It seems like it’s been forever since the surge of Zombie games coming out, titles like The Walking Dead, Day Z, Dead Rising 3, and more took the console generations of the Xbox and PlayStation by storm. One of the games to stand out from the rest was Techland’s Dying Light series, bringing players an open-world Zombie experience that combined the gameplay and combat from titles like Dead Island, and combining them with the movement mechanics of parkour titles like Mirror’s Edge, players would spend their time in the fictional city of Harran attempting to stop a zombie outbreak from taking over the world. The game did so well it got its own expansion for players to enjoy, which brought vehicles into the world of the game, and included more of a story for players to sink their teeth into. After this, Techland started working on a sequel to Dying Light, and the game continued onwards while people wondered what was going to happen next in this new Zombie-infested world. With Dying Light 2, the game is going to be drastically different than what some fans were expecting from the original game, and now it’s gone gold 2 months ahead of it’s anticipated release date.

While the original title had a large horizontal experience, Dying light 2 is aiming more at focusing all in on their movement system. Removing the cars from the game, the title is going to completely focus on running from location to location, including more things in the game like wall-running, and other parkour moves. This new world is going to be more vertical than the previous game, expanding the world with more levels of buildings and other vertical running spots than just a single row of rooftops in the original world. While this does make the world smaller than the original, it’s going to be more lived in, by both the humans and the undead. The game also isn’t going to include as many guns in the game as the previous version of the title. Instead, they’re going to focus on melee combat, as the new title is going to take place after the world has fallen to the zombie virus in the game. Players are going to be spending their time doing jobs for the many factions in the world as well, and the choices in the game are going to greatly affect the world around them, as the fate of the final human city falls into the hands of the player. Techland’s focus on their new game had players wondering when it’s going to come out, originally the game was supposed to launch in 2020 but soon fell to a delay that was made indefinite in light of the COVID19 pandemic, However, the game is finally coming out, and Techland is already celebrating while putting their final touches onto the game.

The game’s official release date is slated to be on February 4^th, 2022, however, according to a post from Techland’s Dying Light Twitter account, Dying Light 2 has officially gone gold. 

But, what does Dying Light 2 “Going Gold” mean? For those who are unfamiliar, a game going gold means that the game is complete, and is good enough to start printing copies of the game without any unfinished areas in a game. However, the concept of going gold doesn’t mean a lot when other titles have gone gold. Other titles like Cyberpunk 2077 went gold, yet still launched with plenty of bugs, and even some games like No Man’s Sky which “went gold” back in 2016, came out as a title that many didn’t actually think was gold when it launched. 

However, this doesn’t mean that the game is going to come out any earlier, Techland has stated in their Twitter post that they’re still on schedule to get the game on shelves in February, and they’re not going to stop working. Even though the game is complete, they’re going to spend their time making sure that the game launches in an even better state than they want it to be, despite the fact that the game is finished. “we will spend an additional time making sure that we’ll deliver the best possible experience for you” the tweet states. This is a good move on the developers of Dying Light 2, seeing that a lot of games have announced their titles going gold, like the aforementioned Cyberpunk 2077.

With the multiple delays from the company, it seems like they’re genuinely working on making the game the best it can be, especially since they announced an indefinite delay in January of 2020. With their intention of not giving a specific date on the amount of time they needed back then, it appears that Techland is more focused on making a worthy sequel to their hit Zombie game than other companies who pushed their games despite the fact they weren’t finished after the delays. 

Regardless of going gold, they’re using the extra time and things seem to be turning out for Dying Light 2, so it’s no surprise that they’re going to continue using this extra time to make a game they’re going to be proud of.