My big concern is that Techland tooled The Following for co-op way over single player, making the XP grind balanced in favor of Youtube fans that don’t mind spending their time on repetitive stuff.
These shifts in combat and difficulty are Techland’s way of retooling Dying Light’s end-game. Having built a strong community through updates and DLC, it’s now giving them something to do. Alongside the new driving skill tree, The Following also introduces Legendary levels (also available, retroactively, to those still exclusively playing the original Dying Light). These offer incremental improvements to Crane’s core stats - stamina, damage, health - and an absurd depth, with 250 levels rather than the regular 25. To give you some idea, having played The Following for 16 hours, and having unlocked all 25 driving levels after around ten, I currently have a Legendary rank of just four. This explains why there’s a huge Demolisher called Holler on a farm near my central safehouse that hasn’t yet registered a single sliver of damage despite considerable and sustained efforts with all of my shiniest guns. I’ve finished The Following, but there’s obviously a long way to go.
We’ll see, I didn’t think the base game was too bad grind wise and I just about maxed out the trees through normally playing. If the new mechanics and map are fun enough I’m sure I won’t mind leveling up the new tree too. I never played the base game in co-op so if anyone feels its going slow and wants to try teaming up(on PC here) for better xp I’d be all for giving it a go!
Not really captured in the image, but it kept respawning waves and the plants would fight them off - though sometimes the zeds would lose focus (look for the buckethead and conehead in the background to the right on the wrong side of the fence), but all in all it was pretty delightful!
Yeah I was feeling the same way for the first hour or so last night. It did start coming back thankfully lol. I want to say the rank and file zombies feel much tougher so far. Bought a bow but haven’t tried it yet, the new SMG feels pretty solid. The car is fun so far but starting out and having to scavenge for fuel and screws feels like a bit of a chore. Will probably get easier as I build up supplies. Techland said in a twitter post that the Crossbow isn’t in the same location as all the preview videos they had put up on YouTube, they didn’t want getting it to be that easy apparently lol.
Having a blast with it so far, though I’m not looking forward to having to take out all those volatile nests.
Yep I am rusty as heck, also just in the starting area of The Following, I am finding weapons that do 2 or even 3 times the damage of my best weapon from the main campaign.
My weapons at the end of the main campaign were doing just over 1100 damage(fully modded) and within the first hour I was able to buy a couple that were over 1500 once I modded them out. So there has certainly been a nice boost in power. At the end of my play session last night I finally remembered about covering myself in zambie guts and and doing the instant executes from behind, it saved a lot of time when I needed to clear out the base of a tower.
Damn , my best weapon was only doing 450ish damage at the end of the main campaign. So it was a huge leap for me once I cleared out the area where you get the buggy. :)
Missions sure seem a lot harder than I remember. Before bed last night I did the restore power mission, I went through 3 weapons and probably 10 health kits.
Playing solo that is, maybe its easier with friends?
I just did that one last night too. Mostly wound up using my various guns once inside the dam and by the time I had the safezone finished I was out of most my ammo types and had to repair one of my melee weapons. So it felt pretty close to your experience I’d say. The zombies that leave an acid/poison cloud once you kill them are a pain in the butt.
I’m not sure how or if the game ramps up the difficulty when you’re in co-op. If you want to try sometime, hit me up on Steam.
The Following, even on normal difficulty, is harder than the base game’s ending area.
Part of that is because of Techland’s reversed difficulty curve. Just like Dead Island and vanilla Dying Light, you start weak and have to grind to get to the fun stuff. In The Following’s case, the buggy is crap until you level it up to get nitro and better parts.
The other part of the difficulty is due to the changes to Volatiles and spawning. The aforementioned spitting ramps things up. As for spawning, I don’t know if Dying Light always spawned so many enemies behind you while in battle and you just couldn’t see it because of the buildings, or if they ramped it up for The Following, but I’m not a fan.
