Dying Light 2 Beginner's Guide - Tips and Tricks

Last Update: February 3, 2022 7:59 PM /

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Dying Light 2 Beginner Guide

Dying Light 2 is here, and it is a fair bit different from the first game. Even if you’ve put hundreds of hours into the first title, you’re going to find that there’s a fair bit here that works differently. With that in mind, we’ve put together some tips and tricks that make your transition from the last game to this game a little bit easier. Hell, even if you’ve decided to skip the first game, this guide should make it a bunch easier to get your head around some of the core concepts in Dying Light 2.

Dying Light 2 Beginner Guide - Night Mode

Dying Light 2 - Night and Day Cycles

One of the most important concepts in Dying Light 2 is the dichotomy between light and darkness, specifically UV light. In the first game, UV light hurt zombies and protected you from them especially at night. In this game, it’s even more important. 

Early on in the game you’ll become infected with the zombie virus, making you constantly on the verge of turning. How do you stop it from happening? Well, that requires you to make sure you get regular doses of UV light. Whenever you’re in the dark, you’re going to need to move quickly, as a timer will show you how long you have until you turn into a zombie. 

This makes the safe houses on your map way more important. If it gets light while you’re out, you’ll need to sprint for somewhere with a UV lamp and a bed. Early on in the game, you won’t be able to survive outside so easily, partially because of another one of the biggest changes. 

Stamina is a necessity in Dying Light 2

In the last game, Stamina was necessary for sprinting and combat, as well as a few other key actions. Here, you need it for literally everything. Jumping costs stamina so does climbing up ledges. This means that if you run out of stamina while you’re climbing, you’ll just immediately let go and hit the floor, probably fatally. 

Since so many different things now completely rely on your stamina, including your ability to climb to hard-to-reach places, you need to increase it straight away. Your first few upgrades need to be in Stamina. Honestly, if you’re confident in your combat abilities, you probably don’t need to go beyond health level 3, even in the post-game, so pour the rest of your upgrades into Stamina. 

Dying Light 2 Skills - Tree

Dying Light 2 - Beginner Guide Skill Tree

Unlike the previous game, your skill tree here is split only into 2 trees, Parkour and Combat. You level these up by taking part in combat or by running around the city and performing various parkour moves. You gain extra experience at night as well, since it's so much more dangerous.  We’ve listed below the best early upgrades in each skill tree. 

Dying Light 2 Combat Skill Recommendations

  • Perfect Dodge: A great enhancement of your dodge ability that allows you to stagger an enemy by dodging at the last second. 
  • Air Kick + Dropkick: Honestly, Air Kick is only in here because you need to get it to unlock dropkick. Just like the first game, dropkick is the most overpowered combat move you have in your arsenal. Combat in this game predominantly happens near ledges and very high falls. Your dropkick sends enemies flying backward when it connects. Can you see where we’re going with this one? 
  • Power Attack: The perfect thing for smashing through a blocking enemy instead of baiting him into an attack. Makes combat much more proactive. 
  • Smash: Basically a ledge kill from above that is insanely useful for getting a strong start in a fight. Higher ground is always a must-have anyway.  

Dying Light 2 Parkour Skills Recommendations

  • Active Landing: This ability can literally save your life. It makes it possible to survive further drops by tapping the duck button just before you hit the ground. It’s also worth getting the upgraded version that increases the height of jumps you can survive. 
  • Sleek Runner: This ability stops you from losing as much momentum when you’re running around the world, and comes in insanely useful when escaping virals at night. 
  • Far Jump + Double Jump: Both of these abilities are in the same branch of the tree and they both do similar things. One gives you the ability to launch yourself forward after a vault, the other to launch yourself upwards after a vault. Obviously, these greatly improve your mobility and should be some of the first upgrades you grab. 

Dying Light 2 Factions - What to Know

Dying Light 2 Beginner Guide - Alignment Map

A new big element of Dying Light 2 is choice, so instead of having a singular narrative and only one group of survivors hanging around the place, you have two different options for groups you can support. For the most part, it should be pretty obvious how your decisions are going to affect those around you, but the most important faction decisions are who you assign territory and key buildings to. We’ve detailed both in-game factions below and given a brief summary of what you get for helping them. 

Survivors Faction

The survivors represent the civilian interests in the City. These are mostly ordinary people who are scraping by day-to-day. In the later game, they’re also backed up by the remnants of the night runners and Lewan.

What you get for aligning with the Survivors in Dying Light 2: Additional world traversal additions. Survivor control will gradually improve how quickly you can move around The City by adding things that assist with parkour such as jumping pads, landing pads, and extra zipelines.

PeaceKeepers (PKs) Faction

A militaristic faction that formed after the perceived failure of the military at the start of ‘The Fall’. While their name sounds great, they do have a tendency to be a bit OTT with the aggro at times. Having said, there are plenty of good people amongst the PKs and they do have the best chance of bringing some order back to the city as a whole. 

What you get for aligning with the Peacekeepers in Dying Light 2: Additional zombie mitigation. Peacekeeper control adds additional traps throughout the city that you can utilize in and out of combat, such as the gate traps and car traps from the last game.

    Dying Light 2 Blueprints & Crafting

    Blueprints are used a bit differently in Dying Light 2 compared to the first game. They're mostly focused on consumables, and most are either unlocked or purchased - you won't need to hunt around to find them. Some of the key blueprints you can obtain in the game are:

    • Lockpick: Needed to unlock pretty much everything
    • Throwing Knife: Great for silently taking down enemies
    • Molotov: Burn Groups of zombies with ease.
    • Remote C4: Great remote damage without much risk to you.
    • Boomstick: Boom, need we say more?

    Crafting is much the same here as it was in the original Dying Light. You collect basic resources from zombies and random containers scattered around the map and use them to craft various useful tools. The most important materials you need are featured below. 

    • Rags: Used in important recipes like Molotov cocktails. You can find these almost anywhere. 
    • Scraps: Used for pretty much everything, including weapon upgrades, and can be found randomly in most containers and corpses. Unlike the previous game, however, you don't use these to repair weapons at all. 
    • Honey & Camomile: Found in rooftop gardens, usually in nests and hives for the honey and in the grass around it. These are the two most essential ingredients in the game because together they make healing items. 
    • Feathers: Found in rooftop gardens, specifically in the birdhouses you'll see in these areas. Used primarily to craft arrows which you'll need to do a fair amount if you plan on using any ranged tactics at all. 

    Dying Light 2 Mods and Mod Upgrades:

    You can purchase mods and upgrade them at the Craftmasters who you'll find at major settlements. Once you've got these upgrades, you'll need to improve them at Craftmasters using a mixture of scrap, and the trophies you get from the infected around the city. 

    • Quick Tip: wait to mod your new weapons. When you mod them, based on the mod level - it will repair some of the durability!

    Check vendors and craftmasters regularly. You'll want to continually upgrade your blueprints and mods, and make sure you're upgrading your weapons with higher damage ones. We highly recommend maxing the "Reinforcement" Mod, pictured below to get the most out of weapons you want to extend the life of.

    DL Weapon Mod Reinforcement

    Dying Light 2 Inhibitors

    You'll have to get really familiar with inhibitors throughout the course of the game as there are hundreds of them in the game, and they're incredibly important to your survival. The best places to find these things are inside dark zones, but they can also be found all over the place. In the final hours of the game, you develop the ability to detect these things and can collect them much easier at this stage.

    Every 3 inhibitors you use will let you improve your health or stamina, as we discussed above. In order to unlock some skills, as well as windmills and other parts of the map, you'll need to have certain levels of Stamina or Health.

    Quick Tip for finding Dying Light 2 Inhibitors:  When you're near one, you'll hear a chime and at the bottom left of your screen you'll see "XXm" with the GRE key icon. Use this to hunt them down easier, and use your survivor senses to spot it through walls.

    Dying Light 2 Endings - What To Know (no spoilers)

    One of the biggest changes in Dying Light 2 compared with the original game is the fact that you will occasionally be faced with choices that will have an impact on how the story plays out. Thanks to this, you can actually get several different endings depending on certain choices that you've made, though only around 3 of them have a major impact on how things will shake out. We've listed them below with zero spoilers, but we can't promise they won't give away some very vague details about certain missions. 

    Dying Light 2 Choices:

    You can actually get several different endings depending on certain choices that you've made, though only around 3 of them have a major impact on how things will shake out. We've listed them below with zero spoilers, but we can't promise they won't give away some very vague details about certain missions.

    • Choice 1: You'll be asked to assign a radio tower two one of the two factions, and this choice will affect who is in charge down the line. 
    • Choice 2: At some point, you'll fight a human character in a church. To get the best possible ending, you need to make that no one kills them. 
    • Choice 3: At the very end of the story, you'll be given the choice between two people to save. Saving the one you've seen the most in the game will have an extremely negative outcome for the city.

    Dying Light 2 Accessibility Options

    We think it’s great that games are starting to include more accessibility features, so we’ve included a list of the features that you can turn on in the game. 

    • Subtitles
    • Subtitle Size
    • Color
    • Speaker Color
    • Background Color
    • Controller
    • QTE Hold Mode
    • Colorblind Mode
    • Protanopia
    • Deuteranopia
    • Tritanopia

    Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


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    More Info About This Game
    Learn more about Dying Light 2 Stay Human
    Developer
    Techland
    Publisher
    Techland
    Release Date
    February 4, 2022 (Calendar)
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