Dying Lightwas already a tough game for many people when it first came out, but a new patch this week answered other players’ demands by making it even harder.
Loot is one of the weirdest things about video games. I usually can’t stand it when a game makes you obsess over weapons and items for their own sake. Fixating on minutiae worked perfectly for me in the zombie survival game Dying Light, though. Until I started playing with the new “hard mode.” Now, I can’t stop staring down at the floor.
The added difficulty dials up the game’s intensity by tweaking a few different aspects of the game: your character has less stamina, can only heal over time (rather than immediately) with medkits, and can no longer detect the toughest and scariest types of zombies on the mini-map. Enemies deal more damage and take longer to kill, and your weapons wear out and break at a faster rate than before. On top of these substantial challenges, your “survival sense” also gets diminished so that it no longer highlights loot you haven’t picked up yet. Dying Light was already a terrifying game, the extra hard mode makes it all the more so thanks to the newfound vulnerability all these changes instill in you as a player.
Loot is hard to find in Dying Light. It’s also exceedingly valuable — your weapons all have dangerously short lifespans, and you need to scrounge around for random bits of stuff in order to repair and modify them. Doing so is the best way to get the most bang for your buck, item-wise, which also means it’s the best way to guarantee your survival. Most of the time when I visit a merchant in the game, it’s not to buy any of the weapons they’re selling — those are far too expensive. It’s just to buy even more random junk.
Picking through every conceivable corner of an abandoned house in the hopes of finding a bit of string (necessary to make molotov cocktails) or gauze (needed for medkits) adds a surprising amount of time to playing Dying Light once you remove the ability to automatically highlight items. Before, walking into a room and picking everything up was as simple as pressing X to see something like this:
Now, I have to go over and over (and over) a room again to make sure I didn’t miss, say, that one piece of metal I could really use to trick out a weapon:
Or a bag that could contain a useful bit of something:
Or — who knows — some side-challenge that could give me an even more lucrative reward:
This makes sense, on one level — string and gauze are relatively tiny bits of stuff in the real world, so they wouldn’t exactly announce their presence the moment you walk into a room.
Going over (and over, and over) a small patch of the game’s scenery with a fine-toothed comb can feel unsettling and realistic, then. It might be frustrating in the moment. But in the aggregate, it adds up to something genuinely horrifying: you’re behaving like a bottom-dwelling scavenger because that’s exactly what the terror of the post-apocalypse has turned you into.
At the same time, Dying Light’s newfound obsession with loot helps solidify an already weird dynamic I’d noticed in the game: why, when a developer puts so much time and energy into making an intricately crafted and gorgeous open world, does it then make the game keep grabbing your head and pointing it directly at the ground? Wouldn’t they want you to spend as much time as possible ogling all the pretty scenery they created?
All this scrounging for loot feels all the more irritating because it’s placed on top of a whole lot of pre-existing ground-staring in Dying Light. You already spend a lot of time with your head pointed downwards to make sure you’re kicking out a zombie’s legs properly:
…and then to make sure you’ve bashed their head in properly once you’ve knocked them over:
…or you might be looking for a safe way to drop down from a tall building:
…or just make sure you’re keeping a safe distance between yourself and some monster below:
The point is: you’ve got a lot of pretty stuff in there, Dying Light! Why not try and encourage me to spend more time looking at something like this:
…instead of continuing to fixate on something like this?
Comments
10 responses to “Dying Light’s New Hard Mode Is Definitely Harder”
Reminds me of The Last Of Us on Grounded difficulty.
I only just downloaded this just before the weekend started, Hard Mode was already an option for me after the auto update patch. I have only had the pleasure of playing it on Hard. Oh my god. This game is insanely pants browning material. I refuse to do night running. My 7.1 surround headphones make it an absolutely chilling experience. Love it.
Only got Dying Light Friday night and put in a solid 8 hour session in on Saturday. I’ve never really enjoyed any Zombie related games (Except Resident Evil) but I tell you what, I’m loving this game. Can’t wait to finish it then smash out the new Hard mode with a few people online.
Hey Yannick, I found a better use for your gif – Around the World Infinite Zombie Butt Punching.
https://gifsound.com/?gif=i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/d6z9ynsksvvbzwz5jfos.gif&v=x5__Ogi4Tek&s=41
You’re welcome.
simply awesome
thank you!
They also turned down the rate of items you construct (ie. Moltovs, Medkits) from 5 to 2. This is a bit rubbish in my opinion.
If anyone is interested, they’ve fixed crossfire support. Everything maxed out at 1440 p with draw distance set to 90 percent is smooth as butter! Running with afr mode and an r9 295×2.
I call shenanigans on gold loot. It doesn’t exist in a non modded game.
Could we slow down on the GIFs, or at least on the concept of having articles comprising single sentences surrounded by images? If I wanted a step-by-step of you playing a game I’d watch a stream, I check Kotaku on my phone for the most part though and articles like this rape my data. :/
I’m not sure you played the same game as the rest of us, Dying Light on default was never a loot centric game, it quickly in the first 10% of the game got to the point where I had more money and gadgets/weapons than I knew what to do with. This difficulty is clearly a much needed increase.
This is how dying light should of been in the first place, no baby sitting, no hand holding. Lovin it!
The impact it has at the night runs cause you really don’t know what’s around the corner makes dying light what it should be, a scavenger hunt with an emphasis on the night danger.
Shit your pants, just make sure your don’t leave a trail for zombies to follow.