Image: Techland
The studio has walked its lengthy estimate back
Dying Light 2 Stay Human, the upcoming open-world zombie game from Techland, will potentially take “at least 500 hours” to fully complete, the game’s official Twitter account revealed on Saturday. Over the weekend, the studio’s tweet spawned some angry discourse, as well as an interesting conversation around other long games that players value.
“To fully complete Dying Light 2 Stay Human,” stated the tweet from Techland, “you’ll need at least 500 hours — almost as long as it would take to walk from Warsaw to Madrid!” Techland is located in Poland, only a few hours away outside the capital.
About two hours later, the Dying Light Twitter account quote-retweeted itself, offering an update after some community pushback.
Techland clarified that players will only need 500 hours to do everything in the game — such as getting each ending, exploring every inch of the world, and finishing every quest. A normal playthrough, even one that includes some side quests, will take players less than 100 hours.
UPDATE:
500 hours is related to maxing out the game – finishing all the quests, endings, and exploring every part of the world, but a regular player should finish the story + side quests and do quite a lot of exploring in less than 100 hours, so don’t worry! https://t.co/4R641zkLpg— Dying Light (@DyingLightGame) January 8, 2022
Before the clarification, some fans were not happy that the long-awaited sequel was going to take 500 hours, and the complaints started flying in the comments. For reference, even a completionist playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — including all the Korok Seeds — only takes about 188 hours.
There’s no game in fucking existence that can justify being 500 hours long to 100%, not even the best games ever made can for a single playthrough, this is worrying as fuck guys, Quality > Quantity
— Synth Potato (Ameer) (@SynthPotato) January 8, 2022
What the fuck? Like I know this is for 100% but Jesus I can’t imagine how much the main story is.
I was actually interested in this but now it seems it’s gonna be like Assassin’s Creed where the story took like 80 hours. This is a pass for me, sorry.
— Edco (@cloud154532) January 8, 2022
Imma be honest with you, That’s not ideal. Less is more
— playoff Octavian (@SixersOctavian) January 8, 2022
Lara Jackson, the gaming news editor at Screen Rant, also spawned a Twitter conversation over the original Dying Light tweet, asking “What games have you genuinely played for 500+ hours?” The tweet has 14.8 thousand quote-retweets as of this writing.
Techland originally announced Dying Light 2 in 2018, and it was scheduled to ship in December of 2021, but Techland delayed it to “polish and optimize” the final experience. Our November 2021 preview of the game specifically called out its open world, noting it is an improvement over the original game’s. As for how long the final product will actually take to complete, fans only have a couple more weeks until they can find out for themselves. The game is now set for a Feb. 4 release for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Update: A representative from Techland and Dying Light 2 Stay Human reached out to Technovanguard to further clarify the length of the upcoming open-world game.
According to Techland, players can rush through the story in about 20 hours, although the studio revealed some players can actually do it faster. Completing the main quest and every side quest, as well as “engaging with all characters” can take about 80 hours or more.
The 500-hour figure is from internal QA testing, and denotes how long it may take the average player to collect every item and see every bit of the map.
