Dying Light 2 had a remarkable launch, selling more than three million copies in the first weekend and remaining in Steam’s top ten best-selling games throughout February. Despite early success, lead designer Tymon Smektala has no intention of resting on his laurels. “It’s easy to release a game and enjoy its initial success,” Smektala said on this week’s episode of TheGamer Podcast. “But then you have to build the longevity of the game. That’s exactly what we aim to do at this point.”
Techland is planning to support Dying Light 2 for the next five years. The original Dying Light is well known for the half-decade of updates it received, including a new-gen upgrade just this week, but that wasn’t always the plan. Smektala says the team thought they were done with Dying Light after it released, in part because the critical reception wasn’t particularly strong. “There was this moment where we started reading reviews, and the media wasn’t really into the game, so maybe the atmosphere of the studio went a little down,” he says. “But then we started seeing what people were writing online and how they were getting really excited about gameplay. They really gave us back the confidence that we needed. We felt the community really supported us so we wanted to give that love back.”
This time, post-launch support was planned from the very beginning. Smektala says that knowing from the start that they wanted to continue working on Dying Light 2 long-term allowed the developers to plan better and take a more thoughtful approach to add-on content. “It’s definitely different but I hope in the end the effect will be the same,” he says.
Part of that process involves gathering community feedback. Now that players have had time to dig into Dying Light 2, Smektala and his team are looking carefully at all the reactions to help them decide how to move forward. “We want to listen to the community and we want to follow community feedback,” he says. “Every [piece of] feedback expressed by a member of the community is precious, valuable information which we can take and act upon.”
Smektala uses his personal Twitter account to survey players about requested features, like photo mode and New Game+, to better understand their needs. Not everyone that shares their opinions about the game is polite or respectful, which Semktala understands might be difficult for some developers. “Behind every game there is a team,” he says. “They treat feedback about what they do very personally because this is where they express themselves. Everyone gets very personal about the game.”
Smektala, who started as a game journalist before joining Techland eight years ago, says experience helps build confidence. “It’s a little bit easier for you to understand that people will express opinions that sometimes won’t be positive,” he says. “But you have to listen to everything that people say and try to take something out of it.” Smektala doesn’t take harsh feedback personally either. “You have to understand that people don’t think about how they express their opinions,” he explains. “On the internet anything goes, but I think we’re adult enough and professional enough to be able to filter through this and get to the essence of what’s being said.”
Considering how different Dying Light 2 is from the original, some of the negative feedback has been around the sequels’ big changes. Smektala says there are some things already in the works that will bring back elements of the original – like this week’s Brutality Pack as well as higher difficulty game modes – but the team isn’t planning to undo all of the things that make Dying Light 2 different, either. “We don’t want to rush it,” he says. “We try to listen to every word that is being thrown at us and make our own conclusions from it.” While they intend to bring the game “a little closer to what [people] expect”, Smektala says they still want to stick to their guns and stick to their vision for Dying Light 2. “We will not be totally steered by democracy,” he says. “We still want to be able to make the final decisions on things. But we are listening and we try to learn from what we hear.”
The full 30-minute interview with Tymon Smektala can be heard as the final segment on this week’s episode of TheGamer Podcast. The show is available on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and all other podcast apps.
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