Dying Light: The Beast franchise director Tymon Smektala is “a little bit surprised” that other studios haven’t copied his series’ approach to open-world game design, particularly when it comes to player freedom.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, Smektala said that “one thing Dying Light games always did – and we were the first ones that did it – […] is the amount of freedom we put in players’ hands.” The original Dying Light, he says, was particularly good at breaking “the usual walls and corridors” that limited players’ direction in open-world games and FPS games, respectively.
“Dying Light suddenly became this game where you can climb on anything, go anywhere you want, see the world from the other side, from any vantage point.” It was an approach to open-world design that Smektala says he was “a little bit surprised” not to see “picked up by other games to an extent I was expecting to.”
That player freedom has shown up, but in places you might not have expected. Titanfall and its battle royale spinoff, Apex Legends, allowed players to access almost anywhere they could see, and Smektala says, “Call of Duty even is going in that direction.” I’d argue that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom also both offer some of that ability to “access almost anywhere,” as long as Link had the stamina to climb there.
Whether Nintendo, Respawn, or Activision took any particular notice of Dying Light is unclear, but Smektala says that he hopes his game “opened some mental drawers in other developers’ heads.” But it’s not just open-world game design that he thinks Techland pushed the envelope on. First-person melee combat is a particular example of something he thinks “we are a pioneer” in. And “one thing that no one is doing in the same way that we are doing is […] the combination of open-world and survival horror. This is something very, very special about us.”
Techland might have pioneered some ideas, but there are other “areas of perfection” that the Dying Light team can’t mess up at any cost.
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