Open-World Zombie: My first few hours with Dying Light

[Jos]

I wasn't sure what to expect from Dying Light, a new open-world zombie game from a studio known for making the regrettable open-world zombie series Dead Island. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I discovered some cool ideas during my first hours with the game. Maybe you can teach an old zombie new tricks.

Maybe. I'm still not sure yet. Dying Light improves aspects of Dead Island's zombie-centric gameplay by adding parkour-style movement into the mix along with other promising features. It doesn't do as much to repair other parts of the Dead Island template that really needed fixing, though. So while I've enjoyed my first few hours with Techland's latest zombie romp, I remain wary about what's going to come next.

Read the complete article.

 

[seefizzle]

Whoever decided that they should blatantly copy Far Cry and make you climb radio towers should be punched in the ball bag. Climbing towers isn't fun. It wasn't fun in Far Cry, it's not fun in Dying light.

 

[ElShotte]

"I'm not entirely sure what Crane's mission is yet, but a few key plot points have already started to emerge."

@Yannick: Are you serious dude... have you completely missed the intro movie where Crane (the Player) parachutes into Harran? There was a GRE operative who turned rogue (Now known as Rais) who stole some secret documents from the GRE after his brother was killed when they failed to extract him. The secret document supposedly documents how to make a cure, but it is incomplete and in it's current form would end up killing people. Your primary mission is to recover this document.

Sorry man, but I refuse to read further past that seeing as you seem completely uninformed.

 

[Nobina]

Waiting for those benchmarks, this I heard was a bad PC port with almost no difference between a single 980 and an SLI. Wondering how's it gonna perform on mid range PCs.

 

[loading]

Waiting for those benchmarks, this I heard was a bad PC port with almost no difference between a single 980 and an SLI. Wondering how's it gonna perform on mid range PCs.

It's not a PC port by any means. The problem right now is that it's pretty unoptimized.

Right now the problem is that too many tasks are being sent to your CPU and not the GPU. There are a mired of tricks out there already such as the CPU affinity trick (alt tab, set affinity to 1 core for a second then switch back to all cores) for improving CPU load.

The thing that bothers me and others (hope they're listening on the forums) is the fact that they tossed in film grain and chromatic aberration without giving options to turn them off. We have eyeballs not cameras. Which resorted to people picking apart the Data0.pak files to turn them off.

Hopefully they'll get to some optimization problems soon. It's a really fun game and the core mechanics are solid, but the performance problems are holding it back.

Edit: Forgot about Steam Workshop. This game will only flourish with modding capabilities.

 

[Nobina]

Waiting for those benchmarks, this I heard was a bad PC port with almost no difference between a single 980 and an SLI. Wondering how's it gonna perform on mid range PCs.

It's not a PC port by any means. The problem right now is that it's pretty unoptimized.

Right now the problem is that too many tasks are being sent to your CPU and not the GPU. There are a mired of tricks out there already such as the CPU affinity trick (alt tab, set affinity to 1 core for a second then switch back to all cores) for improving CPU load.

The thing that bothers me and others (hope they're listening on the forums) is the fact that they tossed in film grain and chromatic aberration without giving options to turn them off. We have eyeballs not cameras. Which resorted to people picking apart the Data0.pak files to turn them off.

Hopefully they'll get to some optimization problems soon. It's a really fun game and the core mechanics are solid, but the performance problems are holding it back.

Edit: Forgot about Steam Workshop. This game will only flourish with modding capabilities.

Yeah, I meant to say it's unoptimized it's not a port, lol. Sorry. I'm just used to PC games being console ports.

 

[davislane1]

Sorry man, but I refuse to read further past that seeing as you seem completely uninformed.

I read the whole thing. He was trying to wing it. Probably had a deadline to meet. Probably should have asked for more time.

 

[Guest]

Seems to me these game programmers may have come from Microsoft.

 

[Sancticide]

"He can perform a number of acrobatic feats while travelling around Harran: jumping between rooftops, climbing up and around buildings, or just running and sliding with athletic grace."

So, the hero can scale walls, jump across rooftops, etc., but he gets winded swinging a pipe for 5 seconds? I'm sure it improves with time, but yeah, that seems super-arbitrary. Why can't devs just let the players decide how they want to play and provide options for different play styles?

That's why I rage-quit Dead Island. I really liked the guy who could throw melee weapons, but the game (either by glitch or design) kept screwing me over. Weapons kept disappearing from the ground or I'd lose weapons permanently after death, and since the game forces you to autosave, I'd constantly lose all the money/mats I spent customizing those weapons. The game wasn't fun enough to continue slogging through all that BS or re-rolling a different character.