Well, after what seems like a very troubled development and several significant delays, Dying Light 2 is finally out. What are everyone's thoughts?
I adored the first game, although I only played it once, only coming back to it to play The Following expansion. It had the best feeling first person traversal and melee combat mechanics I had seen at the time...at least by the end of the game. The main reason I never really had the urge to play through it again was because the ramp up to the game feeling amazing is pretty slow. Not that its unplayable at the start by any stretch, but after knowing what it feels like later, it makes starting over unappealing.
So far, DL2 seems like it's going for the exact same gradual increase in power and abilities. I think it feels even slower than the first game, going by memory, actually. That said, you also seem a little more capable at the outset than you were in the first, especially when it comes to the parkour abilities. Still, this game has a very slow beginning, as it's a good 3 hours before the open world is even available. The game continues tutorializing a lot of things beyond that, though.
I'm about 10 hours in at this point and my overall impression is positive, but not without caveats. The parkour and combat still feel really good. It's perhaps just less impressive than DL1 was simply by being more of same 7 years later. I'm enjoying that the game has leaned a bit more into its RPG elements, and I'm just getting to the point where loot feels meaningful. There seems to be a good variety of things to do, but the map full of icons is giving me serious Ubisoft vibes.
Maybe I'm not far enough in the story yet, but I don't think it's terrible so far. There are a few fun characters, and the voice acting ranges between good, to "good," to just plain flat. I've done several side quests that have implications in the main story, a few of which have had various choices and outcomes that already make me curious to see how else things would play out if I did the other option or had not even tackled it at all. A few quests and their placement in the story make no fucking sense though. There have been two instances so far where I've been to areas and met characters I've already interacted with only for them to act like this is the first time meeting me. Either the writing has failed to account for this or certain quests are being given in the wrong order. It's hard to get absorbed into the story at all with something as immersion-breaking as that.
As far as visuals, it looks nice running on performance mode on the PS5, though there is little about it I would consider impressive. I tried the other two visual mode options just to compare and I still like that the performance mode, purely technically, somehow still looks better than the higher fidelity modes. I will say that I haven't seen many repeated character models yet. Every character you can actually talk to has a very distinct look and animates pretty well during conversations. This is something Techland has never really excelled at until now so maybe it stands out a little more because of that.
I totally understand everything Jeff seemed put off by in the QL. Your enjoyment of this game will heavily depend on your tolerance of modern open world mechanics and your commitment to building your abilities up. There is still a lot to like and the game can be fairly rewarding. If you're a fan of the first game, I think this should be pretty easy to get into.
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