"If I start playing Assassin's Creed Shadows, I know I will never finish it": Dying Light: The Beast director says his game is just the right size to let you get "every dollar" out of it

Dying Light: The Beast is a game designed to let you get "every dollar" out of its relatively modest runtime - in a piece of game design its director says is distinctly unlike Assassin's Creed Shadows and its sprawling open-world.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala explained that Dying Light: The Beast's 20-hour core runtime is evidence of the team's philosophy that "size ain't everything." Smektala points to Assassin's Creed to help make his point - "if I start playing Assassin's Creed Shadows, basically from the start I know that I will never finish it. I get my money's worth out of the investment, but it's not by completing the game."

Smektala's point is that games like Shadows - and Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla before them - are far too big for the average player to see in their entirety. The return on investment, then, comes from "getting satisfied with the gameplay mechanics, with the chunk of the story I managed to experience, learn, understand." Eventually, with games like these, he says that "finishing it basically at some point starts feeling like a chore. I don't want to pay additionally for a chore, right?"

On the other side of that coin, he says, are games like Control and Alan Wake 2 - "proper AAA" experiences, but ones that "you can complete [in] 15 hours." Those are far closer to the 20 hours that Dying Light: The Beast will give most players who see its story through (something Smektala really hopes they'll do). That means that Smektala is "quite confident that Dying Light: The Beast delivers on every pound, every dollar, every euro, every yuan that you have spent on the game."

It's a sales pitch that certainly makes sense for a studio like Techland, which doesn't have the same kind of resources to create enormous worlds as the likes of Ubisoft or fellow Poles CDPR might. But that's not something that concerns Smektala, who's already made his stance that bigger open-worlds don't necessarily mean better - instead, it's all about how much they are to get around and spend time in.

Dying Light: The Beast is more than a homecoming for Kyle Crane – "For us, this is Dying Light 3."