Dying Light: The Beast's open ended approach to combat lets you tackle encounters a variety of ways, from full-on stealth to fire and brimstone – and Techland director Nathan Lemaire reckons this freedom of choice is even better suited to Dying Light than Far Cry, which he also worked on.
In a sit-down with GamesRadar+, Lemaire gives a couple of examples of how Dying Light: The Beast lets you approach dangerous situations in your own way, and inevitably, on the fly. In other words, the "360 approach."
"From the beginning of the castle, from the garden, the moment that you open the door, you can do this whole situation [in stealth] instead," says Lemaire. "And like, the whole situation has been made for that if you break the stealth, you have reinforcements and so on. It was only in specific activities that were like outposts or bandit camps, you know, and it's critical to do it when you are in the context of the main quest, because you create the grounds for player expression."
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Even in the nighttime sections of the game – typically when you would want to be stealthy, as it's when enemies are most dangerous – there are, uh, alternative methods of dealing with threats.
"UV lights are connected to a generator. So basically you could come at night, turn off the generator, and throw a ticker so it attracts volatiles and you hide in a bush, and then you just collect the loot [from dead soldiers]," says Lemaire.
"This is the kind of 360 approach I'm talking about, but I also feel [it's something] the franchise needs, because it makes the experience better and replayable as well."
Lemaire spent seven years at Ubisoft from 2016 to 2023, during which he was game economy designer on Far Cry: New Dawn. He tells us he was "mentored" on this kind of open-ended combat approach while he "was working on Far Cry [New Dawn]'s open worlds and so on," adding, "But it suits Dying Light very well – maybe better actually, if I can say that – but this is why it's one thing that would be interesting to push specifically with the amount of toys that we have."
The 360 approach isn't something Lemaire or Techland invented, and in fact Ubisoft has been throwing the phrase around since at least 2017's Game Developers Conference. What Lemaire is saying, however, is that those methods are most harmonious with Dying Light as a series – even more so than some of the games that helped popularize them.
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