Dying Light 2: 10 Crucial Things It Must Improve

Along with creating a more likeable good guy comes the necessity of making a better bad guy.

Rais, the main antagonist from Dying Light, was a bad guy that did bad things (cue Harley Quinn reference here). He spouted off cliche dialogue occasionally, or tried to act really menacing, and he just came across as a big pile of "meh." Rais was not really a human, merely a caricature of bad traits, like if Saturday morning cartoons had more brutal zombie executions.

Once again, nobody is really expecting Pulitzer Prize award winning writing here for the villain, but a little bit of humanization can go a long way. Perhaps making the antagonist a leader of a rival faction, who clearly cares about their soldiers and other citizens, but is willing to do whatever it takes to protect them, including standing in front of the player.

Suddenly, the bad guy is at least believable. They aren't doing bad things because they can, but because they must if they want to survive with the ones that they care about. It has the added benefit of showing that a zombie apocalypse takes a psychological as well as physical toll.

At the very least, ditch the trope of having the bad guy execute their own soldiers to show just how evil they are. That's just lazy writing.