Dying Light 2's parkour, combat, and factions to be detailed at Gamescom

This year's Gamescom festival will be fully digital, streamed online at gamescom.global, and one of the games being showcased is Dying Light 2 Stay Human. Various details about Techland's next zombie-filled open world have previously been revealed by the video series Dying 2 Know, the third episode of which will debut on-stream at Gamescom.

Lead game designer Tymon Smektała will host the episode, which will include a new gameplay trailer and tell us more about Dying Light 2's parkour, combat, and factions. Apparently "players will find out how powerful Aiden's hands and legs can be as weapons, but they will also discover an impressive arsenal of deadly tools". In the footage we've seen there's been a lot of improvised armaments like street signs and buckets, as well as modified ones like a tomahawk axe electrified by the addition of a power cord, so expect a homebrew aesthetic to the zombie-slaying tools on display.

It won't all be about killing the dead, however. Techland is also using the Gamescom showcase to "bring you closer to the differences between combat versus infected and humans". We've previously seen that Dying Light 2 will feature factions called survivors, peacekeepers, and renegades, and we'll be forced to choose sides during the story, coming into conflict with other humans trying to rebuild society in different ways. Expect more info on the faction system behind that as well.

Finally, the studio plans to detail what it calls "Techland GG", short for "Gamers and Goodies", a community hub that will connect players of all its games beginning with Dying Light and Dying Light 2, and also run competitions, with a cosplay contest coming up.

Dying Light 2's showcase will be streamed during Gamescom on August 26 at 11am PT / 8pm CEST (which is August 27 at 4am AEST). The game's expected to release on December 7. Here's everything we know about Dying Light 2.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.