Revealed via the official Dying Light Twitter account, developer Techland recently shared just how long it would take to fully, absolutely, almost abhorrently complete their anticipated sequel, Dying Light 2. Using the walk from Polish capital Warsaw to Madrid, Spain as a frame of reference, the account rather excitedly told us all the hours needed for a completionist run of their zombie-filled shooter:
To fully complete Dying Light 2 Stay Human, you'll need at least 500 hours—almost as long as it would take to walk from Warsaw to Madrid!#DyingLight2 #stayhuman pic.twitter.com/Sk3KFpRJoA
— Dying Light (@DyingLightGame) January 8, 2022
Five… Hundred… Hours. Right, time to get memeing.
Since most everyone on games Twitter was downright aghast at this colossal figure, we at Game Luster figured we’d ease your woes with even more frames of reference. After all, we doubt the walk to Warsaw from central Spain is something most people have taken on. If we compare Dying Light 2’s completion length to activities any gamer can understand, you’ll see 500 hours isn’t all too bad!
Y’know, maybe.
With that, we present our list of the Top 10 Things You Can Do in One Dying Light 2 Completionist Run (we’re still workshopping the name… and the hours…):
1. Four Playthroughs Of Persona 5 Royal
JRPGs are notorious for their length, often easily and rather unabashedly clearing 100 hours for full completion runs. While there are a wealth of them to choose from, this writer thought he’d pick his favourite, Persona 5 Royal, as the subject for this experiment.
My first playthrough of P5R took me a solid 124 hours. In that time, I did most everything; fused high level Persona, flirted with my doctor, punched a painting in the mouth, went fishing, romanced a teammate (Makoto best girl), and shot a god through the goddamn head. You know, standard Persona fare. This 124-hour run also included Royal’s third semester, ensuring I covered all of the possible story content.
Taking this number as average, you could complete Persona 5 Royal a whopping four times in the time it would take for one completionist run of Dying Light 2. Probably half another if we consider the reduced grinding time in subsequent New Game Plus runs. That’s twelve semesters at Syujin Academy. 44 Palaces cleared. Countless “For REAL?!”s.
That’s also one way to avoid a harem run…
2. Get, Like, a Loose Grip on Warhammer Lore
Warhammer.
I know next to nothing about this series of… games? Books? Archaic references?
There’s a lot to get through. Luckily, I have 500 hours to dig in! Where do I start?
Oh… Oh no.
To clarify, that’s just the set of sources for one of the Warhammer Wikis. There are also Wikis for Warhammer 40k and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. Each of these Wikis has their own obscenely large thing right in the middle, with a galaxy for 40k and a 13-entry long table of overarching contents for Sigmar. That’s… a lot of content.
Truth be told, I doubt I’d actually get through all of this in just 500 hours. But given my “Good Reader” status according to this random speed reading test I found, I think I’d be able to skim a good amount! Maybe the first few books of base Warhammer? Ten odd planets worth of lore in 40k?
At the very least I’d be able to understand who the Brother is and why he is pinned there.
So, if parkouring over zombies for 500 hours isn’t your jam, you could always learn the truth behind why the big men in the big suits do the big scream! Or, just, go kill orcs or something, I don’t know.
3. Watch Almost Every Cinematic Video Game Adaptation
We just recently got season 2 of Netflix’s The Witcher, continuing the adventures of Superman in a wig. Earlier in 2021, Arcane, based on popular thing-to-hate League of Legends, premiered to insanely good reviews. There are… six Mortal Kombat movies.
Video game adaptations are everywhere! Few of them are good, even less of them are easily accessible, but there is such a wide range of content to be found within them. From hilarious levels of whitewashing in 2010’s Prince of Persia to the absolute fever dream that is 2019’s Detective Pikachu, there’s all sorts of stories you could experience in the time it takes to jump over every zombie in Dying Light 2.
Now, I actually did the math, and going by the runtime for every currently released, English-language, live action film on this list, it would take you 4,309 minutes to watch all the video game adaptations on the first list here. That’s about 72 hours! Which is… less than a fifth of a Dying Light 2 completionist run. For all those movies. Combined.
You know what, maybe it IS a little long…
4. Plausibly Link Every Legend of Zelda Game In A Cohesive Timeline
Easily one of the most revered and celebrated series of all time, The Legend of Zelda is an obvious game to bring up when we’re talking epic, long-spanning sagas. Or Dying Light 2.
If there’s one thing that’s not so obvious, though, it’s the lore. Zelda timelines are a convoluted mess, with more than a few fans saying no such thing even exists. Half the fanbase insists that The Legend of Zelda is a series of grand retellings of the same base story across generations, Nintendo’s own claims to the contrary be damned. The other half says that there is, in fact, a connecting thread throughout the games, beyond the apparent pointy-eared one. A surprise third half claims a weird hybrid of both theories. They look like this.
Okay I’m maybe making up that third half. Regardless, Zelda lore is only hampered by Zelda discourse, with neither camp budging on their stance. The best way to come to an educated conclusion, then? Do it yourself!
The (un?)official ZeldaWiki on Fandom dot com has a section all about the alleged timeline. There are forty-seven subsections within. While none of them are too long, they’re quite dense when put together. For safety’s sake, then, let’s give you 10 hours to study the events of each entry. Another 10 to read through the book I mentioned earlier. With another 20 hours, you piece together all you’ve learned, and would you look at that. In just 500 hours, you’ve done it!
Everyone is still miserable!
5. Beat every release of Skyrim
Much like the game it concerns, this meme will never die. Bethesda’s megahit The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been released so many times across multiple generations, it’s essentially a library or canon of its own. Not every release has significantly expanded the game’s offerings, but a good few changes come with each. There’s a wealth of content to get into, again and again… and again and again and again.
To be specific, there are fifteen releases of Skyrim. That’s almost as many mainline Final Fantasy games have been released. If we were to get into the numbers, HowLongToBeat has Bethesda’s immortal husk pegged at 34 hours needed to beat the main story. 108 hours will net you a good chunk of side content, while total completion will run you a meagre 232 hours. Of course, the Toddlord himself said that Skyrim can technically be played forever, but let’s just run with these numbers for now.
In the context of Dying Light 2, beating the fifth Elder Scrolls story in all fifteen releases will take you a solid 510 hours. However, since that number doesn’t work with this joke, I’m gonna say we’re all proper gamers who could easily shave two hours off a story beeline run of Skyrim. With that, 32 hours times 15 releases gives us… 480 hours! That’s 20 hours shy of a Dying Light 2 completionist run! What’s more, guess what you can do with those spare 20 hours?
We wanted to clarify our recent communication about the amount of hours required to complete the game. Dying Light 2: Stay Human is designed for players with different gameplay styles and preferences to explore the world how they see fit.#DyingLight2 pic.twitter.com/tcaDKULMo8
— Dying Light (@DyingLightGame) January 10, 2022
The fun never ends.
6. Complete The Pokédex
We’ve talked Warhammer and Zelda, but let’s get into the cutest bastion of ye olde gaming: Pokémon. There are millions of players of this creature-collecting chronicle around the world, and almost as many pocket monsters to boot. At least, that’s what it feels like.
In truth, there are currently 900 unique Pokémon out there. Well, 898 in the official Pokédex, but two more after we count the Arceus trailers. They’ll be added later, I swear. Now, by no means will you be able to fully complete every Pokémon game in just 500 hours — there aren’t enough Master Balls in the world for that. This probably rules out actually catching them all as well. However, I never stated exactly what I meant by “completing” the Pokédex…
Remember my speedrun-worthy reading speed I mentioned earlier?
Each entry in the official Pokédex comes with an image of the Pokémon in question, a short description, some quick facts and stats, relevant evolutions, and images of all the trading cards featuring the ‘mon in question. Reading this one for Calyrex took me a grand total of… one minute. Once again taking my dumbass as average, that means reading all 898 entries in the Pokédex would take around 898 minutes. Add in the upcoming two, and it brings us to 15 hours exactly. You could read the Pokédex a full 33 times in the time it takes for one Dying Light 2 completionist run.
Trivia nights will never be the same.
7. Actually Load Into A Game Of GTA Online
Lo and behold, we’ve finally come to a joke about load times!
In the era of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, jokes like these are hard to base in reality. Luckily, we can always count on good ol’ Grand Theft Auto to provide us with just the ammunition we need. Between three generations and two full releases with another on the way, one could argue that GTA V, especially GTA Online, is Rockstar’s Skyrim. They keep releasing it, people keep playing it, and the madness never truly ends.
By madness, of course, I mean the load times.
For all its varied and manic content, GTA Online simply cannot escape the plague of obscenely long loading screens. Players have reported load times of anywhere from 3 minutes to over 10. I myself spent over 400 hours playing the game with my friends throughout high school, all those moons ago. Far too many of those hours were spent staring at a birds-eye view of Los Santos, hoping and dreaming that I, too, could one day traipse around the very city that was so close yet so far.
Now, the issue has since been (mostly) fixed, with Rockstar finally releasing a patch last year. The game originally came out in 2013, however. That’s still almost eight full years of absolute hell with loading times.
Almost enough time to complete Dying Light 2…
8. Achieve Perfection in Stardew Valley
In February 2016, Eric Barone, otherwise known as ConcernedApe, blessed the world with Stardew Valley. The massively popular farming sim has only grown bigger since release, coming to more platforms and winning various awards. This beloved little farm that could has achieved so much… But has it achieved Perfection?
Perfection, of course, is the state of having completed all of Stardew Valley’s content. According to the community Wiki, this means maxing out every possible task across eleven specific categories. You’ll be hunting walnuts, romancing villagers, and planting enough crops to warrant a spreadsheet or two. It’s no small feat, with few players having made it. If you’ve got the time though, you absolutely could! It’ll just take you around 149 hours. That’s about 30% of a Dying Light 2 run.
Survive the apocalypse, or thrive in the valley with three whole farms! And families. And sets of friendships. And agricultural empires…
No zombies though, so that’s nice.
9. Complete Dying Light Ten Times
If there’s one thing gamers aren’t known for, it’s patience. I was literally complaining about loading times, like, two entries ago in this list. Waiting is a problem, and that’s especially true here. For all the conversation we’ve got around it lately, Dying Light 2 is still three and a bit weeks away (as of writing). That’s a long time! Maybe all this talk of zombie games longer than the Bible has got you itching to shoot some undead NOW.
Boy do I got a game for you.
Techland’s first outing into the apocalypse, Dying Light, was a breakout hit when it launched in early 2015. The game had fun and relatively varied gameplay, and boasted the strategic advantage of launching during a mild drought of new releases at the time. That didn’t last long, but there was more than enough time for the zombie shooter to garner a large fanbase. Many loved Dying Light, with some even going so far as to complete it. On average, such runs took gamers around 55 hours.
Or, y’know, a little over one-tenth of a Dying Light 2 completionist run.
Alright, maybe you can’t actually complete the first game ten times in 500 hours. A 50 hour completion run would’ve worked better, but I’ve shamelessly fudged the numbers once already in this article. But hey, nine out of ten ain’t bad!
Playing the previous game in a series right before the launch of a sequel is a fun tradition, and helps prepare for the new content to come. What better way to get in the mood to complete Dying Light 2 than by playing its predecessor for 500 hours?
Well, I can think of one thing…
10. Literally Anything Else
Now, before we get up in arms here, I am not bashing Dying Light 2 before playing it. I’m just saying, 500 hours is a long time. That’s four Persona 5 Royal runs, three perfect farms in Stardew Valley, and an ungodly number of terrible movies. And that’s… kind of my point.
Spending long hours on anything can definitely feel great, especially when you’re super invested. That said, only ever spending long hours on things gets dull real quick. For all of Techland’s efforts, I doubt there are 500 hours of consistently fresh, non-repetitive content in their new game. Thus, to truly get an appreciation for all the developer has to offer, I recommend you spend plenty of time between zombie parkour sessions doing anything else. Spice things up! Play other games, read some books, touch some grass, whatever.
There are a great many gamers just like me who love heavy-focusing on one thing at a time before moving onto the next. We start and we do not leave till it is done. Play Dying Light 2 like that, and you may well come to abhor the medium as a whole, let alone this one game. Please, dear Reader: take a break.
And with that, we’re done! At least until Dying Light 3 comes out.
