Respawn’s Titanfall uses free-running, but they aren’t giving ”quite as much freedom” as Dying Light. It’s on the rise and ”will be used a lot” in next gen titles, especially FPS.
The days of being confined to corridors is passing as gamers are hungry to scramble all over their environments. Free-running is the next step on from old timey springboards, which coincidentally need to be stepped on.
”I haven’t been able to play Titanfall, but from what I’ve seen I think their capacity is smaller than ours and they’re not giving quite as much freedom in terms of the parkour movement,” Tymon Smektala told us in our interview.
”Their version adds to the experience, in ours it’s the core of the experience. Having said that I think that Dying Light and Titanfall does show that free-running is something that will be used a lot in the next generation, especially in FPS games.” Techland has shown off Dyling Light’s free-running credentials, making it radically different from Dead Island.
Giving the player a truer free roam with free-running could help freshen things up. ”… this could be one area that makes them feel new and different again. Say in a couple of years I think that every FPS will have some kind of natural movement system or free-running system, because players will notice how it really improves the whole experience. “
Not every situation calls for a fight in Dying Light. ”…we have to give players something else to do if they don’t want to fight. Natural movement is one of the answers, and there are lots of others including the interactive environment.”
”In our environment you can use things to fight or escape zombies, and in each situation we want to give at least a few scenarios that can play out,” explained producer Tymon Smektala.
”All the things you can do in Assassin’s Creed you can do in our game. The only thing that you cannot do is a “leap of faith”, if you fall from that high in Dying Light you’ll probably die. That’s their thing really, anyway.”
He says that Dyling Light’s world is about 95% open. ”You can go nearly everywhere,” he said.
”If you see a building you can go in it, there are caves to go in, you can swim in and under the sea to find things of interest there. In terms of size it’s around 3-4 times the size of Dead Island’s map. Dead Island was a very flat game, but in Dying Light you can go really high.”
”It’s not only bigger than Dead Island but you also have to take into account that verticality factor as well.”
Check out our full interview with Techland’s Tymon Smektala as we discuss Dying Light, which releases in 2014.
