Everything Wrong With Dying Light 2

Dying Light 2 is an awesome game, but it has its flaws. Let’s take a deep dive into everything that is wrong with Dying Light 2

Table of Contents Table of Contents

First things first. I want to set the premise for this article. I really liked the game, and I finished the campaign, maxed out the character and did most of the side activities in the game with almost 90 hours on the clock. I had a lot of fun with the title, and I found the gameplay to be very satisfying and addicting in a good way. I would highly recommend the game to anyone, and it is one of the best titles I played in the last year or so.

However, the main focus on this article is to point out everything I did not like in the game that could potentially change in the future. I cannot wait to see what Techland adds and patches in the upcoming weeks, months, or even years.

I enjoyed the game and on my personal scale I would rate it as a low 8 or a high 7. With all that out of the way let’s dive deep into what are the worst parts of the game, and I will be very nit picky in this feature so buckle up and let’s go for a journey on dissecting all the flaws I found in Dying Light 2.

Everything Wrong With Dying Light 2

Chapter 1: Quests Without Questions

Dying Light 2 offers a better story than the first Dying Light, but it was not a bar hard to beat. The general story and its aim are fine, nothing wrong with it, but nothing memorable. I never had any questions that the game would pose me, or I would pose to myself while playing the main story. Many of the side quests suffer for repetitive plots and lackluster characters. There are some gems inside and some side missions are really captivating, but overall, the story is not the strongest aspect of the game.

Another part of that are bugs to the quests. Some missions appear available on the map even though if you hover over them, it states that the quest is completed. It is mostly due to the order of main and side missions you complete, and something bugs out. Nonetheless, it can be frustrating if you want to complete absolutely everything. The other thing are disappearing quests. There are some quests on the map like “Closure” for example that I selected, travelled to it and when I got near it disappeared. It repeated a couple of times, and it’s another technical aspect but connected to the mission’s aspect.

As a scenario: you travel through the roofs exploring destroyed ruins, you see an exclamation point in the distance, you find your way and parkour to reach it and then *poof* there is nothing there.

Characters are also fine, there are some exceptions. Hakan and Lawan are the most interesting characters that you build real connection to, but without any exploration for relations with them makes it not that hard to choose. As an example of something Cyberpunk 2077 did better are relations between characters. The fact that you could impact your relations with characters in a way it could let to a romantic relationship and even being together in the game’s world meant much more than just some simple choices here.

Speaking of choices. You can in fact impact how the open world looks and what is located in there like jump pads or car traps. Depending on the faction you choose to side with, the world will look different, but in terms of the story, it does not matter which faction you give control over the city to. The story choices are there, and some are harder than the other, but the ability to choose a patch has more impact than its effects themselves. More often than not, the decision does not impact the whole trajectory of the main plot. Also, a brief mention to the atmosphere which is great for the first couple of hours, but then the nights and the game stops to be scary at all.

Chapter 2: Technical Difficulties

For the first 40 to 50 hours of my playthrough I had no issues whatsoever and was quite surprised with the feedback from the community. It is worth noting that I played the early build of the game without the Day 1 Patch implemented. However, in the second half of my experience with Dying Light 2 I experienced many more issues than before. Some minor stuff like character model’s glitching or one game crush to the home screen, but there were also some more major technical aspects that did not work.

One of the issues I was faced with were stuck animations. All characters would just not work in cutscenes, they would be frozen somewhere off-camera and the items like a whisky glass would float until I restarted the game. Framerate started dropping to 26-27 FPS on PlayStation 5 on Ray Tracing mode. The performance mode stayed consistent to 60 FPS throughout my time with it.

As mentioned above, many visual glitches with quests, some icons are stuck on the minimap like a black question mark with no description, disappearing quests and more. I also cannot seem to find the last 3 inhibitors. I gathered 123 Inhibitors and have 3 of them left. There is no sign of them on the map, even though I unlocked every broadcast tower and triple checked if I did not miss any in quests. I tend to lick every wall while playing, so I think it is an issue on the game’s side.

Chapter 3: Endgame Imbalance

Last but not least, the main point of my frustration is the lack of endgame balance in some aspects. Hard difficulty relies heavily on making you hit zombies with a machete a thousand times in order to kill them, which does not add to the immersion.

Gear leveling is fine in itself, but being able to find epic or legendary weapons as early as the first hours of the game is definitely a choice, and there is no feeling of progression apart from damage numbers on the weapons themselves.

Enemy scaling is fine in most places, but there is no item scaling. I tend to gather and loot everything I find, but after beating the majority of the game’s content and upgrading a lot of stuff, I found that gathering some items is pointless. You spend a lot and I mean A LOT of time grinding for enemy trophies in order to upgrade your Medicine or Molotovs for example. I maxed out these items, and they work really good, you can see the progress in healing and damage respectively. However, almost every Molotov and Medicine I find in the open world is level 1. I can craft them for level 9, so there is no point looking for it. You need to craft everything yourself, and items found in the world are useless in the endgame.

Chapter 4: Epilogue – All the Other Issues

The final point I want to make is the lack of New Game Plus at the release of the game. Techland themselves stated that the game can last for 500 hours, and even though I can see that in some way, if you want to find every collectible and beat the game multiple times in order to see every story choice, but it is farfetched. To add to this, lack of New Game Plus hurts the game a lot, because if I did want to see other campaign choices going from fully maxed out parkour skill tree to poor, slow lazy boy Aiden is just impossible.

Language issues. Not being able to change the voice-over of the game and subtitles in the game hurts. You need to change system’s language, and still you cannot choose voice language in one language and subtitles in the other.

Lack of separate save files. One of the most common issues is also not having the ability to save manually and create multiple saves. I understand that developers did not want players to go back on their choices, so it feels like they matter, and it works in that regard, but taking the freedom from players is never a good idea, so even though it half-works I think they should add it into the game.

Disclaimer! I still want to make sure everyone understands this article right. I like the game and I think it is very fun to play, the aim is to point out the worst aspects of my experience with the game to see these issues fixed in the future or at least give some feedback and ideas to the devs on what to focus on later down the line.

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