Rooftops & Alleys put a new perspective on Parkour in DL2

[thegildedstallion]

I've been playing DL2 ever since day 1 of release and I had a ton of fun with the parkour system in the beginning. After the parkour update, some things felt better and other things felt...off. For instance, there used to be a looming dread of failing your parkour line if you were to time a jump wrong, or not jump at all. Or if you jumped, you may jump in the wrong direction and be punished for it. After the parkour update, that looming dread is completely gone for me. Yeah, you can go back to the original. But, like I stated before, a lot of things had improved with the new parkour, making it not really worth it to stay using the old parkour. Going back to DL1, I loved parkour in that game. The number of different parkour skills you could perform was incredible for it's time. Kong Vault, Dash Vault, THIEF VAULTS! It was crazy! How are these vaults NOT in DL2?! I gave this a pass after some time, accepting that DL2 has completely different parkour mechanics from the first game, so some skills will be different. However, my perspective has completely shifted after playing a game made by a solo developer...

Rooftops & Alleys is fascinating for many reasons, most notably because it's made by a single person who spent around 8 months making the game. In that time, the parkour has been incredibly well done and includes a surplus of skills that can be combined to make a beautiful and satisfying parkour line. I firmly believe this was the original vision for the parkour in DL2. The vision for the parkour was to be able to combine different skills, running across rooftops. But, when the game doesn't give us any skills to work with (i.e. literally ANY VAULT because there's only 1-2 vaults in the game currently and they are some booty cheeks and boring af), there's no room to be creative with how we traverse in the world. In addition, most skills in the game are just played out animations, and don't have any satisfaction when performing. A good example of a satisfying, but simple line: You want to vault into a cat hang and climb up the wall. Maybe you want to do a Kong vault (Cat Pass) into the wall. To do this, you'll need to time your jump (pressing space bar) at the right moment to perform a kong vault. Being able to time things, or maybe do a button combination would greatly enhance the parkour in the game.

I know Techland is super busy coming out with new DLC and potentially a new Dying Light game/rebrand, but c'mon guys. If you can't smooth out core gameplay and make it more enjoyable, how do you expect us to stay playing this in the long run? After playing this game made by a solo developer, I have a really hard time going back to DL2 and it's broken, half-baked parkour system...which is really hard to say for me because I truly enjoyed playing this game when it originally released, and I still hop back on DL1 from time to time. But, DL2 is just not as enjoyable to me as it used to be for me...what are your all's thoughts? Am I being too nit-picky? I want this game to bounce back, but the core gameplay/parkour is just not refined and polished and that's a real turn off for me.