Dying Light 2 Stay Human

[DisturbedSwan]

Started this on Friday night and have put around 9 hours into it so far. 

 

For those not familiar with the first game, to play it feels like a mix between Dead Island, Mirror’s Edge and Far Cry. The zombies, looting and emphasis on crafting from DI, the first person parkour of Mirror’s Edge and a similar mission/open-world structure to Far Cry. There is a distinct day/night cycle too where stronger zombies come out at night but you earn more XP and in the day there will be more zombies inside buildings so it’s more difficult to get to loot and crafting resources. As well as this there’s a drop-in drop-out co-op mode so people can join your game at will if you so choose and you can join theirs.

So it’s much the same case here although they’ve changed the day/night cycle balance a little bit (as many in the first game weren’t incentivised enough to go out at night, so many players used to skip it completely) so that it’s really difficult to access  loot caches in the day (as a lot of strong zombies are there) and the rewards for venturing out in the night are far greater. On top of this, if you try to venture inside anywhere during the day (anywhere without sunlight) there is a 5 minute timer that counts down, when it reaches 0 you ‘turn’ and die. This can be topped up by taking inhibitors which allow you to explore longer in the dark depths of Villedor. This timer and the inhibitors also come into play at night when you’re not under UV light. The other big difference with this is that unlike the first game, there’s no guns.

 

So far I like it but not quite as much as the first game. The first 5 hours or so is quite a lengthy tutorial section where you’re held by the hand, shown some new mechanics and gradually led into the city of Villedor. Once there you then have to do a few missions before you’re finally set loose in this gorgeous sprawling city. 
 

Graphically, it is absolutely superb overall but the textures can look a little muddy at times. For the first couple of hours I played on resolution mode before switching to Quality Mode to see what the Ray Tracing was like in the game. I’m glad I did as well as the RT in this is by far and away the best implementation I’ve seen so far in a current gen title, it goes far beyond the reflections seen in the likes of Miles Morales and is a full on game changer, it completely changes the look of the game and makes everything look better and more natural. Despite only running at 1080p the game looks noticeably better than the resolution mode and it’s artificial rays. 
 

Since getting let loose in the city properly I’ve been enjoying it but feel like I need to unlock a few more Parkour moves on the skill tree and some of the cooler combat abilities like the drop kick before I can really start leaping from building to building, dropkicking zombies off ledges and all that good stuff. The combat is as good as it was and feels a bit deeper than the previous game and the city this time around feels massive compared to the Istanbul-esque Harran.

 

Villedor feels more Eastern European with some Parisian influences to me so far. I haven’t toyed with the online side of things much with it so far either, in the previous game people just used to drop into your game from time to time but with this it seems like you need to call for help before anyone will actively come in, likewise you can respond to other players’ requests for help and it’ll transport you to their game. 
 

So yeah, so far so good really. It’s a big game so I’ve barely scraped the surface to far, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played. 
 

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[AndyKurosaki]

I didn’t realise there’s no guns. Not that I’m bothered by that, as the melee combat is satisfying. Just finished the tutorial. I’ve two friends that got this, so we will start co-oping it soon.

[Nag]

I'm really torn on this so far... on one hand it has the same combat (pretty much) from the first game and that's fine along with the Parkour but then there's something that's really not gelling with me right now and I can't put my finger on what it is.

 

In regards to the ray tracing, I've flicked back and forth through modes while standing in (what I thought were) lighting intensive areas and I honestly couldn't tell a difference between modes... I think I'm actually going to have to give that another go today.

 

I dunno, I really wanted to love this but so far I just don't... maybe story achievements not popping when they should has also coloured my view of the game up to a point... hopefully given some more time and upgrades my view will change but so far I feel a little disappointed.

[Whiskey_chaser]

I've played up until the open world unlocks and then spent a good couple of hours dicking around with a friend in co-op. It's a bit rough around the edges but it's great fun. Combat feels nice and weighty and the city is fun to explore. 

[Nag]

I spent last night playing this on the quality settings... today I've reverted back to resolution, the hit to picture quality and performance in exchange for prettier lighting just isn't worth it in my opinion. I started getting chugging around one of those military convoy areas and at 1080p on a 65 inch screen it just looks a bit ugly.

 

I am enjoying the game a little more now though, although I'm not to sure about the whole nighttime countdown thing.

[DisturbedSwan]

Still cracking on with this, almost 30 hours played now. 
 

It’s definitely a big ass game that’s for sure. I looked back on my playtime of the original on Steam and it was 47 hours which includes The Following and some other bits of DLC. Whereas I’m still in the opening ‘old Villedor’ area on the map compared to the other larger ‘central loop’ section which I feel I’ll be entering quite soon. 
 

In story terms it feels I’m still in the opening act and close to moving to the second. It’s safe to say it has had its ups and downs, it’s more serious than the first game but better written and with slightly more memorable characters with some more depth to them. 
 

A lot of it feels very Far Cry but the Avellone Obsidian DNA is definitely in here. Already on quite a few occasions I’ve had to choose which of the two main factions (survivors and peacekeepers) I’m going to align with in weighty story decisions which feel like they’ll have ramifications for the rest of the game. You can also choose who you want to occupy the bandit bases you liberate by choosing between either faction, giving you specific perks for choosing one or the other. 
 

The side quests haven’t been particularly good so far though, most seem to want you to care about the characters involved in them but most of the time I’ve kind of zoned out. I think only a handful of the many I’ve already completed have impressed or stayed with me in some way.

 

The parkour gets better as the hours go on as well. At the very beginning you feel like you’ve got your wings clipped a bit compared to my memories of the first game but the further you get in and the more perks you unlock the more and more fun it becomes and the better the city feels to explore as a result. 
 

So yeah, still so far so good really, it still hasn’t reached the heights of the original for me but this is a much bigger beast to tackle so it’ll be awhile before I have a definitive opinion on it. 
 

I will say though, don’t die around the water tower once you’ve done that story mission as you may get stuck in there when you respawn . I managed to have this happen to me and then when trying to rectify the issue I accidentally downloaded a cloud save from the previous day which led to me losing 8 hours of progress 😬. 
 

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[DisturbedSwan]

 

[AndyKurosaki]

I’m waiting for the co-op to be properly fixed before playing much more of this. Though with Horizon out this week, that’ll soon dominate my time. 

[Whiskey_chaser]

I'm about 25 hours into this now, though a lot of that has just been dicking around and exploring. I've made it to the second area though. I'm absolutely loving this though. It's one of those games where I can just get lost in and do my own thing and the traversal is so much fun. It's basically the most over the top game of 'the floor is lava' you'll ever play. Once you get a few decent skills under your belt, combat is satisfying as well. Smacking a zombie twenty foot across the street with a hybrid two handed flame hammer is great.

The city design is fantastic as well. They've nailed the sense of accomplishment you get from working out how to climb the various tall structures around.

[Nag]

This game can act weird at times, the last few times I've booted up the game it keeps resetting my finishing position to somewhere completely different and I'm part way through a side quest (Double Time) which I've finished at least 3 times now... I've added new side quests, done a couple story quests and opened new fast travel points which the game remembers but it looks like I'm stuck with this fucking reoccurring side quest for the foreseeable.🙄

[DisturbedSwan]

My play time on PS5 now says 55 hours which is pretty bananas. 

 

I'm also well into the second area, the 'Central Loop'. It's just pretty crazy really being able to explore this space, the first time you enter this area you're taken to the top of a skyscraper and then just look out on this deluge of other skyscrapers in this ridiculously big, sprawling city area laid out in front of you and the game is like, 'yeah you get to explore all that'. It's just a super rad moment when you come to that realisation, it's hard not to be excited at the prospect of exploring this huge sprawling city centre in front of you. Especially when the game then gives you a paraglider to explore this huge new area and is like 'well, off you go mate'. Leaving you to your own devices pretty quickly. 

 

This whole area is so different to 'Old Villedor' area in this game and Harran of the OG Dying Light. I'm struggling to remember experiencing anything this vertical in an open world game either really, MP games like BF3 dabbled with this kind of verticality awhile ago but it's never been done AFAIK in a single player game before. It's a complete gamechanger in how you really interact with the world. Previous areas in DL and this game you'd go about a relatively low-level city, clambering between rooftops with pieces of apparatus left about when the apocalypse hit but here you're now so reliant on the pullies that take you to the top of the skyscrapers (almost exactly the same as the pullies in AC games) and the paraglider to get about and scale buildings. It's a real dense open world, there isn't just one or two skyscrapers, there's a fucking shit ton of them, all surrounded by smaller (but still tall) buildings.

 

On the ground level, Parkour does suffer a little as a result of your new found toys (in the paraglider and pullies) as there isn't much of an incentive to scale buildings and a lot of buildings are pretty much impossible to scale without your newfound toys. Even smaller buildings though, if you can locate a manhole vent nearby to boost you into the air with your paraglider you can reach the rooftop within seconds rather than taking the time to figure out the parkour puzzle of ledges and grooves in the decaying buildings to finally reach the top on foot. 

 

On the rooftops though the Parkour reaches a whole other level. There's little runs strewn everywhere between rooftops which chain together all the key Parkour skills in your arsenal, they feel so damn good to pull off and then often you can paraglide to the next building over and continue your run, sometimes leading inside one of the skyscrapers, up through some offices and then out the other side and into another Parkour run on the rooftops nearby. There is still a lot of the cool Parkour puzzles found in the previous game in this too and the Parkour is still a key piece of this games identity, it just feels like you don't have to rely on it as much now with the pullies and paraglider taking up some of the slack. 

Combat is relatively simplistic but just so damn fun. It never gets boring seeing a zombies head get cleaved clean off in a slow motion blur of blood and guts, they absolutely nail the feeling of your different assortment of weapons cutting through a zombies' flesh. The further you go into the game the more combat skills you unlock which just allows to play with the zombies really and kill them in different kinds of unique ways, drop kicking them off ledges is hilarious every time, as is doing a strong windmill attack that cleaves through a whole crowd of zombies surrounding you. 

 

If the game had stayed within that opening area then it just would've been more of the same from the first game with some bells and whistles thrown in but what they've achieved in the second 'central loop' area you have to explore makes it a different experience from the first game and fundamentally better in almost every regard, everything you love from the first game is improved upon and the paraglider and pullies elevate it to make it something better, richer, and more enjoyable than the original game. They make this daunting vertical area accessible and fun to explore without significantly impacting the key tenant of the game which is the Parkour.

 

So yeah, save to say I absolutely love it. It's a moreish game you can just get utterly lost in and not realise 5-6 hours have gone by, I haven't had that in an open world game since AC Valhalla. Where this game and the likes of AC Valhalla succeed where others (Far Cry 5 for example) fail is that you are just never bored, there's always something fun (or fun enough) to do, there's always something worthwhile to spend your time with and most of the time you're grinning like a Cheshire cat whilst doing so. It's just a lot of fun.

 

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This many hours in, some of the activities are starting to become quite repetitive though. There are an awful lot of the dark hollow type interior areas which are pretty much identical to one another just with a different array of zombies inside to tackle, GRE encounters where you have to take down a viral mini-boss, GRE quarantine zones where you have to go through about 3 floors of a building collecting inhibitors (these are used to level you up), Parkour challenges, combat challenges, Metro Stations to power up, Electrical substations to power up, Windmills to activate (which each feature a unique little puzzle to power up). Its a huge game and with something this big youre not going to get away with having unique, distinct activities on every occasion. Some will dislike this aspect of the game and see it as being too closely aligned to the Ubisoft open world game philosophy, but they don't have to be engaged with in the same way activities and side quests have to be engaged with in say AC Odyssey. You get a very generous amount of skills and power-ups just going through the main campaign.

[DisturbedSwan]

I had that exact same bug @Nag, I also finished it a few times before throwing in the towel. It finally stopped for me when I finished some quest at the Bazaar and never popped up again luckily. 

 

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[Fragpuss]

On 06/02/2022 at 18:56, AndyKurosaki said:

I didn’t realise there’s no guns. Not that I’m bothered by that, as the melee combat is satisfying. Just finished the tutorial. I’ve two friends that got this, so we will start co-oping it soon.

Oh the irony lol, since the multiplayer doesn't work for me, and techland apparently don't remotely care

[AndyKurosaki]

Yeah, they’d best get it sorted out. As I’m not even bothering to play it anymore, until they get their shit together.

[DisturbedSwan]

What is the issue you guys are having exactly? You can't join each others games?

 

I've pretty much not touched the co op at all, I've had my game open to be joined by folks but have only had 2 people in that whole time pop in whereas in the first game tons of people used to drop in and out. Not that I'm overly bothered.

 

I probably would've joined you guys sometime if it did work your side though.

[mmmark]

They’re being very active and specific as to what fixes they’re working on if you look at their twitter account so it’s a bit unfair to say they don’t care. 

[Whiskey_chaser]

I've clocked about 38 hours in this now. Haven't really progressed the main story that far into the second area either. I just like exploring in this. Single player has been largely glitch free (with the exception of one mission where I died and had to restart as a countdown timer didn't reset on death and just stuck there). I've played a chunk with friends as well which hasn't been quite as smooth sailing but it's still been fun.

The dropkick in this is fantastic as well. It's so ridiculously overpowered. Going full Eric Cantona on people on a rooftop is ridiculously fun.

[DisturbedSwan]

Yeah the dropkick is so fucking good, dropkicking bandits or zombies off of skyscrapers just never gets old lol.

[Fragpuss]

On 17/02/2022 at 13:41, mmmark said:

They’re being very active and specific as to what fixes they’re working on if you look at their twitter account so it’s a bit unfair to say they don’t care. 

I've been following their tweets and they've said nothing about anymore coop issues, i've emailed their support and been replied with "we don't know what's really causing it but it will probably be fixed in an upcoming patch" which to me stinks of "meh.. thanks for the cash" due to their main target seeming to be PC and consoles users can wait until whenever.

 

The game itself has also got pretty boring and samey, aside from dawn and the city is generally boring and nothing really stands out, just dirty alleyways and streets filled with buses and cars and trash. Dying light had varied and memorable locations that made you want to explore, as did previous game Dead Island (not so much riptide), but this is just alley, alley, office, another office, more offices, alley, alley, more alley, some more alley, yet more alley, military checkpoint copy and paste. There's just nothing that makes you go "ooh i want to explore this and see where it leads". Also the weapons are drab and uninspired "enjoy your knife/bat/club rinse and repeat, even modding them doesn't make them much better, because once you use them they are worthless until you get to repair them late game (supposedly).

 

Maybe when i can play it coop it might reinvigorate me but before launch i was excited for dying light 2 10/10, a few days of play i was 8/10, now i'm 60 hours in it's very much a generous 5.

 

Even skills you unlock a lot of the time are things that you feel are just basic actions that should be part of the skill set to begin with like dash, and slide for instance. Talk about the ideas guys running on empty and just plucking regular actions that a pilgrim would clearly have and nerfing him so hard it's like if you bought a pilgrim on wish!

[DisturbedSwan]

Have to disagree with most of that, I'm about 60 hours in as well and the game is considerably higher in my estimations. I don't like to put a score on until I finish a game but it would be considerably higher than your 5/10. 

 

The only thing I agree with is that the activities are samey. I've mentioned this previously, but every zone has a GRE Revenant, a GRE Hospital to get inhibitors, a few dark hollows, forbidden book stores and military convoys, then sprinkled in with that you get at least one Metro station, maybe an Electrical Substation as well along with a few challenges (combat or parkour) along with safehouses and windmills to unlock. It doesn't help that the dark hollows and forbidden book stores only have a handful of different designs, so some can be identical to one another and you get that feeling of deja vu. But then, I can forgive that personally as it's a huge open world game, there's bound to be some repeated interiors, repeated activities and stuff when it comes to games like this, you can't escape it and although mindless the activities are still fun enough and engaging enough for me. 

 

I strongly disagree the city is boring though, it has a lot of varied and memorable locations. Old Villedor is wildly different to the Central Loop and even then the downtown and Garrison areas of Central Loop with all the Skyscrapers are wildly different to the Wharf and some of the other lower lying districts, to me anyway. It's bloody beautiful as well, I frequently stop and look at the horizon when the sun is setting.

 

The skills not being unlocked at the start was a thing in the original Dying Light as well, I get what you're saying but as in the OG game they don't want you to feel too overpowered too quickly, they want you to feel a progression curve as you pick up more skills and inhibitors and I definitely felt that (which is nice) and now feel like an all powerful Zombie slaughtering, parkour hopping machine.

 

For me, the game is so fun that some of my cons like the repeated interiors and repetitive activities are a very minor complaint. When I'm finding my way to the top of a building then paragliding around half the city before touching down on top of a skyscraper and parkouring my way across to a different building it matters little the activities I'm doing, all that matters is that the zombies are fun to dropkick off skycrapers and the traversal is engaging. It's not so much about what you'll see or find at the destination you're heading to, but having fun on the way to it which is why I love this game so much (and why I also loved the original).

 

I do genuinely hope co op gets fixed for you guys soon though. 

 

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