Techland's chief creative officer Adrian Ciszewski has revealed that the team tried to make the in-game world of Dying Light 2 as organic as possible, in terms of having no clearly defined good or bad calls - everything affects everything.
With Techland often being asked to provide an actual number of choices players will have, Ciszewski said that Dying Light 2's E3 gameplay trailer is just scratching the surface. There are no set numbers - everything will have consequences of some sort.
Most of these choices are quite ambiguous in nature, meaning not necessarily good or bad. The gameplay trailer shows this concept in action pretty well - Peacekeepers, while they may be very helpful when it comes to clearing the streets of the infected, may be a bit overzealous when it comes to authority.
So for instance, informing Peacekeepers of a place filled with the infected may clear the building in question, but will have part of them migrate elsewhere. Much like in real life, all things will have consequences, some for better and some for worse.
Similarly, manipulating Scavengers, another in-game faction, into moving closer to bridges may mean that you've more places to go, but it also means more visitors, which may not always be a desirable thing.
Revealing a healthy disdain, which I happen to share by the way, for presenting your game as a non-linear open world, only to find it's "series of invisible walls guiding you" where you're supposed to go, he said Dying Light 2 is trying to go the other way. As such, clever planning and manipulation of the in-game world may quickly turn a near-impossible to beat location into child's play. Zombie child's play, I guess.
Techland
Ciszewski said that Dying Light 2 had the team "thinking about choices and consequences as gameplay, as a narrative sandbox", instead of just having dialogue options branch out the story. It was during development of the game's predecessor, Dying Light that Techland realised having "agency on both the gameplay and story side" is key to a true open world.
You can find Ciszewski's interview with GamesIndustry .
Dying Light 2, Techland's open-world survival RPG game
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