Good news for everyone who fell for the scruffy charms of Techland's Dead Island back in 2011. The developer is back with a new open-world zombie game that is almost exactly the same, but more polished and with added parkour.
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Dying Light doesn't just resemble Dead Island in its setting or style, it repeats entire gameplay features. The focus on melee weapons is the same. The kick you use to keep the undead at bay is the same. Even the stamina bar, which depletes every time you swing a pipe or wrench, is the same. The crafting is identical, in function if not form, allowing you to add elemental damage to your weapons through blueprints and upgrades. And the co-op gameplay is the same, as up to three others can join you as you leg it around the quarantined South American city of Harran, performing fetch quests, looting crates and earning XP.
One major difference is parkour, that once-zeitgeisty method of locomotion that sees you mantling up ledges and leaping from rooftops like an excitable flea. This is a one-button affair, mapped to the jump command. Hold that shoulder button down when sprinting or leaping, and you'll grab whatever ledge you're looking at. It's never particularly elegant - this is more frantic scramble than effortless grace - but it gets the job done.
That job, of course, is keeping you out of the clutches of the undead which congregate in Harran's streets and shanties. Your common or garden walking corpse can't climb, so providing you stick to higher ground, you'll be unmolested as you chase quest markers across the averagely sized map.
The other notable addition to the Dead Island formula is a day and night cycle which dramatically alters your chances of survival. Once the sun goes down, deadlier mutated creatures are on the prowl, and they are both more tenacious and agile than the basic shambling ghouls. You're advised to take shelter in one of the many unlockable safe houses dotted around the city and speed the arrival of the dawn by sleeping through the carnage outside.
Both are solid ideas, if hardly original. Parkour has long since lost its novelty, both in real life and in games, and the nocturnal race for safety feels like a grungier, bloodier riff on Minecraft - or any of the dozens of other zombie survival games around at the moment.
The game certainly looks and performs better than Dead Island, which was always a diamond in the rough. There are still some creaky bits - textures pop in, sometimes zombies flicker in or out of existence, and while the environment has had some attention lavished on it, the zombies themselves are fairly crude up close. It's not uncommon to see these 'biters' lodged in scenery, or getting themselves in a right mess as the AI pathfinding struggles to pick a route through the rubble.
But the game is capable of moments of beauty, and the character models are a vast improvement over Dead Island's balloon-limbed marionettes. The script, sadly, hasn't seen similar evolution, but the predictable tale of government malfeasance and despotic survivor cults does what it needs to do, and gets you up to speed on how to play and keeps you moving around the map.
It's just hard to muster much enthusiasm for the end result. Dead Island was a shambolic mongrel, but it had a cartoonish verve that made it surprisingly likeable. It knew that what players really wanted was to carve the limbs of zombies using an electrified machete, and it made sure that opportunities to do so were never far away.
With its emphasis shifted to avoiding zombie confrontations rather than revelling in them, Dying Light can't help but lack the sort of energy needed to keep your attention throughout a prolonged but repetitive campaign. Weapons feel nerfed, even once you've advanced beyond the basic starter arsenal, and zombies too quickly become damage sponges.
There are three upgrade trees - one for general survival skills, one for agility, and one for attack power. XP for each is earned ambiently - so for every leap and climb, you add a few points to the Agility total, while the same is true of Power and every point of damage dealt. It's a nice way to handle progression, ensuring even the most aimless jaunt serves a purpose, but you have to play for a very long time to unlock the really fun abilities.
Also holding you back from taking a proactive approach to undead clearance is the heavily punitive weapon damage system. Even the hardiest wrench will break after just a few skull cracks, and must be repaired with metal parts scavenged from the scenery. That, in itself, is nothing new but each weapon now also has a limit to how many times it can be fixed. There's no point getting too attached to a specific weapon that you've upgraded and customised, because eventually it will break completely and need to be trashed.
Clearly, if carving your way through the horde was cathartic entertainment from the off, rather than a lethal slog, there'd be no reason to make use of the parkour stuff, so all of these features feel designed to keep the really fun stuff at arm's length. For fans weaned on Dead Island's blood-stained excess, it can be a frustrating twist.
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That's not to say there aren't flashes of grisly emergent brilliance along the way. Pools of gasoline explode, downed power lines offer impromptu electrocution spots and some kind soul has left useful spikes all over the place. Kicking zombies into these is almost always an instant kill, and the pleasure of these minor improvisations makes for a welcome respite from the drudgery that getting from A to B soon becomes.
As with Dead Island, multiplayer is what makes the difference. Whereas in Techland's previous games, you were simply bundled together into one game and left to make your own amusement, Dying Light displays a more curated eye for co-operative mayhem.
While playing with others, the game will serve up miniature challenges which both encourage co-operation and competition. There may be a survivor in need of rescue, and the player who deals the most damage to the zombies threatening them will earn bonuses. It may be a race to the next objective, or a fight to take down one of the larger club-wielding brutes. You can choose whether or not accept these bonus objectives, but they keep the world feeling fresh and reactive even once you've cleared the story and are just roaming around looking for reasons to get your hands dirty.
Similarly, there's also Be The Zombie, a free bonus DLC mode which allows you to invade other player's games as an advanced hunter mutant. In this form you can use tentacles to propel you through the air, Spidey-style, as well as using your blood-curdling scream to reveal the locations of human players. They, meanwhile, can use UV flashlights to sap your powers, leaving you vulnerable to retaliation. In other words, success comes from sneaking up on enemies, rather than chasing after them. With enough players, all flanking, distracting and pouncing on each other, it can be a real blast. With small lobbies, it's less appealing.
As a follow up to Dead Island, Dying Light represents an improvement on the technical front, but has lost some of its knockabout charm in the process. It shares its predecessors pace and shape, as things start on a relative high as you explore into the game's systems, but then tail off the hours tick by. Dying Light mixes up Techland's own recipe to enjoyable effect, but can't fully disguise its regurgitated flavour.
7 /10
Dying Light, the upcoming survival horror title from Techland won't run at 60FPS (as earlier targeted by the development team). Maciej Binkowski, Lead Game Designer has officially announced this new development in a recent Q&A session on ASK FM.
Maciej Binkowski stated that the development team at Techland is now targeting 1080p/30FPS for PlayStation 4 version of Dying Light, no details were shared about the Xbox One port.
Back in December 2013, Techland was pretty confident of achieving 1080p/60FPS on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and it's still not clear why the developer decided to chop the game's frame-rate in half.
'We aim to have the final game running at 1080p, 60 fps on both PS4 and Xbox One, and it seems that we will be able to achieve this,' tech director Jakub Klarowicz said last year. 'Obviously, we're still working on the game itself and its optimization, but we aim to provide that kind of experience when the game launches.'
We have contacted our sources at Techland for more update on this, so stay tuned to Gamepur as we will update this post as soon as we get to hear something from them.
It’s 8.03pm and I’m existentially scrolling through the PS4 dashboard, spending more time figuring out what I want to play instead of actually playing anything at all (otherwise known as Netflix Syndrome). I could finally make a start on Detroit: Become Human? No, I don’t have the emotional fortitude to withstand David Cage’s preachy histrionics right now. How about another match of Fortnite Battle Royale, that old and familiar friend? Better not. Considering the amount of hours I’ve already pumped into that game, I can only justify jumping off the battle bus for the millionth time if I’m playing with actual pals (“It’s a social gathering” I tell myself).
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The right thumb scrolls over a few more undesirable tiles before finally discovering a target worthy of the effort needed to hit that big X button. Unlike so many other games that have come and gone from my PS4’s hard drive, Dying Light has made a permanent home for itself on the digital shores of its memory banks, and for good reason.
I’ve played and completed Dying Light’s campaign four times; twice with friends in the excellent co-op mode, and twice alone. Beyond that, I’ve finished its two story expansions, frequently enjoyed Techland’s steady stream of updates, or just intermittently hopped on now and again to blithely mess around in Harran, parkouring and head-bashing to my heart’s content, or invading other players’ worlds to scare them silly as a super-powered zombie. I thought this slightly odd obsession was just my own personal, guilty pleasure, but it turns out I’m not the only one who keeps coming back to Dying Light.
Three and a half years on from launch, Dying Light still sits comfortably in Steam’s 100 most popular titles (as measured by current player count). Not bad for a largely single player zombie game which came out at the beginning of 2015. Dying Light’s Reddit page is similarly populated by a community stuck in a perpetual loop of collectively fawning over Techland’s spiritual successor to Dead Island.
One fan recently posted a screenshot showing off a total playtime of over 3000 hours. Another describes how the game inspired them to take up professional parkour as a full time hobby. Several posts compare Harran to real life photos of Turkey, showing precisely how well Techland has translated its Byzantine muse into a virtual sandbox. New players asking for help with some of Dying Light’s deeper mechanics and controls are frequently met with several eager and richly detailed answers from zombie-slaying veterans. It’s kind of amazing.
But why? Why are so many people still playing Dying Light to this day, especially compared to all the other new games that release, peak, and fall out of the spotlight within the space of a few months? The obvious answer requires looking no further than the quality of the game itself. Dying Light’s not just a unique and expertly crafted action adventure, it’s one of the best games of the generation, and one that has only improved over time.
Undying love
Setting a big budget open world title in the Middle East (Harran is implied to be located in Turkey) was always going to be an ambitious but welcome change over the typically Western locales of similar games, but Techland make it look easy, capturing a distinct, local vibe that adds new tonal layers of horror and dread to the zombie genre.
It’s the little things; like the debris and dust that often floats past your character’s field of view, or the fact that you can explore so many buildings that other games might lock you out of, which together manage to do something enamouring with a typically tiresome colour palette of browns and yellows. I’m never not impressed by the way my character begins to uneasily swing when balancing at great heights, or the tactility of his hand animations during almost any interaction with the world, but Dying Light’s detailed production value is just one side to its success story as a lasting product.
Looking good is one thing, but it’s the way Dying Light plays at a granular level which makes the experience so addictive - and keeps it so fresh - at its core. The free-flowing momentum of parkour has never been captured this well in a video game before, but Techland also makes sure that Dying Light never lets you put the freerunning on auto-pilot, Assassin’s Creed style. You need to look where you’re going, plan every step, and think (quite literally) on your feet, with the zombies being merely another hazard adding yet more tension to all the tightrope walking.
That sense of physicality extends to the combat too, which combines RPG-lite looting and crafting with hard and fast melee mechanics to create something that’s both challenging and endlessly satiating in equal measure. I rarely, if ever, use a firearm in Dying Light, despite them inevitably being the more effective option in combat, simply because it feels so good to witness every ensanguined slash and bone-shattering crunch of the hand to hand fisticuffs.
And, best of all, I’m still getting scared silly by Dying Light. The eldritch, superhuman Volatiles which arise from their slumber every evening are great at making mince meat of your self-confidence, however long you’ve played, as their equally adept free-running skills means you’re no longer able to seek sanctuary atop Harran’s city skyline.
Playing in Nightmare Mode only ratchets up the survival horror intensity, too, with even the most basic shufflers posing a threat to your character, and all the earned experience points they’re carrying with them. No, it’s not exactly crap-your-pants levels of fear, but when you accidentally crash through a corrugated iron rooftop, and the runners scramble out of their manholes to swarm you in hordes, it’s hard to deny that Techland knows exactly how to wring horror out of the undead.
True to its word, Techland has also stayed committed to curating Dying Light to a degree that few other developers can claim to match, with the kind of customer-first dedication that brings to mind equally attentive studios like CD Projekt Red or Blizzard Entertainment. To be held up in the same league as developers like those is no small feat but, by my estimations, Techland is right up there when it comes to post-launch support.
Life after death
Recently, for example, the studio celebrated hitting its 10in12 milestone, which added 10 pieces of free, mini-DLC to Dying Light over the course of the last 12 months. This is on top of all the other bits of bitesize content that had been added to the game before then, including a bunch of hotfixes, that aforementioned Nightmare difficulty mode, and the addition of community maps on console. This is on top of the excellent Bozak Horde and The Following story expansions, which brought new play areas and enriched the world with more things to see and do.
All of this, by the way, can be picked up for an incredibly affordable price with Dying Light: Enhanced Edition, which basically wraps up everything into one GOTY-sized package. Yes, there’s always going to be something inherently satisfying about drop kicking a zombie into a spike trap, but Techland’s content care packages have been that extra little nudge that was needed to get me back into Dying Light on a recurring basis.
Rumour has it that a Dying Light sequel could be one of this year's surprise E3 2018 games, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Techland announcing such a follow-up now that Bad Blood, its Battle Royale inspired PvP spin-off, is gearing up for launch. Even if Dying Light 2 doesn’t turn out to be a thing this year (*update* it is!), I’m still perfectly happy with the original for the time being, which continues to surprise and impress me, long after I thought I’d the zombie apocalypse could no longer achieve any such thing.
See what we think are the best zombie games of all time, and find out where Dying Light ends up in the ranking.
In the gaming world, it's hardly new practice to offer complete editions of previously released titles but, between CD Projekt RED's The Witcher series and now Techland's Dying Light, it's fair to say that nobody does enhanced editions quite like a Polish development house. Combining the experience and insight gained from the original release with new content is what has come to define the best enhanced editions and, with Dying Light: The Following, that's exactly what you're getting. Features galore, an entire new world to play in and a whole lot more awaits potential buyers here but as this is Digital Foundry, we were most interested in what this means for presentation and performance.
Since its initial launch last year, Dying Light has continued to receive patches - nine of them, in fact - with minor tweaks made on each platform in order to improve performance and image quality. For instance, Techland now offers users the ability to disable the film grain effect and choose from a large number of unique color filters. This includes things like macro mode, which attempts to mimic a tilt shift perspective complete with depth of field, or one of the print options, which give the game a comic book feel.
The sheer number of new modes and ways to play the game is also rather impressive here and adds a lot of replay value to the mix. The game's multiplayer mode is particularly interesting, though in our testing, we did run into some connectivity issues - not something one would expect in a definitive release. Still, this feels like the complete package - what could possibly go wrong?
Well, there are some curious issues that persist in each version of the game. Some of these issues, such as the noticeable ghosting artefacts caused by the temporal anti-aliasing solution, are shared amongst the three but the console versions have unique performance quirks that can have quite an impact on the user experience. We'll cover each of these in turn.
Xbox One: Performance impacted by 'Instant On' system feature
Operating at 1536x1080, Dying Light was one of the earlier titles to utilise a resolution lower than 1080p but still sharper than 1600x900. It's certainly not as clean as the PlayStation 4 version but manages to look great in its own right and - at launch anyway - had an advantage in terms of cleaner texture filtering. Unfortunately, the early versions of the game suffered from pretty noticeable screen-tear in busy areas, accompanied by frame-rates dropping into the mid-20s. It wasn't common enough to spoil the game but it definitely impacted the experience.
In its latest iteration, we see some forward strides in terms of performance. Dying Light now makes use of the seventh CPU core on Xbox One while frame-rate issues are reduced in the original game. Running through the same problem areas on Xbox One produces generally faster results by a good 2-3fps. It's a welcome improvement.
However, there's another problem with this version of the game that has been around for quite some time, it seems - Dying Light is rendered nearly unplayable when using the Instant On feature available on Xbox One - a feature that enables faster console startup times while allowing users to continue playing from where they left off. In Dying Light, this OS level option triggers a bug that basically forces a double buffer v-sync mode rather than the standard adaptive v-sync mode.
The reason this is a problem is simple - when the hardware is under load we see more significant performance drops. Scenes that operate at or near 30fps normally can come crashing down to a full on 20fps instead. The resulting frame-rate issues are rather similar to the 20fps swamp performance problems that plagued the PS4 version of The Witcher 3 for months. While this issue is in effect, we observed frame-times rapidly alternating between 33ms and 50ms (and higher) producing a very uneven level of performance that impacts controller response and the presentation alike.
Thankfully, when operating normally, performance is much better. We see a level of performance closer to 30fps most of the time with more demanding areas dropping to an average of 27fps with screen-tear. The countryside region available in the DLC certainly seems to struggle more often on Xbox One thanks to the abundance of foliage but it's still very playable. Unfortunately, in order to play the game optimally, you may need to restart your console on a regular basis or simply disable the Instant On feature. Neither solution is really acceptable and we only hope this can be patched out at some point simply because, beyond this issue, Dying Light is reasonably solid on Xbox One.
PlayStation 4: Looking good, but compromised by spiking frame-rates
Looking at PlayStation 4 we actually have a rather different situation on our hands. When it first launched last year the PS4 version suffered from a lack of anisotropic filtering which resulted in blurry textures at oblique angles. Thankfully, in version 1.05, this was addressed and selective AF was implemented bringing it on par with Xbox One in this regard. Version 1.05 also modified the density of foliage in order to improve performance on all platforms. This means, even on the PC, we see a general reduction in the flora and fauna. Of course, the PlayStation 4 version continues to operate at full 1080p while offering faster overall performance - drops under 30fps are extremely uncommon on Sony's platform. Oh, and Dying Light: The Following also makes use of the recently unlocked seventh core on the PS4 as well.
This would be all well and good if not for one seriously frustrating bug that has plagued Dying Light from day one - frame-rate spikes above 30fps. Now, on paper, this doesn't sound awful. We're certainly not fans of the added judder one must deal with when running with an unlocked frame-rate (as seen in Killzone Shadowfall and Infamous Second Son - both of which added a 30fps lock option), but that's not what we're seeing in Dying Light. No, in areas where there is rendering power to spare, such as indoor locations or when looking towards the sky, we see a flurry of frame-time spikes to 16ms. Like an inverted version of the Xbox One standby mode bug, the game appears to use a double buffer v-sync setup in these situations.
This back and forth between 16ms and 33ms is remarkably jarring as the game is effectively rapidly alternating between 30fps and 60fps. This impacts controller input and the general presentation producing a lurching sensation that is highly annoying. As noted, this occurs primarily indoors or while in less demanding outdoor areas. Here's the thing, though, the Enhanced Edition is further optimized than the original release and, as a result, these frame-time spikes have become more common.
If the frame-rate is clamped down to 30fps with no opportunity to go beyond this point, the PS4 would have a nigh-on locked frame-rate. It really is a shame that this problem remains. We pointed it out in our original coverage and have continued to keep tabs on the situation. With Techland updating the game so regularly we were disappointed each and every time this situation went unresolved. The fact that the game now suffers more regularly from this issue in the Enhanced Edition is deeply disappointing.
PC: By far the best way to play Dying Light
Finally, we come to the true definitive version of Dying Light - the PC release. The game runs extremely well on the PC platform even on mid-range GPUs. It's possible to enjoy Dying Light at a smooth, stable 60fps or, on weaker hardware, at least a locked 30fps. The issues we encountered on consoles are non-existent and visual quality can be pushed out even further.
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