There have been dozens of zombie games over the last two decades, ever since The Walking Dead brought the shambling corpses back into mainstream popularity. Zombies are simply the perfect fit for video game enemies — slow, plodding corpses that relentlessly pursue the player. But with the glut of zombie games it takes a special something to stand out — and remind us why the monsters have been so compelling in the gaming space. That’s just what the Dying Light franchise has done, time and again. The secret sauce, according to director, Tymon Smektała, is to hold onto what works while pushing in new directions.
The new direction for Dying Light was clearly the parkour — an innovative movement that brought these games to life. “In Dying Light 1, you have a classic zombie game – where you have a weapon, zombies in front of you, and you need to take them out,” says Smektala. “Would you fight them, or would you run away and climb to where they can’t reach you? That’s why we added parkour, it was our way of pushing the zombie genre to other places.”
Parkour and traversal has been integral to the Dying Light franchise from the beginning, with that sense of speed and agility giving it an edge over both other zombie games and open world games. But the next title in the franchise, Dying Light: The Beast, is hoping to redefine the zombie game, and the studio, Techland, once again.
“The other thing you can do, like we do with The Beast, is give you special powers you can use against the zombies,” says Smektała. “It feels like a Pac-Man game.”
After being experimented on for years, protagonist Kyle Crane’s new Beast powers essentially turn him into a mutant superhero for brief periods of time — drastically increasing his speed and power, and unlocking devastating abilities like a ground pound that tears up the earth.
Zombies, Sure, But Also, A Bigger Baddie
Of course, cartoon ghosts aren’t the baddies in Dying Light — horrifying zombies are essential to make the games pulse-pounding fun. “You need to make sure to have the scariest, most horrifying zombies.” says Smektała who notes that the team is currently hard at work making the faces of the zombies particularly gruesome, so when they grab players you’ll be truly repulsed.
But The Beast is innovating on more than just the zombies and powers — it's a drastically different vision for the franchise at large. The primary changes are that of a new villain — and a more bite-sized game, a big change for the larger more amorphously terrifying games of the past.
“The catalyst for this, unfortunately, was that we experienced a story leak for the DLC. A lot of the story details went public, and we had to face a situation where, if we didn’t act upon it, then we would have a game that, for the people most interested in it, would not be new,” says Smektała.
That development turned into a chance for Techland to create a smaller, more focused experience — one that sports a harrowing new villain and a dynamic new rural location. Both of these factors integrally separate The Beast from what’s come before.
The new villain, The Baron, was briefly introduced in the new trailer at The Game Awards. When I mentioned to Smektała that the reveal reminded me of how Far Cry games center their villains, he notes there are definitely some similarities, and a lot of The Beast will focus on Kyle Crane overcoming The Baron as an opposing force.
“We wanted to showcase the antagonist because this is your main goal. You want to take revenge, and we want to build those emotions in the player,” says Smektała “You will feel the Baron's presence in the game, he’s a central part of the whole experience.”
Having an ever-present villain has some interesting implications for a game where you’re typically just mowing down zombies, especially when that experience isn’t set in the urban jungles of past Dying Light games, but in a far more open rural setting that leaves you vulnerable. Ostensibly, that could affect the game’s unique parkour elements, but the team has apparently found a way to address that too.
Less Parkour, More … Everything Else
“It felt a bit scary in the beginning because we had to say, okay, there won’t be parkour everywhere. But, thankfully, we’ve found ways to inject it here and there. So basically, if you see a building you can’t just walk in the front door, you always have to climb,” says Smektała, “But then we said, if we don’t have parkour, what else can we deliver? And actually the forest environment helped us out, because we're able to focus more on the atmosphere and tension of being alone at night, and getting scared.”
This idea manifests in what Smektała calls nice “tricks” — things like using a flashlight through the trees and getting scared because a shadow passes by, and you don’t know if it’s a zombie or not. Behind the scenes, the game pulls some strings to spawn zombies next to the player where they may not have noticed it, constantly ratcheting up the sense of tension and paranoia.
The first two Dying Light games are expansive open world experiences that take dozens upon dozens of hours, but The Beast can be completed in roughly 20-30 hours. This itself might be the biggest change to the series. “We come from the standpoint that everyone knows the hardships the industry faces right now. Part of it comes from the fact that, yes, games grew so big that it’s very risky to do them. Until we find smarter ways to approach games, manage the production, and how to shape the game so it makes sense, both for the developer and player, I think it will be difficult to avoid those hard times,” says Smektała.
“We, as developers, have to listen to what players have to say, but I think they will appreciate The Beast because it’s more compact in terms of length, but also it allows us to make every second count. We can focus on every location, put more effort in, take it to another level in terms of art, environmental storytelling, and polish. This is an experiment for us and we want to see how this will work for the company. We’ll see how players react, and we have our hopes.”
