After splitting from publisher Deep Silver and losing the Dead Island license, Techland had to come up with some new ideas to set its upcoming zombie survival game Dying Light apart.
As lead designer Maciej Binkowski explained to Strategy Informer in a recent interview, that wasn’t always an easy process; ”I’ll tell you, there were times we had to step back and say “this is too much like Dead Island”,” he admitted.
”Why does it feel like that, and how can we make it different and keep it fun. That was one of the difficult things. We made a game that was fun, and suddenly you have to find a different kind of fun, and that’s really difficult because you’ve got more questions than you do answers. Building a new IP can be painful.”
Ultimately, Binkowski admits that this adversity may have actually benefited the creative development of Dying Light. ”I think the fact that we had to develop a new IP, because that was the deal right from the start, we had to brainstorm different ideas about what to do with the game. Like we couldn’t just do another Dead Island, we had to come up with something new. It’s hard to judge, I don’t know. Stuff like the freedom of movement, the day/night cycles, how much of that stuff would be there if we hadn’t had to… because suddenly we had to choose stuff that’s really separate.”
”So we were kind of against this wall having to come up with this new IP. I kind of think it worked in our favour, you know. It really pushed us hard to come up with something unique.”
You can check out our full interview with Binkowski here. Dying Light is set to release on January 27, 2015 in North America, and January 30 in Europe.