14 DAY TRIAL // A new video has popped up online, offering us a glimpse of cooperative and competitive multiplayer in the upcoming first-person zombie survival video game Dying Light.
The action in the game takes place in an open world similar to the urban environments of South American slums, after a vicious outbreak turned the majority of the population into brainless killing machines.
Players have to navigate the sprawling urban environments looking for valuable supplies, by using a combination of melee combat, traps, and freerunning action to defend against the growing horde of infected.
The dynamic day and night cycles will introduce a twist into how the game is played. During the day, zombies are mainly apathetic, and players have to go on missions to scavenge for materials, rescue new survivors and recover airdrops, with the hordes being little more than a nuisance.
When night falls, however, the game changes dramatically, with zombies becoming vicious fiends, being able to sprint after players and climb buildings, the rooftops of the city no longer being the safe haven they are during daytime.
Strong multiplayer focus
The video comes from developer Techland's presentation at EGX 2014 in London, talking mainly about how cooperative and player versus player interaction will play out, and revealing that the game is pretty lax when it comes to what constitutes coop.
For instance, when a group of gamers decide to venture into the city to scavenge from supplies or dance the night away, whichever seems of greater importance at the time, they don't have to stick together for the entire duration of their adventure.
Any and all players can simply do their thing, go their own way, and then meet up later with the group, after having sated their thirst for solo parkour action from one rooftop to another.
In-game challenges
The multiplayer evolved organically, and the developers described that interactions between friends led to many intuitive additions to the game, such as friendly in-game challenges, with whoever gets the most kills within a minute winning the competition and gaining extra experience.
This friendly competitive aspect of cooperative gameplay will lead to players gaining access to useful abilities faster and in a more enjoyable fashion, such as using their freerunning skills in order to traverse distances faster and getting to certain interest points faster than their friends.
In addition to this, during nighttime, the game is open to invasions, and players can assume control of the super-infected and try to mess up other players' games.
Dying Light is scheduled to come out on January 27 in North America and January 30 worldwide, headed to the PC, the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 home consoles from Sony, and the Xbox 360 and Xbox One entertainment systems from Microsoft.
