinear, and with sandbox space that can have a lot of variation and variance in it. You need to support every possible combination of these too. This is really stressful, and we had to come up with some internal methodologies for how we wanted to handle this.

This is really a headache, especially if you’re doing this for the first time. But thankfully we have support from Chris Avellone, who’s basically a master of nonlinear narratives. He has been supporting us very much, first of us he shares his knowledge with us, he shares his experience with us, he helped us build the world that Dying Light 2 takes place in.

The city, the factions, the whole lore is either made by Chris himself or with support from Chris. But I think the most important thing we benefit from right now is the fact that he also as I said shared with his knowledge with his internal team of writers.

So he did a lot of nonlinear games where you have choices and those choices have some kind of consequences, of course these games never really offer the opportunity to change the actual game space, but still this helps out. He knows how to do it, he knows how to approach it, so it’s manageable.

There’s also this ScreenRant interview where he discusses Dying Light 2’s technology, horror elements, and its multitude of endings. Have a look:

On the narrative sandbox: Since there are so many different choices, so many different versions of the open world, is there one ending or are there multiple endings? And with that in mind, is there a “true” ending?

True ending, I would say no, because that’s the idea. There are multiple endings, but the only true ending is the ending you have chosen it to be. I think that works for a lot of people. We also did some analyses and tests and discussions, and we also are gamers, so we kind of feel how this works. Therefore, if there’s a game that offers a lot of endings, the true ending for them is the ending they have reached during their playthrough. So this is the feeling that we want to have here as well. But also there are different options to the game. There are different sides to this coin, and you will not see a lot of content when you play the game and when you make those decisions.

What’s interesting and what’s important is that you can actually experience that either by replaying the game, perhaps with a character that you ended the first playthrough with, or you can play with your friends in co-op. And this is a very interesting idea and very interesting way of experiencing the other sides of the narrative, because now you’re free of making those decisions. You don’t make them; the host makes them, but you get to see what happens. And the one thing that’s also cool is that, when he makes the choices, you can chat with him on the headphones and say to him, like you guys did here, “Choose this, choose that!” This is really crazy – all the very funny moments which basically happened outside of the game, but this is still something you remember.