Dying Light
Single Player, PC (Linux – Steam/ Proton, Windows), 2015
Open World games have been a revelation. The option of “freedom” to the player to do whatever he likes however he wants, has always been a bait that gamers from the bygone days of corridor FPS have not been able to overcome. Back in time when I first played Max Payne, I wondered how great it would be if we could go to all those buildings that one saw from the rooftops of NYC. There was a level where Max would jump from one rooftop to the next while chasing drug peddlers, before finally hopping on to the roof of a (running) metro. Few years later Far Cry was released, and we got the first taste of what a really open world shooter could be if it wanted to. (Although Far Cry original was still not as open as subsequent titles of the series. )
Then we have the endless RPGs like Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Some of their stake to fame was precisely the open world they offered, and the freedom to do any quest in any order. I still have not finished Skyrim‘s main quest line, but I uninstalled it a couple of years and 500+ hours later, so that I did not miss out on other games.
As gamers we have evolved since then. And now I do not have that enthusiasm about a game like Skyrim anymore, as I want to spend my gaming time on a variety of titles instead of just grinding through. I do not play video games to waste time (I guess most of us do not have time to waste for that matter). I play them for the immersive experience they offer, and that cannot be just restricted to 1-2 games.
The first time I saw a really innovative design to prevent grinding was Divinity: Original Sin. It is an isometric RPG which without duplicating a single fight, already runs into 150+ hours, with incentive to restart another new game if you wanted a different class or difficulty.
The golden formula of preventing grind is to not respawn enemies.
Once you have cleared an area, thats it. You can go back, but there won’t be any fight to win and gain (fake) XP. This makes the player really think of how to win the first time, because if you miss out on the XP, there is no second chance. This is really the best way to engage the player and not waste his time.
Some other open world games took a less strict approach, where option of grinding is left to the player to decide. For example, in Far Cry (newer ones), you can clear an outpost or a fortress and that area becomes less hostile. Now if you want to have a repetitive hostile experience, you could reset the outposts, but that is up to you.
Which brings us to Dying Light. A zombie apocalypse open world where there is no fast travel (not even between safe houses), no quick save/ safe house save, and endless swarm of zombies to keep you “engaged”. It is designed from ground up to be a grindfest.
In the initial “slums” area, you start doing quests. You clear an area of zombies (there are some innovative kill moves and animations, and parkour is good if you don’t get a headache from the post processing), but ten minutes later, you see exact same horde to fight through again*. It quickly becomes repetitive. There is an incentive to find loot for crafting, but how many times would you want to explore an area with zombies again and again (loot re-spawns too, like Fallout or Elder Scrolls). Most irritating is when you complete a quest and just want to do the last step, i.e. return to the quest giver. If the person is in another corner of the map, you have to go through the entire length to reach there, because the devs did not give a fast travel option.
Why can’t we fast travel in a map which is large enough (for navigating on foot)? If you want to make the players “feel” the apocalypse, it could have still been kept albeit more innovative. For example, you could designate some main safe houses for fast travel instead of all (one in each corner or region). You could “charge” some money for fast travel. Or it could be a perk in survivor skill tree that enables fast travel in a region where you have revealed all locations.
And by the way, there are enough things devs have put in the game to make it not so immersive anyway. In a zombie game, you can get bitten and live without regular dose of antidote “antizin” for days. Virals can jump buildings, but cannot jump fences of safe houses even in the day when that blue light is not on.
In one safe house (which the player unlocks as part of main quest), there is a small gap between a blocking van and the fence. A viral fell there while chasing me. The game magically lifted the viral up and threw outside the fence! I literally saw the “corrective” animation.
*There is a mission to blow up a “nest” at a later stage, but even after that, zombies keep spawning out of thin air. (And the concept of nest itself is hilarious, as the mutation is supposed to be transformative, not reproductive.)
When a zombie attacks you, the moment animation starts, you can’t do anything. You have to wait 2-3 seconds, take a health hit, and then the quick time “escape” event of smashing the button prompts. Even if you are carrying a gun and should be able to instantly fire. After some time, I unlocked a skill to instantly break free (though that still prompts after 1 second, instead of 2-3). If you sacrifice realism in the name of a bad skill tree design, there is no justification to not reduce the player’s frustration.
The awful skill tree frustrates further; by locking certain helpful skills behind useless ones so that you have to waste skill points to unlock the helpful ones. To be able to perform a drop attack from above, you first have to “learn” to pound your weapon to the ground! And some skills that should be available right from the start, have to be unlocked later, like stomp. Why would you need to be “adept” in combat, in order to put your foot on the ground?
And if that was not enough, they clubbed this grindfest with only checkpoint saves. You cannot save even after you reach a safe house. Lets say you “smartly” decide to finish some quests in proximity, then come to a safe house and call it a day before starting to haul your *** to the other corner of map. Next time you load up, you won’t start from that safe house, but from the one closest to your current objective. How you traveled between the 2 safe houses then, if the game decidedly had not included the fast travel option? The “immersive” design, turns out, is not so immersive after all.
The biggest problem of devs is the deceiving objective of doing “something new”. To be fair, this is an issue with most devs these days. Even though they are not re-inventing the wheel, they will “disable” some perfectly validated mechanics like save games, fast travel, unwanted post processing effects disabling, etc. so as to irritate the customers who gave them money for their livelihood. Who in their right mind decides to keep a blurry post process effect and not give a menu option to disable it? It is “post” processing effect, i.e. extra work after processing, then why can’t we turn it off? In Far Cry 4, they had this excellent option of disabling loot flashes. It immensely helped make the game more immersive. Then in Far Cry 5, suddenly you don’t have that option any more. You are again back to seeing streaks of light running over a loot object. Disgusting to not have something that was working fine, had a menu option, and broke immersion without. If someone wants, they can just keep it enabled right?
Another issue is community events. I am in a single player campaign, with visibility to other players set to hidden. Even then suddenly I find more virals spawning because of a stupid community event that I do not want to participate. They enabled that setting without my consent, spoiled my session, made me waste time by going to the main menu and disabling it (cannot be done in current session by the way), a setting which does not persist on next restart. So they will again enable at a whim. Just STOP with the online/ community bullshit already. And if you have your head shoved up so high, ASK first before enabling it.
Crafting is another grindfest. You have all ingredients to create 10 med-kits. Guess how many you can create at once? Just 1. So you have to repeat the task 10 times. It was really simple to have a “quantity” option right? Exactly the way they have quantity for ammo during purchase. So you can buy multiple quantities together, but not craft. Lockpicking is a random variable, and has nothing to do with it being hard/ medium or easy lock. You can open a hard lock in one flash, then break 2 lockpicks to pick the next easy lock. In the spirit of wasting the player’s time, the pin will vibrate after 90% travel, just so you can restart again.
Parkour is a hit or miss. In some places the jump did not grab the ledge but on retrying it did, but I was not sure what I did differently. So called “realism” vaporizes into thin air like camphor, when you see how far you can jump with momentum from a couple of steps, or how high your can pull yourself up with the support of few fingers.
The story starts promising, until you end up with the same kind of zombies as in Left 4 Dead, which do not fit the lore at all. I don’t understand the obsession these zombie-game devs have with boomers, goons, spitters, and demolishers. I thought the lore was about a certain Olympic games like event that witnessed a pandemic or biological warfare. They could have just kept the roster to regular zombies and virals, with variable behavior during the night (which is the game’s USP). Instead of focusing on variety of AI and aggression, they made volatiles and demolishers, designed to frustrate the player, e.g. the pin-point accuracy of a demolisher throwing an unlimited supply of concrete blocks not visible around where he is standing and picking them up, or around 3000 HP of the volatiles.
Modern Game Dev 101: When you are out of ideas, just increase the health points of enemies and make them bullet sponges. Pretend that your gamers are just schoolkids taking pride in fake achievements.
The final nail in the coffin is, well, the final mission. No other game in my 25+ years of play has screamed louder that why manual saves, not checkpoint saves, are important to respect players’ time. The game mostly cheats the player, especially at the penultimate stunt where you have to proceed exactly the way “they” want, and not how “you” want with the available tools which you have gathered throughout the grind, the most important of which they disable because otherwise it could have been just one-try completion, which they can never accept. And if you somehow luckily manage to reach the climax, you’ll be greeted with one of the biggest facepalm moments in video game history. You’ll question your sanity – is this really why you retried the last mission so many times?
Checkpoint saves are not for intellectually challenged devs like Techland, who is B.A.D. at designing mission progression.
That it is not a AAA game is evident from production quality of voice acting and dialogues. It is not necessarily a bad thing of course, but given how already the game tires the player, the story does nothing to keep up engagement. Not to mention, there is also zombie fatigue. This genre is so overdone that every game feels tiring.
But Dying Light certainly has some good things. For one, the melee combat is very good; beheading a zombie with a nail hatchet in one sweep, discovering that there is actually a right moment when to swing the weapon for the perfect shot, is very satisfying. Then there is a sense of achievement with mastering arrow trajectory and gun recoil, and makes it totally worth. The setting and weather effects are well done. Graphics are quite immersive for a 2015 game. Rain and dust particles do not reduce FPS. Light effects are also good. Collecting drop loot from airplanes, then giving to the Quartermaster often give you better XP than the main quests, and can be satisfying. This also gives a chance to fight non-zombies (i.e. the antagonist’s men), as the zombies lack any variety after some time. Background music is also decent, but more pronounced in main campaign quests than others.
[Update 2021] The Following DLC comes as a somewhat saving grace. An hour into it and one can realize the DLC is what the base game should have been in the first place. (Speaks loads about the misplaced priorities of the company.) The devs got more time for the DLC after base game launch, and it shows. The Following branches out into a parallel story line within the game’s setting, with open farmlands and a buggy to travel around and mow down zombies with, the latter also bringing in new vehicle loot system, crafting requirements, and skills. The map though larger than both Slums and Old City, is still plagued by original game’s design choices, like how we can have such a large horde of zombies in farmlands is beyond any sane comprehension. The choice of safe houses are arbitrary, hunting towers act as spawn points but do not have beds to rest, but apart from these nitpicking, the DLC offers a better experience overall than the original game. There are better weapons, and the vehicle offers new ways to kill the cursed. Dialogues and voice acting, even lip sync seem to be better, so is the design of “nature freaks” (unique bosses) with Doom-esq weak points that require a little thinking to take down efficiently. The Following actually feels like the project that the devs may have wanted to do in the first place, but could not because of a poor higher management.
Officially, the game is natively supported on Linux. Just check out it’s Proton DB page, you will know what a big joke that is. Why Linux ports still use OpenGL instead of Vulkan, or do not go the Feral Interactive/ Gamemode way, I cannot understand. Linux gamers ought to be taken more seriously, because Linux is a platform where games are not pirated for. Though to be fair, after disabling film grain/ noise/ sun shafts, and putting CPU in performance mode, I did get a 1440p, locked 60 FPS performance using Proton (DXVK) on a GTX 970. So technically, the game is certainly worth.
I bought the “Enhanced Edition” at 70% discount, and for that price, it can certainly be recommended, to even Linux gamers. Only this edition is recommended though, as the base game masks the solid foundation the game has underneath, which is only revealed by the DLC . The original game was definitely never worth the asking price at launch. It is not a AAA title, not in terms of design and game mechanics.
[Update 2021] Techland has shamelessly patched the 6-yr old game with ads for their upcoming Dying Light 2 in game textures. So they have the time to put ad textures in their patches, but not the time to fix the post processing or bugs. A big thumbs down for the company. They have successfully influenced my decision to not buy the sequel at launch.
Pros:
- Linux open world at a discount
- Satisfying melee combat/ animations and innovative parkour
- Immersive graphics and particle/ weather/ gore effects
- Technically robust performance (only after some ini file tweaks)
Cons
- G.R.I.N.D.F.E.S.T.
- No manual saves, not even safe house saves, only checkpoints
- No fast travel, even between liberated safe houses
- Slow, boring crafting mechanics
- Bad skill tree design
- Community events which spoil your session without notice and cannot be permanently disabled
- More time in traveling across map, killing re-spawned zombies, than actual quests
- Headache inducing post processing effects that cannot be disabled in menu
- Unnecessary patches to put ads of the DLCs/ sequel in game textures
Hello, new world! 