While developer Techland has already confirmed that Dying Light: The Beast will take players around 20 hours to finish its story, franchise director Tymon Smektala has called this game length an example of the studio’s “size isn’t everything” philosophy. In an interview with GamesRadar, Smektala referred to Assassin’s Creed Shadows as a game that might possibly be too big.
He does point out that the massive scope of Assassin’s Creed Shadows does mean that players get their money’s worth when they buy it at full price. However, whether many players will continue playing the game long enough to finish it is another question entirely.
“If I start playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, basically from the start I know that I will never finish it,” said Smektala. “I get my money’s worth out of the investment, but it’s not by completing the game.” According to him, the “return on investment” on these kinds of games tends to come from “getting satisfied with the gameplay mechanics, with the chunk of the story I managed to experience, learn, understand.”
Smektala also spoke about how there are games in the market that are “proper AAA” that can be finished in 15 hours. Keeping these in mind, he is “quite confident that Dying Light: The Beast delivers on every pound, every dollar, every euro, every yuan that you have spent on the game.”
The discussion largely boils down to what makes a game’s price “worth it” for some players. Smektala brings up that larger games like Ubisoft’s recent entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, “finishing it basically at some point starts feeling like a chore. I don’t want to pay additionally for a chore, right?”
While Dying Light: The Beast’s runtime might be on the shorter end for an open-world game, that doesn’t mean that it won’t have plenty of things for players to discover. Back in June, Smektala had described the upcoming title as being one of the most dense open-world games out there.
“Open worlds are not about scale,” he said. “They’re about your feeling of being there. So we can create an open-world that’s maybe not as expansive, but if it’s hand-crafted, if it feels real, the player’s satisfaction of being in that world is much bigger.”
Speaking about the franchise as a whole, he said that “Dying Light is probably one of the most dense open-world games on the market.” He continued that the studio wants to make a world “where you are constantly looking around you, where you are constantly in the zone, in the feeling of it all.”
Smektala has also previously confirmed that Dying Light: The Beast will not have an overtly serious tone with questions about the nature of morality being at its core. Rather, he said that the developers at Techland were more focused on expanding things on the gameplay side.
“We don’t really need to be asking players about morality and all of that stuff,” he explained. “We are making games which are first and foremost about really cool gameplay, cool characters. I think overtly serious will not work for Dying Light as a series so I think we’ll continue on that path. I think it makes more sense for us.”
Dying Light: The Beast is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on August 22.
