Dying Light: The Beast will allow fans to partner up for co-op action—a tradition in the series. The team at Techland recently spoke with The Best War Games about the importance of co-op to the franchise and how it'll be implemented into Dying Light: The Beast.
Though Dying Light: The Beast will be doing plenty to keep things fresh, Techland is taking pains to ensure it leverages what worked best in previous entries in the series. This includes the implementation of a co-op mode, which was present in Dying Light and Dying Light 2. The Best War Games sat down with members of the Techland team, including franchise director Tymon Smektala and game director Nathan Lemaire, to discuss the co-op mode and its role in the series.
Dying Light: The Beast's Co-Op Mode Explained
Both original Dying Light games featured co-op modes, allowing fans to play through the campaign together; that's in addition to the many instances where DLC has featured co-op integration. Similarly, four-player co-op will also be coming to Dying Light: The Beast, and the mode will feature shared progression, meaning more than the host will progress throughout the story. In the discussion about Dying Light: The Beast's co-op mode, Lemaire revealed the purpose of the mode and the design goals that informed its implementation:
"Dying Light: The Beast is a great and open playground. Playing the game with friends is creating a different kind of experience, full of anecdotes and emerging stories. Offering co-op is also a way for us to allow players to continue their experience by joining their friends or other members of the community."
Lemaire's statement highlights the general applicability of co-op play to the Dying Light gameplay experience, implying that the openness of the Castor Woods will be an asset to the co-op mode.
Smektala went further, bringing in statistics that informed the team's decision to keep up the co-op tradition:
"Looking at historical data, about 25-30% of Dying Light players are playing the game in co-op. This means that even if we focus most on the immersive, narrative-driven, single-player survival horror part of the experience, there’s a very significant part of our community that’s interested in a more free-for-all, “let’s have fun with friends on a Friday night” approach to the game. We’re all for that, as many of us were raised on classic co-op experiences from the X360 era like Army of Two. There’s definitely something special about facing a horde of zombies with your buddies."
Blow Up Zombies with Friends
Smektala's comments on Dying Light: The Beast and its co-op mode hit upon the core appeal of zombies in a game that emphasizes action. Zombies, through their depiction in all manner of media, are generally depicted as a fodder enemy. They're weak, often slow, and come in massive hordes—not to mention that they're utterly mindless and fiercely ravenous. Those last traits are key to making a player feel good about slaughtering zombies, considering that, in most media, there's no need to feel bad about popping one's clogs.
Dying Light: The Beast
