The Surge 2's world "much more alive than it was before"

Specifically in regards to characters you meet.

The Surge 2's creative director Jan Klose was at E3 to talk about the various elements of the action-RPG sequel, and during this time we asked about the environments the player will face, and more specifically the urban environment and what that will contain, to which he said:

"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."

"There's a lot of variety in the environment, and this is what we really want to really up, so it's a huge... it's not in a very good state, so the whole city's under quarantine and for some reason - which we can't reveal right now - they build a huge protective wall around it that you can also witness and see that."

We're also told we'll see "very different characters, creatures, and I think the important thing it's not like everything is that or zombies like some people said in the first one, but you'll encounter a lot of people trying to survive, they're assembling somewhere, they're doing their own stuff, and you can sometimes align with them or fight against them, take on quests from them. So it's all much more alive than it was before."

Does this all sound like a big improvement from the first game?