Just recently the second part of the zombie action game Dying Light 2 was released and before completing it I decided that I needed to finish The Following. The game was downloaded, I logged in, ran for an evening and then abandoned it again. And then I wondered why in the original my friend and I spent about 80 hours, and in addition, no matter how many times we got together, we still finished playing it literally in one evening. This fact prompted the idea that the DLC is worse than the original game, and let’s find out whether this is actually so, and for what reasons such a conclusion was made.
What are the main features of Dying Light? This is parkour and zombies, and if with the second everything remains, in principle, exactly the same, then with the first, in addition, there are very serious problems. For the game, the developers came up with their own movement system. Initially, they wanted to manually place objects that the player could cling to, but in the open world there could be thousands of them, which significantly occupied the memory. In their method, special rays scanned the environment, matched it with the player and determined whether he could climb on it or not. This gave simply unrealistic freedom of movement, incomparable to other games with parkour elements. Thanks to this, your run felt simply endless and all movements smoothly flowed into each other, and most importantly, the player himself decided where exactly to jump.
All this brought unreal pleasure, https://ladyaidacasino.co.uk/login/ even when you just got to the mission point. Usually in games you just want to skip such moments, but here you really had a blast, yes, and it was cool to just run around without a specific goal. It’s not for nothing that on the Internet there are more highlights on the game, more about movement than about killing crowds of zombies. This is, without exaggeration, the best implementation of such mechanics in games, which for me became the fundamental reason for the purchase, as a fan of all this movement, inspired from school by the feature films "Yamakashi" and "District 13". And David Bel himself, the performer of the role of Leito and quite a bit the founder of parkour, took part in the development as a consultant, and in the sequel he actually played one of the roles, although I don’t know if it’s big, since my computer is unlikely to handle it. In general, they approached the implementation of movement thoroughly and did everything conscientiously, if not brilliantly, although there is no limit to perfection, so it’s simply not worth throwing around such epithets.
And what a brilliant move Techland made in Dying Light: The Following? They simply took and practically neutralized one of the whales on which the game was based. Instead of the slums and narrow streets of the city of Harran, we are now greeted by open spaces that make the system useless, the development of which was spent so much effort, and during its implementation we had to face a bunch of problems that the programmers successfully dealt with. This step not only takes away from the players one of the elements for which they love the game, but also devalues the achievement of the developers themselves, who managed to implement such mechanics with great difficulty.
As usual you acted in the original? You took a quest and your destination was marked, or you yourself put a mark on the quest giver or task. Then you could, without wasting extra time, just run towards the mark and it was exciting. The game provided a kind of obstacle course that you completed with pleasure. Since many were added to the DLC, or rather the entire game consists of open spaces, we were provided with buggies to move around them. And in the first minutes you feel the pleasure of riding it, it’s something new, unusual, something that distinguishes your gaming experience from the one you absorbed for dozens of hours in the main campaign. After a while, you begin to miss the slums and rooftops of the city, since you cannot go directly on your own two feet to your destination. Of course, this can be done, but running stupidly is not very interesting, plus it takes a lot of time.
But here you will object, because there is a car. Yes, it exists, but you’re unlikely to drive it straight. The terrain is never suitable for driving, it consists of embankments, lakes and other bodies of water, fences and mountains, so the most effective method would be to drive directly on the road. The map is not small and often you have to go to the other end for the quest, probably noticed from Ubisoft. Maybe I have topographical cretinism, but here it got to the point of absurdity, when in order to get to my destination I put markers at every turn. You can, of course, jump through the fields, but there are crowds of zombies there, and the car breaks down very quickly, even despite upgrading its strength and adding various wunderwaffles to destroy living carrion. And at least for me, what caused pleasure in the first part, in addition causes outright hemorrhoids. Situations are especially pleasing when you are rushing somewhere at full speed, and then bam and suddenly find yourself in a body of water from which the car can only be rescued from the base, to which you still need to run. And you take it and walk across the open field to her without a hint of excitement.
The undead shredder as a whole has not changed, I would say, but even here I found something to dig into. The fact is that in the original the battles took place in close connection with parkour. If you were pressed, you could skillfully retreat, run around and generally take advantage of your surroundings. Here, I repeat, the horde basically meets in an open field and in addition to the massacre with stabbing, all that remains is to jump on their heads like some Mario. There is a thrill in this. Sometimes you rush around the field, turning off your brain, and for several minutes, just enjoying the chopping and cutting manipulations. At such moments you even begin to understand the fans of the zombie mode in Call Of Duty.
These are the conclusions I came to when I tried to figure out the reasons why I couldn’t complete this DLC. If the tasks themselves are interesting, then getting to them is quite boring, and that atmosphere is no longer there. But this is my personal opinion and if you like The Following then please. Although no matter how anyone makes excuses, no one will care that it’s just them who didn’t like the game, they will take it as an insult.