![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() You can climb rooftops, you can explore interiors of buildings, there's a huge seamless city - well, you really have to go a long way until you see a loading screen." We want to give players the actual advantage that people always see in movies, in comic books. "You're human, smart and agile and you can just jump over chest-high walls and maybe climb over stairs. "This is something we felt was missing from zombie games," says Krakowiak. It's more than just a tweak of the slow, trudging walk that made playing Dead Island feel like wading through treacle: it's a part of Dying Light's key new feature, dynamic traversal, an addition that adds as much to the zombie genre as it lifts from Mirror's Edge. The shanty huts reach out into the distance until, at some point near the horizon, they blossom into a cluster of tall tower blocks, and when a plane swoops through the skies with its engines ablaze, the trees all sway convincingly under the drama of it all.Īnd once the scene's stopped being admired Dying Light impresses again, the player moving urgently across the rooftops as they scramble to investigate the scene of the inevitable plane crash. Looking out upon the slum that's part of Dying Light's open world - the tropics of Dead Island having been replaced with a more downbeat but no-less sunny clime - the detail astounds. It helps that it's being shown on a high-end PC, in a vision that's set to reflect the target being set for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions. First impressions of Dying Light put some of those fears to rest: this is an attractive, coherent take on the zombie genre, and one that looks to offer plenty more than just cheap thrills. For all its boisterous, energetic charm, Dead Island was a scrappy, often ugly mess. There's good reason why Techland's developers weren't satisfied with what they had. They learned a lot working on all our games, and they are never satisfied with what they have." As far as this one's concerned, in 2012, when Dead Island was done, the biggest team that we had in the studio they wanted to try something new. The difference is small and important to us. "Riptide, we always called it the next installment and that's it. "One thing that needs to be said is that I don't know anything about any Dead Island sequels," Krakowiak continues. "You have to ask them about that" - we did, and they declined to comment - "but we are proud of what we've achieved, how that game's introduced some very interesting concepts, but we're focusing on this one." Obviously Dying Light won't look quite like this on Xbox 360 and PS3 - though Techland's trying to cut as few corners as possible on the current generation. "Dead Island is Deep Silver's IP," says Krakowiak. It's good to have several projects - because when the art's done that team can move on to another project."Īll of which goes some way towards explaining how a 250-strong independent studio can churn through so much in so little time, but doesn't really explain why its latest melee-based first person zombie game doesn't bear the Dead Island moniker. We know how to do it, and we have to do it - we work with different publishers, we have our own engine and we have our own art team etc. "Sometimes we have something cooking for a long time in pre-production, and then we move to full steam ahead and the game gets done. Obviously we have other stuff cooking, but that's it for now." "Now we're working on this - the biggest game in the studio's history, and the perfect opportunity at the beginning of the next generation - and HellRaid. "Gunslinger's done, and the Warsaw studio's done with Riptide," says Techland's Blazej Krakowiak. It is instead the product of the team's top-tier talent, and is the most ambitious project it's undertaken to date. This isn't a Dead Island game, at least not as far as it's willing to admit. The Polish developer's got an answer to those worries, of sorts. When Techland announced another first-person zombie game a mere month after Riptide's release, mere weeks since it announced an all-new game and mere days after the release of a new Call of Juarez, it's understandable those same concerns rise again. Those fears were borne out by a sequel that papered over some of the cracks but couldn't overcome the shabbiness at the heart of the original design. When Riptide released 18 months after the original Dead Island, there was some cause for concern Techland, a developer not necessarily renowned for the quality of its output, seemed to be pushing itself too far. ![]()
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