Dying Light was never going to be like anything else. Combining grotesque first-person zombie slaughter with Olympian-level parkour is one thing, but according to franchise director Tymon Smektała, it was never Techland's goal to follow the shambling crowd.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ for Dying Light's 10 year anniversary, Smektała recalls the team's 2015 mission statement – or rather, its guiding principle. "The first thing that anyone would do [in a zombie apocalypse] would be to just run away," he says. "But awkwardly running away turned into parkour and climbing, and clumsiness turned into being super good at climbing and being able to reach places that no one else can. This was definitely the inspiration, the first big idea – maybe a little bit unclear back then, but still the first big idea of the type of switch we want to do on the zombie genre: try to make it more interesting, more real, and because of that, not just focus on fighting but on other ways of surviving and solving challenges in front of you."
