How do you innovate with zombies? Dying Light searches for the answer

After Techland sold the Dead Island IP to Deep Silver, the studio knew two things: That it wanted to make another zombie game, and that the next game couldn't simply be Dead Island 2. That's why iteration after iteration led to Dying Light, a co-op zombie game with Mirror's Edge style running and vaulting, and some game-invasion thrown in for good measure. That latter feature makes the dynamic day and night cycle of Dying Light that bit more anxious, as a player can choose to invade someone else's game as a beefed-up enemy, and attempt to kill them in the dead of the night. I spoke with Maciej Binkowski, lead game designer on Dying Light, about finding innovation in a genre that appears to have already been beaten to death. I want to talk about your views on innovation in zombie games, since you guys already have a track record with zombie games. I find it fascinating that zombie games and zombie DLC just continually sell by the bucketload, regardless of how many are released... and I don't know if anybody has worked out exactly why yet. From your perspective, what is it about the genre? Maciej Binkowski: I think it's a unique experience that we have in these games. They're selling something that you can live through, that you couldn't before. That's why people are attracted to it. Maybe they are just tired of having the same shooter every year.

But then again, people complain about zombie games as well, right? I regularly hear "Oh great, another zombie game." And then they go and buy it anyway! Binkowski: Yeah, it's pretty fascinating! A lot of people say, "The zombie genre is saturated, it's going to die soon." I'm not so sure. There's still so many stories to be told. We keep finding new perspectives where the focus of the game is different. You have games like Dead Rising, where it's all about getting goofy and building the ultimate killing toy. Then you have something like DayZ where it's all about this feeling of being helplessness. It's like every single encounter is something that might lead to your death, so you're really anxious. And the first time you play and see another player you think, "Hey, it's another person!" And then he kills you, and you're like holy... And the next time you see a human being, you're like, "Stay away!" Then you have Dying Light, where we're kinda in the middle... we're not going all the way with the goofiness, but we're not hardcore survival. We call it action-survival. It's something in-between.

So which elements of the game do you feel are going to progress the zombie genre? Binkowski: Our feature that we're most proud of is the freedom of movement. I would really hope that we could do something that will be seen as the next step in the evolution of FPS games. Back in Wolfenstein, there was no jumping, and that was cool. Then you got Duke Nukem with jumping, and suddenly it's like, "Well of course you have to have jumping! That's just the basics." So we hope that once you've spent a couple of hours with Dying Light, you suddenly think like, "Of course I can go over that wall or climb this obstacle! My grandma could climb over it, so why can't I?" I hope in the next couple of years, we're going to see games that do that - it'll be a basic thing that could expect from an FPS game. With both Dead Island and now Dying Light, it seems like you guys are really keen to make yourselves known as the people who do zombies differently. Binkowski: Dead Island was a huge surprise, even for us. It evolved tremendously -- it started as a single player game, it was something completely different to what we actually delivered to the market. In the process of development -- and I was really lucky, because I joined the company at the moment where they made the shift and said, "OK, we're going open-world and co-op" -- it was like we had to start from scratch.

It was kinda goofy, but we liked it. I think it was kinda niche too - there wasn't really good melee combat games. We really wanted to make it visceral as possible. It felt more meaty, like you were really hitting the zombies. Binkowski: Yeah, we wanted to feel it. And then of course, we weren't in a very good business position with Dead Island. Right from the start, we knew we had to sell the IP. In the process, we decided to split with Deep Silver - so that means you've gotta come up with new IP. Of course, since it was a success, we wanted to do a sequel - but since it's gotta be new IP... you can't just make Dead Island 2, and name it different. So we sat down and thought right, if we need to make something unique, what are we gonna do? One of the most recurring ideas was the freedom of movement. Then we really wanted to try the dynamic day and night cycle in Dead Island, but we didn't have enough time. So we had DLC that happened at night, and we knew that it felt night, so it'd be awesome if we could make it dynamic.

It wasn't what it is right now. We iterated a lot. At first it was just visuals, and then we thought well, it's kinda nice, but it felt like we could do more. If it doesn't change anything, why bother? So at some point we said, what if we make you "the man" during the day, but when night comes, you're fucked? But yeah, I think we had more than 10 ideas, and finally we got what we have. There's also the player vs. player night-time element, where other players can invade games online, right? Binkowski: Yeah. So we said OK, as another night-time scenario that might happen, sometimes you play a regular night, and sometimes someone drops in. Bringing human factor into the game was something absolutely amazing. I'm a big fan of competitive games, and so bringing another player into the game just turns everything upside. It's totally unpredictable. Humans made decisions that sometimes make no sense at all. You could make a really cool AI to play, but at some point it's not going to surprise you in the same way that the human players surprise you.

I guess that's a problem that Valve had with the Tank in the original Left 4 Dead -- once you realized how you could trick the Tank AI, the illusion was gone and the curtain was pulled back. Binkowski: Exactly. So with this, you work out how they play it, and at some point he does something and you think, "Why would you even do that? You should never do that!" And then he surprises you and does something that you wouldn't expect. It made no sense, but he caught you by surprise and he turned the tables on you and won. That's just what makes games great.