Techland is making two new games - and one sounds a lot like Dying Light 2
The other is an open-world fantasy game with RPG elements.
Dying Light studio Techland announced in Poland this week it is working on two new games. I spoke with CEO Paweł Marchewka at the conference Digital Dragons about what they'll be.
One will be a new IP developed in Warsaw. It will be an open-world fantasy game with RPG elements - "maybe in a slightly bigger sense than Dying Light ... [but] it's RPG elements rather than RPG game" - and it will have co-op multiplayer and single-player, as Techland has done before.
The other new game will be developed in Wrocław and hasn't been named or detailed. However, Wrocław is the studio responsible for Dying Light, which has been a huge success for Techland. And Marchewka went on to actually mention "Dying Light 2" while answering a separate question of mine about the possibility of making another Dead Island game now that the relationship with Deep Silver seems to have been repaired (Techland is remastering Dead Island for PC, PS4 and Xbox One using the Dying Light engine. This Definitive Edition is out 31st May.).
"No," he said when asked about making a completely new Dead Island game. "We had a talk about it but I think Dying Light and Dying Light 2 would be games which are..."
PR manager Anna Lada-Grodzicka continued: "The Dying Light brand is more important for us."
Remember, Techland owns the Dying Light IP whereas Deep Silver owns Dead Island - and has hired British studio Sumo to make Dead Island 2, a game that Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager was once in control of.
Dying Light has around 8 million unique players, Marchewka told me - a figure which includes players of The Following but doesn't include the 3 million or so players with a pirated copy, he said. Those figures won't necessarily equate to exact sales when the count comes in, but it's a good indication of how popular Dying Light has been.
Nevertheless, when I asked Marchewka earlier in the interview whether the Wrocław game was Dying Light 2, he replied, "Can't say that," and smiled.
Both of the new games have been in development for about a year, he said. Techland is around 300 people (and hiring) and roughly divides that force half and half across Wrocław and Warsaw. Both games, added Marchewka, are "equally big projects". He estimated that they will be released "within three years".
The announcement of an open-world fantasy game led many people to assume it was a re-purposed Hellraid. Hellraid, a dark fantasy action game, was put on hold roughly a year ago.
I asked Marchewka whether Hellraid had anything at all to do with the new fantasy IP and he said, confidently, "No." He added: "I mean maybe there are some technical elements ... there will be probably some knowledge from that, but no it had nothing to do with it, no.
"Hellraid is still there," he went on. "It is sitting on the shelf. We just had this great idea that we wanted to explore before. We're not sure how we handle it but we are thinking about Hellraid, how to continue with that game.
"There are different possibilities," he said. "Maybe some other developer we can trust can take it and collaborating with us, delivering it to us so we can just publish it. That's why I'm not closed with this - I'm open for some options."
The same goes for Call of Juarez, the Cowboy-turned-Cartel shooter IP Techland has been sitting on for a few years. "At the moment we have no solutions for that but maybe we can come up with something," he said.
