Today, Techland announced several Dying Light news as part of the franchise’s 10th anniversary. Events and updates are coming for both games, and the next title, The Beast, is landing this Summer. More unannounced projects are already in the works, and Techland is also preparing board games and a comic series.
To dive into all of that and much more, we had a nice, long chat with Dying Light Franchise Director Tymon Smektała. Keep scrolling to read the transcript; we’ve also embedded today’s episode of the Dying to Know show for those who haven’t watched it yet.
We’ve read the press release, of course, but please give us an overview of the key announcements today.
Tymon Smektała: We are actually having a very special day today at Techland because it’s the 10th anniversary of the release of the original Dying Light. It’s a series with quite a long history. Not all the games are lucky enough and fortunate enough to be able to celebrate that.
In today’s stream, we talk and reminisce a little bit about where we are with the franchise. The celebrations are basically packed with a lot of activations for fans. All of this starts today in both games. For Dying Light, we decided to go with a medley of the most liked, the most respected, and the favorite events from the history of that game. There’s HyperMode, Super-Crane, all the stuff that players have come to love over those 10 years. Then next week, when we are at the same time celebrating the third anniversary of Dying Light 2, we’ll start an anniversary celebration for that with a set of bounties, goals for players to achieve that will provide them with rewards that refer back to the whole series.
Of course, we want to use this as an opportunity for players to check out Dying Light if they haven’t already done so. So, both games have cool promotions on all platforms. At the same time, we are also announcing that the series so far has reached 45 million players. It’s something that we are very proud of. And we are also giving players a small update on our work forward for The Beast. We focus this period on the celebration of the anniversary, so we don’t go into much detail regarding The Beast, but the stream will give players a very nice look behind the scenes on how we work on the game where we are. There will be some Easter eggs hidden for our community so they can discover that and see how the work progresses on the beast. We are also telling players that we have a couple of things planned outside of videogames, like board games. We are even announcing some new comic initiatives, but the main message is that Dying Light is celebrating its 10th anniversary as a series and that we feel strong about its future. We stick to our plan of growing the franchise and hope that one day, Dying Light will become the go-to zombie game for players.
I also read that you’re planning to release an update for the first game.
Tymon Smektała: That’s part of the celebrations. Players will actually get two things from us. The first one is a kind of celebratory anniversary bundle where you can dress according to the occasion and also paint your buggy from Dying Light The Following in the same way. And yes, we are also preparing an update that will squeeze a little bit more from our graphics engine. It will also include the remastered soundtrack by Pavo Bashak. Don’t expect a complete overhaul, but there will be a small update where we look at various areas of the game to try to squeeze a little bit more out of it, like increasing the resolution of textures here and there, improving the lighting, especially in dialogues, but it’s a set of tweaks here and there that will just give the game a slightly nicer look.
When is it coming?
Tymon Smektała: It will arrive soon. We’re not revealing an exact date because this is basically a tech achievement to work with an engine that already has its years. So we didn’t want to jump the gun too early, but it will happen very soon. We just want to make sure that when we announce the exact date, it will be delivered on that date. I think that’s the best answer I can give you without kind of having to say, we missed the date for a few days, but it’s going to happen soon.
Looking at the new Dying Light roadmap that you put in the press release, you confirmed that The Beast is coming in the Summer. I guess you must be very close to finishing the game. Is it content complete yet? Is it just polishing at this point?
Tymon Smektała: Yes. One small thing that I said at today’s anniversary is that we have basically finished recording the voice lines. We’ll have all of them in the game within a few days. We are definitely in a stage where the game is complete, and we are just trying to look at all of its areas and polish as much as possible. I would say we are mostly focusing right now on general quality and seeing how we can improve the look at this particular location or this particular set of enemy animations. We are also at the stage of making a proper, final balance pass on everything, so it’s shaping up to be a really nice experience. We still have a few playtest rounds ahead of us, so we’ll see what will come from that, but I don’t expect anything more than maybe another set of tweaks, pulling the knobs here and there to make sure that everything is ready for the launch.
You said Summer, but that’s three months. Could we narrow it down a bit more, like early Summer or late Summer?
Tymon Smektała: I don’t want to answer that question. I think that at Techland, we have a history of being a little bit optimistic and saying days that we then had to move a little. Every developer has that. The game will definitely be released in the Summer, but you’ll have to wait a little bit longer for the final date.
Alessio Palumbo: Okay. I had to try. You’re still working on Dying Light 2 as well, right?
Tymon Smektała: Yes, of course, absolutely. The roadmap also reveals our plans for this year. We are definitely sticking to the promise of supporting the game for five years. We are moving strong in the third year. I think we have found a rhythm that is comfortable both for us as developers and for our community. We have four big events each year. In every quarter of the year, there’s a nice big event inside Dying Light 2, which brings new activities, new rewards, new cosmetic items, and at the same time, in between, we release slightly smaller updates.
New weapon types are coming. We plan to introduce a set of technical improvements mostly inspired by our work on The Beast. I would say we definitely managed to improve our tech for The Beast, so we plan to bring back some of those improvements to Dying Light 2 at some point this year. In the second half of next month, on February 19, we plan to release an update that will bring the Tower Raid. It’s a co-op mode, which we worked on over the course of last year, but this time, it’s going to stay as a permanent addition.
It’s something quite unique for us. We created it as a response to players’ requests and we plan to work on this and develop it further. We’re waiting for feedback from our community. We are also introducing a set of improvements to our prologue and the initial hours of the game. We are making the story and player progression a little bit more seamless because we have realized that there are a couple of bumps, some tricky moments in the initial hours of the game. Since it still brings a lot of new players, we wanted to ease it out a little bit, make it more engaging and flowing more naturally for players.
We also plan to look again at and energize our content creators. As you know, Dying Light 2 is one of the unique games where we have released our tools for players to create their own maps and, at the same time, we made those maps easily accessible both on PC and consoles. I think there are maybe three, four, five games that really do it. We have some ideas on how we can direct and help our content creators to create premium content for the UGC part. When I say premium, of course, what I mean is high quality, not paid, because this is a part of the game that will stay absolutely free forever.
Going back to the Tower Raid, I think it’s also worth noting that over the course of last year, we gave players access to it on two occasions for a few weeks. The goal was to treat it as an early access, open beta type of thing. We wanted to gather feedback and players’ expectations. The permanent version of the Tower Raid will be an answer to that. It will be accessible from the main menu, so you don’t have to be in the open world to access it.
Players will get to choose one of four characters with their own progression trees, skills and roles. Since it’s a roguelite experience, it will change with each attempt, giving players access to different floors, different enemy combinations, sets of mutators, and so on. If they succeed, the loot they earn will then be usable in the classic open world part of Dying Light 2.
What kind of co-op improvements are you making to the game outside of the Tower Raid mode?
Tymon Smektała: I would say those are mostly focused on technical stuff and making it easier for players to connect. Dying Light 2 was never intended or envisioned as a fully online game. We realized that we missed some features on the matchmaking front. It’s a little bit harder, it takes a few too many steps to connect with your friends to create a group and play together. Post-launch, Dying Light 2 has received more and more content that supports, promotes, or is just fun to play with your friends or in co-op groups, so we wanted to make sure that players would be able to connect more easily. We also looked at the user interface to make sure that it’s easier to understand what’s happening to other players, where they are, and what kind of level they are.
We feel that this is something that we want to explore. We realized that we don’t have as many things to play for players in co-op as probably would make that form of playing the game even more popular, so we’ll be looking at this side of the game for any future ideas that we’ll have.
You mentioned Community Maps. What kind of improvements are you going to make to that area of the game?
Tymon Smektała: I think they are already quite integrated and very accessible thanks to our partnership with mod.io, which delivers those super cool tools that make access to maps created by the community in a very easy way. We managed to have them available both on PC and consoles, and especially the consoles part is something that requires a little bit more effort. Not every developer is willing to go in that direction, but for us, it was very important to keep our community intact. The community maps are already available on PC and consoles, and the map creators have access to all of those players when they make their creations. Now, we are growing and improving our relations with the content creators, talking to them every day and trying to understand what kind of features they are missing and what kind of additional options, abilities, and opportunities they would like to have on the editor side.
We have a team that is trying to deliver that to them as quickly as possible. But at the same time, we realize that maybe we could help them a little by coming up with ideas and directions for what they create. Aside from a set of technical editor side tweaks that will make creating maps easier and also iron out some of the kinks that happen when you download the maps, we also want to support the most talented map creators specifically and individually to make sure that they are able to deliver their vision. This way, we hope that the maps that they will create will just get better.
We have had a lot of discussions with a lot of those people where they say, okay, we want to make this kind of map. We have this idea for it, but we were able to make it only up to this point because we are missing a feature or two to fully realize our vision. What we intend to do this year with Dying Light 2 mods is to get more intimate with those creators and deliver them the features that they need to fulfill their visions. For example, we have a map which is called Stadium. It is a set of sports events that use our mechanics. It’s a great map, but when you start playing it, you quickly realize that it misses some features. There’s a football match that you can try to play, with two goals and a ball, and you can play it with your friends, but then there’s no mechanic that would allow you to count the score, so we talked to the content creator, and he told us that he didn’t have the features needed to do this.
With this new approach, we’ll look at a map with such potential and say, “Okay, let us help you, and we will deliver you a solution that will allow you to count the goals.” That’s just an example to present the mindset that we’ll have for this year when working with the most talented map creators from the community.
There are also new firearms and melee weapons on the way. Can you share something more about those?
Tymon Smektała: I think we don’t want to kind of spoil the surprise, but definitely, this year will bring a number of new melee weapons and firearms. When you look at the roadmap and you see new firearms and new melee weapons, you can expect new items within the types that have already been established. And yes, we’ll also add some new weapon types, both in the melee and the firearms sides, that we didn’t have before.
In general, are you happy with how firearms have been integrated into Dying Light 2? Because I know that was a big sticking point.
Tymon Smektała: I think we have managed to do that in a way that makes sense both for us and for our community. We feel that our implementation achieves one thing, which is actually a challenge for a game like Dying Light, where one of the pillars is first-person melee combat. We chose this as something that makes us unique, standing out on the market.
Of course, we still think of new ways we can develop it and what more we can do with it, but Dying Light is a game built on melee combat and bringing firearms to it is a design challenge about how you want to implement them into the game so they don’t overpower your core gameplay mechanic, which is first person melee combat.
And I think we did actually a nice job on it with various design decisions on how often players get access to bullets. What’s the value of one bullet? Does it make sense to use it in every situation? Maybe not. Then also, with additional mechanics that are well embedded into the worldbuilding where if you make noise, you wake up the zombies, making it always a double-edged sword. Then, it supports and builds up on our other gameplay pillar, which is parkour and being able to traverse with great agility. We created this loop where it’s okay for you to use firearms, but you cannot stay in that place for long because the zombies will come and maybe when they do, you will have to use your parkour to run away or maybe even parkour to find a better shooting position.
Of course, we had firearms in the first game, so we have some experience in that regard. I think we’ll be using both of those experiences in The Beast. I think the relation between melee weapons and firearms is even stronger in that game because the firearms are introduced to the player from the beginning. It’s not like we did in Dying Light 2 where it was a game without firearms and only at some point did we add firearms to this already built mechanism. With The Beast, it was slightly easier because we knew from the start that, of course, we’d have firearms there. We are also increasing our range of firearms in that game. So far, we have mentioned that we’ll have a grenade launcher. We have also shown a bit of flamethrower, and that’s not all, as we have more announcements coming on that front.
You also revealed that the franchise has a number of unannounced projects in the works.
Tymon Smektała: Yes, we wanted to use the anniversary occasion to affirm to our players that the future is bright, and we’re definitely not stopping here. But we’ll talk about those projects after the release of Dying Light The Beast because there’s no denying that currently, our focus is on Dying Light the Beast and sticking to the support of Dying Light 2. So, we just wanted to give this little kind of heads-up to players that the future is bright, and we have ambitions for it.
The franchise is going beyond games with board games and stuff like that, but did you look into TV or movie adaptations, which are increasingly active in the gaming industry? Was there ever anything that maybe could have happened or could still happen for the IP?
Tymon Smektała: Absolutely. We are still looking at all of our options here. As you can imagine, anything in this kind of glossy Hollywood area takes a little bit more time than the creation of a board game or a comic. So, we are still considering our options. Nothing to announce at this stage, but this is an area where we are constantly having conversations and discussions about trying different approaches and seeing what we can do. Definitely, our belief is that it has the potential to take off outside of games. I think that with 28 Years Later, we’ll see a slight renaissance of the zombie setting in pop culture, and I think it makes a lot of sense for Dying Light to also be a part of it. But once again, there is nothing to announce at this moment.
I guess you probably can’t answer this, but I’m going to try anyway. A couple of years ago, you revealed that Techland was working on another IP, a fantasy franchise. It’s been a while since that new franchise has been discussed. Could you confirm if it’s still being made?
Tymon Smektała: Well, my role is Dying Light franchise director. I will let my friends speak about their project. I can answer all the questions about Dying Light, but I will not steal the shine from my friends at Techland. So, nothing to comment on this topic.
It’s just that, while I love zombie games, I also dearly love fantasy. So, it’s something I would love to see eventually.
Tymon Smektała: Same here.
Finger crossed. Just a final question. The Nintendo Switch 2 has been announced, at long last. Are you looking into supporting it for Dying Light 2: Stay Human and/or The Beast? The first game was eventually released on the Switch.
Tymon Smektała: It’s too early to comment on this because we have just basically learned the basics about the console, at least publicly. The only thing I can say right now is that I’m waiting for the orders on the Nintendo Switch 2 to open so I can secure my own version of it right away. But nothing to announce on this topic officially at this moment.
OK, fair enough. Is there anything you’d like to add?
Tymon Smektała: I would like to say that it has really been an amazing journey for us and I think none of us at Techland realized that 10 years after releasing Dying Light we’d still be talking about the game and it would still be such a popular series which really left its mark the zombie genre in the open world survival horror genres. We really feel proud about our work on the game and the series, but we also understand that the series wouldn’t be where it is today if not for our community and the players, 45 million of them who have spent their time with the Dying Light titles. So, if I may, I would like to thank all of our community and all the players who have enjoyed Dying Light over the years because we wouldn’t be there without them. And it’s a great honor to be able to deliver at least a slice of entertainment and fun to their lives. It’s an honor for us. It’s a pleasure for us and something that we are very grateful that this could happen.
Thank you for your time.
