Dying Light: The Beast Q&A

At Gamescom 2024, Techland surprised everyone by announcing Dying Light: The Beast, a standalone game in which Kyle Crane, the protagonist of the first game, returns.

Fans were waiting for the second Dying Light 2 DLC, which was originally slated for 2023 but got delayed. The studio has instead pivoted to focus on The Beast for reasons that were thoroughly explained in the below group interview I had with the team, which also featured Kyle Crane voice actor Roger Craig Smith in addition to Franchise Director Tymon Smetkala and Art Director Katarzyna Tarnacka.

Dying Light: The Beast doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will be available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X. It’s important to note that it will be free to owners of the Ultimate Edition of Dying Light 2 to compensate them for the lack of a second DLC. Moreover, it will support co-op just like the previous installment.

I know the game started as the second Dying Light 2 DLC, right?

Tymon Smektala: Yes, but also, actually, not really. We were working on the DLC, and last year, we experienced a leak for the narrative. So, a lot of very important elements of the story have been leaked out, and we were wondering how we could deal with this. We could ignore it, but then I think it would be ruined for a lot of players, actually, the most dedicated ones, because if you are a dedicated fan, you follow all the leaks, you learn about them, and it’s kind of hard to unsee what you have already seen.

We came to this dilemma, and we started discussing this. We spent about a week internally talking about what we could do with this. Out of those conversations, the idea came that we could ask Roger Craig Smith to return as Kyle Crane.

That was the trigger, the moment where we actually stopped thinking about DLC and started thinking about it as a completely new product, the return of Kyle Crane, because many people from the studio world have worked on previous games with him. It got us really energetic and inspired, so we came up with new ideas on what we could do with the character, the story, and the world. I think the best way to describe it is that over those two weeks, the game exploded. It was like DLC, but then suddenly, it became something else and much, much, much bigger, and that’s how Dying Light: The Beast was born.

You had to change the narrative because of that leak.

Tymon Smektala: Yeah, but it was not just that. Saying we had to change the narrative doesn’t really explain the process. It was the beginning of the process. But then we said, hey, actually, we are making a new game. All of the ideas, all of the energy, all of the creativity that has happened because of this trigger, because of that change, we looked at it, and we said, hey, we have about 18 hours of gameplay, we have sets of new game mechanics, a new skill tree for the main character, we have a new main character – even if he’s returning, he’s new in a way – we have a great story that refers to the first game and the second game and tries to connect them together and answer some questions in both of them.

We have mechanics like vehicles, a new multilayered environment with lots of things to discover, and lots of secrets. At that point, it was a completely different project and game.

Was the Castor Woods region the same when you still planned this to be the second Dying Light 2 DLC?

Tymon Smektala: Kind of. It’s a version of it. The name was the same, but the geometry and elements were different. Roughly, yes, we have built this on some elements of the previous map, but again, it’s evolved, grown, and received a lot more love.

Where is Castor Woods located compared to the two places seen in the previous games?

Tymon Smektala: I think it’s definitely closer to Villador. Generally, Dying Light: The Beast takes place after the events of Dying Light 2, but to be honest, we don’t really focus that much on making sure that it’s placed somewhere in the world. What we want to do is we don’t want to recreate a very specific place.

Why? Because if you live in that place, if you know that place, you basically know the game, right? We are trying to build a fictional space that makes sense for our game and for our narrative, but it’s just inspired by various things from a specific area. In this sense, Castor Woods is closer to Villador because both share a lot of European inspirations.

You said that it’s set after the second game, right? Can you say how long after?

Tymon Smektala: Quite soon. I would say it happens right after the events of the Dying Light 2.

Are there any characters coming back from DL2?

Tymon Smektala: I don’t want to spoil it because this would spoil the story, but as I said, it answers questions from the first game and the second game. But I think the most important thing is that Kyle Crane returns in the form and voice embodied by Roger Craig Smith. This is a big deal for us because actually having Roger in the game and on the project really changed things for us. It’s an absolutely amazing thing for us, and I think it’s worth using the fact that we have the actor here, so you can maybe ask him something.

Roger Craig Smith: He said it all. The most important thing is that Kyle Crane is back.

What was it like to return after I don’t know how many years from the first one?

Tymon Smektala: Dying Light will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year, so as humans, we have been working on the game since 10 years ago. However, in terms of Kyle Crane as a character, I think the best way to frame it in the worldbuilding timeline is that it happens after the events of Dying Light 2, and Kyle Crane has been a subject of very brutal experiments for many, many years before that.

How did the fact that your character was experimented on and imprisoned for so many years inform your performance and the narrative as a whole?

Roger Craig Smith:  That’s been the challenge, I think. It’s easy for me as an actor to want to go back and do what I did 10 years ago and listen to the character and go, oh yeah, we can do that again. But because of what Kyle has endured and I’ll use the word trauma, like, the idea that he’s so affected by what was done to him for a very long period of time of brutal experimentation… He’s still Kyle, but he’s definitely a little bit more hellbent on revenge, and he’s maybe not as lighthearted or jovial as he once was.

He’s a little more focused on a mission if you will, so it was fun for me to try to build the connective tissue between the Kyle Crane that we liked getting to experience as players in the first Dying Light but also doing something just a little bit different – well, kind of vastly different really because of what he’s endured. It was a fun challenge to try to sneak little bits of old Kyle in with this new sort of affected version of Kyle, but I love that. If there’s a chance to do anything nuanced, it’s fun for an actor.

Tymon Smektala: Yeah, it’s an actor’s challenge, right? You have to find a new way to interpret the character.

Roger Craig Smith: It’s fun to kind of like tweak it and do that sort of thing. Otherwise, you’re just doing something you’ve done before, but this is not your Grandpa’s Kyle. This is a different Kyle, which is why, to their point, Dying Light: The Beast is not a DL2 DLC. It’s a standalone thing because even Kyle is a different version of Kyle than what we’ve experienced in the past.

Are you also doing motion capture for Kyle or just voiceover?

Roger Craig Smith: It’s straight voice acting.

I also wanted to ask, Dying Light 2 was way more of an RPG than the first one. What about Dying Light: The Beast? Is it more like the first one or is it still an RPG?

Tymon Smektala: I actually think it’s something else. I think with every Dying Light game, we’re trying to look at the zombie apocalypse and do it in a slightly different way, find a different balance for quite a different take on the narrative and on the world, but also find a different balance and use different elements for building the gameplay. I think what we are trying to do with this one is give it a more survival feel. You should really feel that you struggle against zombies in this world to survive the next day.

In that regard, I think it’s closer to Dying Light 1 than to Dying Light 2. A reference for you can be the first initial hours of Dying Light 1, where you enter Harran and just have a weak weapon and every zombie is a problem. Even though Kyle Crane has changed and is a different, more seasoned, more experienced character, the world around him has also changed for the worse, so now he’s back to the moment where he is fighting to just survive.

Okay, so there won’t be any choices and consequences in The Beast.

Tymon Smektala: No, we decided to go with a linear story, very compact and impactful. We think this approach can be stronger, more emotional, and more engaging for players. We just want to tell a story, and because we also want to close and tie some threads from both games, it was important for us to allow ourselves to tell our version of the story, how we envision the canon of Dying Light 1 and 2 combined into what happens next for Kyle and for the future of the series.

I know you’ve been working hard to improve Dying Light 2 post-launch. We had many interviews about those improvements. Are you grabbing all of those improvements, such as for the nighttime experience, and using them in Dying Light: The Beast?

Tymon Smektala: Of course. With every game, we evolve the formula of Dying Light and redefine its gameplay. After the first game, we tried some new things with the second one. Now, we have a better picture and understand what works best from both approaches, so The Beast combines all of those. It is the next step in the franchise’s gameplay evolution.

So yes, we are taking all the advancements of Dying Light 2. We are using the same engine, but the engine has also been improved, for example, some of the weather effects. Dying Light grows all the time. We get wiser and smarter as developers, and we understand our community and the player’s expectations better, so I think there’s a culmination of everything we have done in the series over the 10 years.

Are you still going to continue improving Dying Light 2?

Tymon Smektala: Yes. That’s the plan. We have promised five years of support for the game. There will be more updates coming to Dying Light 2 this year and in the next years. That’s all I can say; we don’t want to reveal too much right now because the message that we have right now is that Dying Light: The Beast is a new zombie adventure set in the world of Dying Light. Kyle Crane is back and we have a great game on our hands. We’ll focus on this for a moment, and then we’ll get back to Dying Light 2 quite soon.

Can you answer whether there will be more DLCs?

Tymon Smektala: Right now, we are not planning a narrative DLC for Dying Light 2, but the game will be supported and you can expect more content coming to it over the next years.

I’m guessing The Beast is not launching this year, right? 

Tymon Smektala: We are not revealing anything about the release date as of yet. Of course, information will happen quite soon when we’re ready to announce that. By the way, I wanted to say that if you look at the title, the trailer, and the Gamescom demo, you would say it’s easy: Kyle Crane is the Beast, right? Because of those new powers. But actually, it is not that simple. I would like to leave that question mark over your head.

Can you talk a bit about the Castor Woods zone?

Katarzyna Tarnacka: Sure. Castor Woods is located in a valley. There are different areas that you can explore. There’s a town that was previously a tourist destination but is now abandoned, and there’s an industrial area.

There’s a lot of woodlands, a lot of farm areas that we can explore, and it’s very dense. In fact, we changed the approach to building the areas quite significantly compared to Dying Light 2. This is much more handcrafted, and there’s much more attention to detail. We have the best of the best people working on it. By the way, I wanted to mention that about half of the team worked on Dying Light, and having Roger back gave us so much energy and excitement that it’s a very beloved project for us.

Something that I was thinking about is that there are some similarities with Dying Light: The Following. That was also a standalone DLC, and you had vehicles in that game, too. How are you balancing vehicles in this case? Because the main focus of Dying Light is always parkour.

Tymon Smektala: What we want to do with every Dying Light project is try to find something new in it. We understand what the core, the essence of Dying Light is, and each game experiments to grow them in different directions. Because the overall theme of Dying Light: The Beast is about surviving and survival – surviving those 13 years of experiments and surviving in this world – the survival aspect is very important. We have also applied this to the vehicles, so it’s not something that you can drive around mindlessly, smashing into everything and crushing it however you want.

It’s also almost like a character in that you have to take care of it, repair it, make sure that it’s not damaged, that it’s not broken, that it has fuel. So that’s one way how we can balance the vehicles. It is important because, on the other hand, we’re also going to give people more options to do things in the world. Imagine being chased on foot: usually, you run to the safe zone, but now you can run to the vehicle. Or when you’re being chased, you can also use the vehicle to get away faster, right?

But the zombies are even smarter in this game, so they can do things to the vehicle. We understand that vehicles give you a little bit more power, but we balance it through mechanics, making it more immersive, more realistic, and more grounded

In the presentation, they said you needed to repair the vehicles, right? Do they eventually break?

Tymon Smektala: A vehicle can break. There’s another difference between this and The Following, in which you just had one vehicle. Here, you can destroy the vehicle, but there are more vehicles in the world, so actually you can drive more than just the water.

Are there different types of vehicles in Dying Light: The Beast?

Tymon Smektala: Most of them are based on the off-road archetype, but we try to find differences between them.

Can you modify them in some ways?

Tymon Smektala: I’m not saying anything about this at this stage. Apologies, we’re just focusing on what’s important for now.

No worries. Thank you for your time.