Dying Light 2's Parkour Features Real Gravity Simulation And Athletic Precision

One of the biggest advantages that players had in the original Dying Light was a talent for acrobatic traversal across a zombie-infected city, and for the sequel, parkour gameplay has been expanded to be more natural and intuitive to learn.

"We have an adaptation of skills and moves that people who practice this real-life sport do. We have worked with David Belle--the father of Parkour--and we have used his experience, his insights, and his feedback to create something that I hope looks very good on the screen, very realistic," lead game designer Tymon Smektala explained in a new Dying Light 2 video. "But please keep in mind that this is a video game, so we had to change some things for the sake of the experience so that everyone can get fun out of it."

Some of those changes include a slow-motion effect and enhanced time in the air during jumps, to compensate for how a player can't rely on their natural agility and expanded vision to make acrobatic decisions on the fly. Dying Light 2's protagonist Aiden Caldwell has athletic conditioning and can maintain a brisk pace of 14 miles-per-hour while he performs various parkour moves.

According to Smektala, parkour is designed to be both easy to learn and hard to master, and is largely unaffected by Dying Light 2's various difficulty modes, save for fall-damage modifiers on more-challenging settings.

After a long period of development, Dying Light 2 arrives on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on February 4. If 500 hours of Dying Light 2 content sounds disappointing to you, the good news is that Techland has at least five years of content planned for the game. For more on the game, you can check out a brief tease of its cross-gen console performance and the other violent skills you'll need to master in the post-apocalypse.