Dying Light 2
Twenty-two years after the original game, Dying Light 2 stars Aiden Caldwell, a member of the Pilgrims, a group of nomadic survivors who act as couriers in a post-apocalyptic world. He’s on a mission to find information about his sister, whom he broke up with at the start of the zombie outbreak. His search leads him to fictional European city of Philidor, where he finds himself a pawn in a tug of war between different factions of survivors trying to stay alive.
Between the free escape moments, you’ll find the rest of the gameplay episode, which consists of fighting zombies and rejecting Mad Max, as well as all the historical fetch and watch missions you’d expect from open-world games. The combat is the same as in the previous game, using temporary degradable weapons to cause damage or protect you. It’s just as bloody as you’d expect, with lots of severed limbs and blood.
The hordes of zombies in Dying Light 2 are less like the zombies of classic horror movies and more like the Olympic runners of modern media. They also have a few other quirks – they don’t do well in the sun or under UV lights, which survivors use to keep the legions at bay. The game takes advantage of the day-night cycle so that you can plan your travels around the habits of the zombies. This becomes even the more complicated when you learn that Aiden is injured, and staying in the dark precipitates his descent to death. Although it may seem a hindrance initially, it adds an unexpected layer of depth to in-game exploration.
Can Your Computer Run Dying Light 2 Stay Human?
Visually, Dying Light 2 beats its predecessor (pun unintentional). There are some of the fantastic scenes throughout the game, which are even more awesome thanks to the inclusion of ray tracing. Unfortunately, however, it also comes with a myriad of technical issues, both big and small, the worst of which spoil the game’s PC version.
On paper, the minimum requirements for Dying Light 2 don’t require too many. However, according to the game’s Steam page, you’ll need to have at least an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or the AMD Radeon RX 560 GPU (4GB of VRAM), an Intel Core i3-9100 or an AMD Ryzen 3 2300X CPU, 8GB of RAM, 60GB of storage, and course, Windows 10. My gaming platform includes an Intel i7-10700K CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, and the 16GB of RAM, but the game suffered from stuttering and low frame rates throughout. While on the high presets, I experienced unsteady performance, with frames per second dropping to 45fps in crowded scenes and even lower during area transitions.
As it turns out, this isn’t rare either, as a quick search revealed several people dealing with the similar issues. As it turns out, it’s not that the game isn’t necessarily unoptimized, but its presets require users to get their hands dirty and tweak their settings for optimal performance. Fortunately, the team at Digital Foundry was able to optimize the settings for low, medium, and high, so I stuck with those for stable performance.
How to the Optimize Your PC for the Dying Light 2 Stay Human
To adjust the settings, head to the Options menu, then the Video tab. You will see advanced video options, at the bottom of the screen. From here, you can change these settings to improve your performance if you meet the recommended requirements to run the game.
- Asynchronous arithmetic: On
- Anti-aliasing quality: On
- Motion Blur Quality: Low
- Sunshade quality: PCF
- Contact shade quality: Ultra
- Ambient occlusion quality: low
- International Lighting Quality: High
- Meditation quality: low
- Ray tracing flashlight: off
- Volumetric Fog: Medium
One foot from the grave
Dying Light 2 has been coming for a long time — probably for a very long time. Although it dropped in 2022, Dying Light 2 feels like the first game did in 2015, for better or worse. Some players may be fascinated by its tacky presentation or not care about the dull story and characters. After all, playing with the friends, climbing rooftops, and slapping zombies with a 2×4 camera that shoots electricity is fun. Given the breadth of updates and downloadable content the first game received, we expect Dying Light 2 to come of age well. The fans of the first game or those looking for the unique co-op experience will find plenty to love here, but everyone else might be better off waiting for the prices to drop.
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