Techland just surprised us with the debut trailer of Dying Light 2 (along with a gameplay video) at the Microsoft Press Conference yesterday.

The first Dying Light was undoubtably a quite good and fun game, however it had some problems. The brown-yellow-grey coloured word felt a little bit boring and samey after a while and the repetitive in-game activities didn’t help in that regard either. Also the story was quite weak and forgettable with it’s predictable nature and cliches.

What becomes obvious after watching the gameplay demo however is that the devs really listened to the gamers and critics as well. It seems like they want to fix the first game’s problems. To start off, the explorable world feels much more alive and vibrant. It feels more interesting from an art and from a gameplay perspective as well. The combat also got an overhaul, as well as the traversing animations, and overall the game just looks and feels much more immersive and… well, fun than the previous game.

What’s truly interesting though is that Techland managed to hire one of the biggest names in video game storytelling, namely Chris Avellone, who worked on such beloved games as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I-II, Fallout: New Vegas, and more recently Prey. In Dying Light 2, players will have the option to make important choices through the story, this way shaping the world around them. Each choice will have meaningful consequences and because there will be hundreds of outcomes, basically no player’s experience will be the same.

We don’t know a release date yet, so judging by this we can safely assume that the game won’t come out this year. We know the platforms though, these are the following: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One.