
Getting players to finish games is harder than you might think, but Dying Light: The Beast's franchise director Tymon Smektala really, really wants you to see his new game's final quest.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, Smektala explained how Techland approaches its playtesting, asking players "to rate each quest one by one," scoring them on a scale of one to five. He claims that "basically all of them," with a couple of possible exceptions, have average scores of 80% or higher. That's pretty good, but he says the final quest blows them out of the water.
"The last mission in the game gets the highest score [out of] everything that's in the game." The scores for the final mission, he says, are "close to perfect," with almost every playtest scoring the game higher than four out of five. That means that the internal playtests have racked up an average score of 4.96.
In fact, it's so "almost perfect" that "it really pays to complete the game." But Smektala's fondness for the final mission isn't just about its scores. It also "puts Kyle Crane where we want him to be for the future." As Dying Light: The Beast serves as the culmination of 10 years of the series, he says that the ending Techland has cooked up "is really satisfying."
Still, Smektala's impression of the final mission doesn't guarantee people will see it. A surprisingly small percentage of players finish any individual game, attrition usually claiming far more than half the audience long before they hit the end credits. Leaving the best until last is often a good idea, but it'll probably serve Dying Light: The Beast well to make sure that its early missions are as good as its later ones. The good news, however, is that Dying Light: The Beast is only about 20 hours long for its main story, which should make wrapping the whole thing relatively easy.
Check out our Dying Light: The Beast hands-on preview for even more information about Kyle Crane's next adventure.