The Surge 2 features have been explained in an interview by Gamereactor. Video is at the link provided.
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Thanks Farflame!"So the city itself, it's called Jericho City and it's a sort of North American city in the near future where we say 'okay, we can show what happened, what we talked about a lot in the first game, what happened to society, to the environment, everything like that.' Now you can experience that. How did the world evolve? [...] You can witness that, and in terms of level design, like you said, it's a huge difference, because if you think of an urban environment you have always in your mind [that] you can go anywhere at the beginning [...] it's not all open but it's interconnected, and like you said verticality - you can go underground, you'll be at street level, you'll be inside buildings."
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