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

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."

Techland's smaller, more focused open world means that Smektala thinks "Dying Light is probably one of the most dense open-world games on the market." Upcoming release Dying Light: The Beast, he says, is a particular example of a world "where you are constantly looking around you, where you are constantly in the zone, in the feeling of it all."

That's helped along, of course, by the fact that Dying Light is a zombie series, which means you've got a good excuse to put enemies everywhere in the world. Whether that's hordes of even just single zombies, Dying Light can offer a threat "at any given moment." That helps with density, but it's not a complete answer to the question. There's still got to be plenty to actually do, but that does seem to be a relative strength of the Dying Light series' melee-focused, first-person, very tactile gameplay.

Smektala has been busy talking up Dying Light: The Beast, and the ways in which Techland is attempting to address the "missteps" of Dying Light 2. Whether it manages to recapture the magic of the original game remains to be seen, but the studio does seem to have learned some valuable lessons.

How does Smektala's philosophy track to our list of the best open-world games?