Dying Light: The Beast director says great open-world games aren't about how big the map is, but about how good it feels to move around

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"If it's hand-crafted, if it feels real, the player's satisfaction of being in that world is much bigger"

Dying Light: The Beast
(Image credit: Techland)

Dying Light: The Beast might not have the biggest open-world map ever, but its hand-crafted nature means that Techland thinks you'll still have more fun than you might do in a bigger world.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala says that the studio had realized that "open worlds are not about scale. They're about your feeling of being there. So we can create an open-world that's maybe not as expansive, but if it's hand-crafted, if it feels real, the player's satisfaction of being in that world is much bigger."

Smektala points at "some of the other open-world games" to try and explain his point. In other titles, he suggests, "there's usually hubs of activities, and in-between them not much is really happening." That's something Techland is trying to avoid – "we were trying to make Dying Light games open-world games where you are constantly playing, where you are constantly interacting with the controller, where you're constantly pushing buttons."

Ali Jones
Ali Jones
Managing Editor, News

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.

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