After Twitter user c0mpl3x1ty had a few drinks, they booted up Techland’s open world zombie game, Dying Light. An electrical engineer by day, they noticed a problem: there should be no way for the city to generate power. It’s all wrong! But when I contacted Techland, they revealed a huge secret about the game.
Because c0mpl3x1ty know how power grids are supposed to work in real-life, this got under their skin; the Twitter rant went on for nearly 30 minutes.
“I admit that I got kinda drunk,” c0mpl3x1ty told me over email.
“Where’s the power coming from?” they said. “It doesn’t appear to be generated anywhere. No dams, no natural gas, no coal, no nuclear, nothing. Maybe they will get into that later in the game but it probably won’t. If I had to guess, that big substation will for some reason power the whole city or whatever, but that’s not how substations work. Substations move power, either stepping it up or stepping it down. Hence, transformers. They step it up to the BIG power lines, or step it DOWN to little power lines. The point is, they don’t generate power.”
The detail in c0mpl3x1ty’s tweets caught my eye. We’ve all complained about one thing or another in a game on Twitter, and we’re used to granting games a pass for not exactly adhering to reality. I’m willing to bet c0mpl3x1ty is the only person who noticed these details in Dying Light, and Techland figured they were fine. It’s possible Techland never properly researched how the power worked.
“I work for the reliability coordinator,” c0mpl3x1ty told me. “Our company is like the air traffic controllers of power for the western interconnection. I see every power line 115kV and up in the western United States, Canada, and Mexico. I travel some and always make a point to take pictures of substations.”
Not only does Dying Light‘s power grid make it hard to imagine where power comes from, their safety standards are pretty lax, even for a zombie apocalypse.
“The only thing more horrifying than the zombies in the game is the NERC [North American Electric Reliability Corporation] violations at these substations,” they said. “Granted, the game probably doesn’t take place in North America, but even in Brazil, they have high safety standards regarding their electrical grid because if they don’t, people DIE. If I saw one of those giant switches at a sub that looks like something out of Frankenstein’s lab, I’d shut the power down and dismantle the whole substation myself.”
Flush with knowledge of this egregious error, my journalistic instincts kicked in, and I emailed Techland. Knowing they’d been caught, Techland came clean and issue a wide-ranging statement about its lax approach to authenticity:
OK the cat is out the bag. Yeah it’s true, our electrical systems break conventional design. But when you’re stuck in a zombie outbreak you’re going to have to adapt and therefore bypass certain “rules”. The people of Harran had to apply a really resourceful design which required the existing infrastructure to be tweaked. That’s why when you look at the current electrical setup in Harran things appear “wrong”.
We didn’t want this ground-breaking design out in the public before we could patent it, but your interest has shown us that electrical engineering world as a whole needs to know there are other ways to generate electricity despite “conventional knowledge”. Feel free to share this with your fellow engineers.
In an industry that normally keeps quiet, it’s heartening to hear such honesty.
What exactly has Techland been hiding? Well, take a look for yourself:
Wow. Just…wow.
“I have to admit,” said c0mpl3x1ty, the electrical engineer that kicked this off, “that if a zombie apocalypse is all it takes to push human ingenuity to the point they reached in game — generating power for free, wireless power transmission — I think I speak for my colleagues in saying, BRING ON THE ZOMBIES!”
Let’s take a closer look:
One way or another, the mystery has been solved.
“We’re totally open to any investors who want to buy this flawless design from us for heaps and heaps of cash,” said a Techland spokesperson. “This will then let us fund our other great ideas like a Dying Light theme park, Dying Light: A VR Farm Simulator Experience, and Dying Light: The Sitcom.”
(Thanks to Techland for playing along with the joke, by the way. This post has gone beyond my wildest dreams!)
Comments
15 responses to “Dying Light Creators Respond Amazingly To Fan’s Drunken Rant”
Awesome!
Provided that there wasn’t any offshore turbines or wave generation tucked away further down the coast etc…….I haven’t watched the video but in the case of the substation provided it had transmission lines going to it very well could be powered from somewhere else. I myself am an Electrician currently working in wind generation, but everytime I see flaws in games with my electrical background generally I don’t cry murder afterall I’m not here to examine them electrically.
Furthermore I find lots of electrical engineers are the first to dive into a cabinet without testing….big no no, now not all are like that but reading drawings will only get an engineer so far before they have to deal with the hands on side of the equation. A rather broaching subject for a friday, time to relax and enjoy the weekend!
Just watch the Video… Its worth it.
Brilliant.
Nowait, that was too subtle. Shockingly good idea! A real lightbulb moment. Really illuminating. Watt an energizing response to feedback. The bright sparks in PR are really switched on. Volt will they think of next?
The puns just won’t stop surging through your mind now, ey?
Just waves and waves of them, so much it hertz. 🙂
Haha that’s pretty funny, I always like Techland.
Techland you legends! lol
As a chemical engineer I always get a laugh at the whole turn-this-valve-to-blow-up-the-plant thing. I guess electrical engineers are in a similar boat.
So Zombies running around didn’t break the illusion, but not knowing where the electricity is coming from, yeah thats a deal breaker.
Because “zombies running around” is the established fiction of the world, we can suspend our disbelief of it. But other than the zombies it’s “supposed” to be our world, so things are “supposed” to work roughly the same way they do here, gameplay concessions aside.
Thanks for including that gif of the video that was 5 lines above it
This is how seriously people should take their own complaints of complex media, sometimes what you think matters, doesn’t. This dude totally understood infrastructure, I’d totally trust him to fix my grid (in a normal way) but would never trust him to explain to me why Dying Light is great or sucks for the same reason that people who utter “plot hole” and “Nolan” in the same sentence will never understand that what they don’t know about narrative could fill an ocean.
Never expected Techland to be so witty, though, seriously did anyone think they’d sound, well… dumb? Like, if I went to speak to the developers of Tony Hawk 5, I would expect to see someone who acts, sounds like and could possibly be Fred Durst. My bad, my prejudice.
i gotta admit, this was not what i expected, i though all the power was going to come from an extenstion board that was pluged into its self
That’s exactly what I was hoping it would be.