The end ofDying Lightis something of a cliff hanger, butDying Light 2isn’t picking up right where the former left off. Instead, players are going totake control of Aiden Caldwell20 years after the events of the original game, and it seems clear that a lot has changed since then. Harran is no longer the only infected city, as the entire world has now fallen and succumbed to the virus. Given the ambiguous ending of the first game, players can infer what might have caused this to happen, but developer Thomas Gerbaud gives a brief summary of how society fell in those 20 years.
Gerbaud works at Techland asDying Light 2’s World Director, so there’s really no better place to get this information. He opened up about the story during the Dying 2 Know More event on May 27th, and fans can presume that they’ll learn more in the next episode of the series.
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According to Gerbaud, theconfinement of the citizens of Harranserved to keep the virus contained for a while, and eventually everyday people started to forget about it. During this time, a small group of scientists were secretly doing research on the virus in an effort to find military or commercial uses for it. As part of this research, scientists experimented on and mutated the virus to new levels, and this naturally didn’t go well. By the Christmas of 2021, the virus escaped a lab and began to infect people.
Thanks to the mutations spurred by the research, this virus was able to spread much faster than anyone could have anticipated. Governments scrambled to try and contain it, but it only took a few years for civilization to fall. In a last ditch effort, the city of Villedor was founded as a bastion for mankind. Even this didn’t go as planned, as there was still infighting amongst the city’s various factions and a deadly infected problem running wild. Players find themselves in the middle of this mess whenpilgrim Aiden Caldwell finds himself in The City.
While this all makes sense, it curiously leaves out any details about Kyle Crane, the protagonist of the firstDying Light. Players wanting to experience the story for themselves with the platinum edition ofDying Lightshould turn back now, but Crane’s ending should definitely come into play in this story. At theend of the final story DLC forDying Light, Crane himself is turned, but this time while outside the wall. It’s highly likely that he has something to do with how the infection spread as well.
Dying Light 2releases on December 7th for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
