Dying Light: Bad Blood starts battling royale in September
Band-Aids do fix bullet holes, in battle royale games anyway
Take twelve people who are good at jumping, drop them into a zombie-infested city, and turn them loose to loot, level up, and murder each other until one emerges triumphant. That's Dying Light: Bad Blood, an upcoming multiplayer standalone spin-off from Techland's parkour-o-zombsmashing shooter series. Y'know, it's a Battle Royale/Hunger Games-ish doodad, as is the style of the time. But on a smaller scale, and with lots of NPC zombies to murder too. Techland today announced that Bad Blood will enter paid early access in September then properly launch as a free-to-play game after a few months.
Techland first announced Bad Blood as a six-player standalone expansion in 2017, though it seems to have changed a little and be presented more as a game of its own now.
Dying Light: Bad Blood will drop twelve players into the city to gather samples from deadheads. Along the way they loot items, level up, and maybe murder each other. Players need samples for the chopper pilot to come pick 'em up, see, so you can gather them or take them off other players who've done the legwork. And the pilot will only collect one person, because reasons, so murder will always happen.
It sounds like it's of that new wave of battlers royale which draw some inspiration from the hot trend, sure, but take that in their own direction into their own game. I'll be curious to see how that works in practice. Though as someone who mostly battles royale in squads to hang out with the laaads, 12-player might be a bit small for me. But that's because it's trying to do something a bit different, which is good.
The plan is for Dying Light: Bad Blood to hit Steam Early Access in September, charging $19.99 for early admission while offering cosmetic doodads and virtuacash in return. Techland expect it'll be in early access for 4-6 months while they expand and tweak it, then it will launch free-to-play in late 2018 or early 2019. You can sign up on the game's site for tests preceding all that.
Do remember that Techland are also working on Dying Light 2, which seemed quite promising when our Brendy saw it during E3 in June.
The best look we've had at Bad Blood so far came from this pre-alpha peek on the Ian Games Network in March 2018, in which the game looks quite bad. But hey, months-old pre-alpha and all that.
