Dying Light: The Beast won't repeat the branching narrative choices of Dying Light 2, all because Techland wants to re-establish an official canon that will "hint at the future of the series."
Speaking to GamesRadar+, franchise director Tymon Smektala explains that Techland is partly stepping back from the narrative choices that allowed Dying Light 2 players to shape the world around them in an attempt to "get back to what we know from Dying Light 1." But there's also a more specific reason that players will have less narrative choice - Techland wants a canon ending that it can build on later.
"We wanted this to be a canon entry into the series," Smektala explains. "We're looking back at what happened to Kyle Crane in the first game, and we want to tell the next chapter of the story." Techland's looking to really make its own mark, he says, and to do that, the team wants to make sure that Kyle is in the same place for every player by the end of the game.
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"One thing that Dying Light: The Beast does is hint at the future of the series. We really wanted to make sure that at the end of the game, Kyle Crane is where we want him to be, so that's why we decided to back down from the narrative choices of Dying Light 2."
It's clearly a decision that Techland has wrestled with - Smektala says the team wants to remain in a "community-driven mindset" when making its games. But plenty of games struggle with asking players to make their own decision, before having to step over those same decisions when it comes to making a narrative follow-up. Elsewhere, Smektala is relatively candid about how Techland "made some missteps" when it came to Dying Light 2, so there's a chance that the studio is also attempting to fix those, but regardless, it's interesting to see the studio take such a firm stance on its narrative.
On the other side of the coin, Smektala says Dying Light has certain "areas of perfection" that it can't mess up or "our fans would kill us."
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