I started dying light 2 twice now, once on PC and once on PS5. Both times I had the same struggle: I don’t want to leave this starting place. Aside from a few rotting skeletons, it’s perfect – that’s where I want to be in an apocalypse. Screw this guy’s missing sister, she’s probably long dead. Here, in this autumnal idyll, I want to settle down.
One day there will be the post-apocalyptic game I’ve wanted to play my whole life. A game where there are no zombies, no aliens, no roving bands of murderous lunatics – just me, a deserted planet and time. As far as I’m concerned, the most uninteresting thing to do with a post-apocalyptic story is fill it with other people, and I can’t understand how no one has made the lonely, isolating game of absolute freedom I’ve craved that way Long.
dying light 2 is the game! For 10 minutes. And then it immediately plunges you further towards the big city, a place so populated by people, let alone zombies, that it feels like a busy Saturday in the city. Some apocalypse. It’s just a really bad power outage.
But you might be wondering, surely there wouldn’t be enough to do without all the usual games? Oh my god, there would be so much to do.
Do you remember the first episode of the miraculous The last man on earth? When Will Forte’s character has found a home to live in and we watch as he takes his collected items to the vast antechamber? There’s the rug from the Oval Office, a T-Rex skull from the Museum of National History, a Monet, Dorothy’s red shoes, an Egyptian sarcophagus… that!
Then the opportunity to sniff and steal would motivate me to leave my adopted country. Rummaging through strangers’ drawers, reconstructing mysteries about things long past, then going to a gallery and picking up the most beautiful paintings.
Think of the extraordinary complexity of so many modern open-world games, how they have entire cities to explore but so little to find in them. Imagine the development efforts that would go into creating combat systems, tons of tiring NPC dialogue to get through, and all those gory cutscenes that would establish whatever faction lives here or whatever all replaced by spending time filling up with it everywhere stuff.
I will Went home-Level narratives that can be pieced together house by house. I will Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey Richness of detail in museums. I’m talking triple-A stuff here, but with a focus not on combat or symbol ticking, just on explore
I probably thought unhealthily a lot about what I might do if I were the last person on earth. I know from conversations with many other people that it doesn’t appeal to them as much as it does to me. Maybe that’s because they’re not misanthropes or anything. In fact, many have told me that their first choice in this situation would be death. To escape the horror of being completely alone. Though her kids may not be as loud as mine.
That’s how it is when I start dying light 2, the house you arrive at during the opening minutes, that’s where I want to stay. Only without the other guy bothering me. Yeah, get rid of those bodies, maybe sweep some leaves off the patio, you know, general tidying up. And then I head home, a place from which I can stroll through this beautifully landscaped forest or, on more ambitious days, head out to a point on the horizon with a picnic.
Maybe there would be missions to go to the big cities. Optional of course, because that is my Apocalypse. Not to save anything or stop the robot uprising, just to find some cool shit. Imagine this incredible space but devoid of zombies and nagging NPCs, all replaced with the remains of their abandoned lives. I could spend forever in this game.
Instead, I have to settle for the opening minutes of a secluded paradise, and then eventually surrender to the noise and excitement of an overpopulated city teeming with odd jobs and danger, in what is, albeit a very decent, parkour zombie-fest. There’s this whole extraordinary world made by extraordinary developers, and it could have been mine! In fact, there are dozens of such worlds! Open worlds built for one game, used for one game only, then tossed aside. Surely they could be recycled? Surely I could have my game built from the abandoned remains of the predecessors?
One day it will be created. It’s going to be a surprise hit. It will have “NO MULTIPLAYER” in its highlighted features. Together, except not together, we misanthropes will have our idyll and we will be so happy there without each other.