Dying Light 2: Stay Human was a mega-hit, with over 5 million copies flying off the digital shelf during its launch month alone. With the first story expansion, Bloody Ties, coming out October 13, I sat down with game designer Tymon Smektała to glean a bit of insight concerning what we’re in for.
You get a true sense of a developer’s intention for a piece of content by how they describe it, so I begin by asking Tymon to pitch me Bloody Ties. He indulges me. “For me, the best reference for it is movies like Rocky or Creed. It’s an emotional story that’s crashing with elements of sport, rivalry, fighting, and trying to be the champion,” he tells me. “Trying to get as much prestige and fame as possible. It allows you to make some choices, which will affect the endings of the DLC, so we are definitely keeping the choice and consequences of Dying Light intact.”
I interject, asking whether the Bloody Ties plot had any bearing on the overall plot of Dying Light 2. “Yeah, yeah. It is a side story,” he confirms. “We wanted to do this consciously because players can jump into it at any level of progression, at any point in the story. It is quite fresh after the release of the game so we have to account for players who just started, as well as for players who just finished and are on a new game.”
The first act of the DLC takes place in the open world of Dying Light 2, but after the first act you reach the new location, The Carnage Hall, where the tournament begins and you aim to become the best and most competent challenger to the title. When Bloody Ties was first revealed, it was met with scepticism by the Dying Light community. “Arena” DLCs tend to be characterised as minigame-heavy without a lot of substance. Smektała is quick to make clear that this won’t be an issue for Bloody Ties. There won’t be minigames. The Carnage Hall may be an arena, but that doesn’t mean Bloody Ties will lack substance.
“The coolest thing about it is that you’d probably expect it to be like another arena DLC where you just fight waves of enemies. It’s actually way more than that,” Smektała tells me. “There’s quite a chunky story that takes between 5-6 hours, Additional side quests allow you to change the flow of the main narrative. Some take you back to Villedor, some are played inside the new map of the Carnage Hall. But what happens in the actual arena, is also very interesting.”
In the arena, you’ll undertake “Spectacles” – new missions based on historical or mythological events that take place within the Carnage Hall. Smektała uses the example of Robin Hood to illustrate what these missions will entail. “You have to infiltrate the Sheriff’s castle and steal some gold. There’s a whole stage built that resembles the castle. First, you have to find a way how to get inside the castle, then you have to find a way to get past the Sheriff’s guards, then you have to get to the cart, then you have to take the cart outside but then you’re chased. We have spent quite a lot of effort making it way more than just a regular DLC.”
These secondary points sound interesting, but I can’t quite escape the sense that this is a particularly flashy Arena DLC, with all the shortcomings that come with that. Smektała says that wary players will be surprised. “So definitely it’s way more than that. I think the story, to be honest – because it’s a smaller story – allowed us to focus more on each character,” he begins. “It allowed us to focus a lot more on what’s happening. It’s quite dense, it’s quite emotional, it’s not too heavy but it’s heavy enough to actually make you ask yourself some questions.”
While the name Carnage Hall implies the expansion area will be limited to a building, Tymon assures me this is not the case. “The Carnage Hall is the building itself, but there is an area that surrounds it,” he clarifies. “There is a small area around where some easter eggs are hidden. I think explorers will actually find plenty of things to find there.”
I was curious to know what the conception and design philosophy behind Bloody Ties was. Without breaking stride, Smektała educates me on how the team landed on Carnage Hall as the setting for Dying Light 2’s first story DLC. “Dying Light is built on a couple of pillars. Those pillars are the day and night cycle, choices and consequences, parkour, and combat,” he begins. “Combat and especially combat against the infected is something a lot of players love. So it felt kinda natural, but again we tried to make it more. This is the foundation, there’s no denying that there will be a lot of fighting, but there’s also quite a lot of parkour and choices to make. So it’s quite rich, it’s quite chunky.”
Techland saw the popularity of Dying Light 2’s combat and chose to do a combat-focused expansion as a result. An arena where a player can use their full arsenal in creative ways? Seems a natural fit for the combat lovers out there. To hammer this point home, Smektała promises Bloody Ties will “take the violence and brutality” of Dying Light 2 “up a notch.”
Following his comprehensive pitch, I probe Smektała more on Dying Light 2’s five-year content plan – how much of this plan is “solid” and how much was open to changes? “We are quite open about it. For the first 18 months, the plans are quite solid. We know exactly what will happen and there’s quite a specific strategy used by us where we want to experiment with a lot of different content,” he says. “Some of it will be focused on online, some of it will be focused on single-player, some of it will be more combat-based, parkour-based, story-driven, non-story-driven. So the idea is that after the first 18 months, we will understand the community of Dying Light 2 better. For the rest of the time, we have building blocks. We know what will happen there but there’s space to tweak those plans and change them following feedback.”
Smektała acknowledges that it’s impossible to know what’s going to happen in four or five years, and they’ll have to keep abreast of what the community wants. Following up on a successful game is never easy, players are always hungry for new content. Does that pressure weigh on the dev team at all? “There’s always pressure, but thankfully I’m a game developer with almost ten years of experience so it’s easier for me to not get too excited, to approach things with a cool head,” he muses. “So of course there are expectations and this means there’s pressure. To be honest, you can’t think too much about the pressure because it will just drive you crazy. So we try not to think about it, we believe this is a very cool addition to the Dying Light universe.”
It’s clear that Tymon believes in the quality of Bloody Ties. It’s not easy to keep a community’s attention for half a decade but Smektała and Techland have done it before with the original Dying Light, and are aiming to do just that again with their five-year roadmap. Only time will tell if Dying Light 2 maintains the momentum of its release. After a recently-announced delay, Bloody Ties will now release on November 10.
