Techland explains why fans should revisit the first Dying Light before Dying Light: The Beast launches

Dying Light fans can be grouped, roughly, by the game that introduced them to the series. Given how divergent 2015’s Dying Light is from 2022’s Dying Light 2 Stay Human—mainly in terms of their stories and somewhat in their gameplay focus—this can be expected. But this fact is key to understanding Tymon Smektala’s hopes for Dying Light: The Beast as the franchise’s next chapter closes in on a summer release date.

Smektala, the Dying Light franchise director for Techland since 2022 (with production credits going back to the first game), thinks The Beast will unify the timeline set down by its two predecessors released seven years apart. He hopes the latest entry will get fans of either title to reconsider their feelings toward their less-favored counterpart.

“For the hardcore part of our community, Dying Light 2 is not as good as Dying Light 1,” Smektala said. “They kind of push it aside.” The 2022 game’s nighttime cycle, for example, isn’t as threatening as the first game’s. Some fans felt that pushed the series away from its survival-horror roots and toward a more straightforward action-adventure experience focused more on accessibility and advancing a narrative to its next beat. 

Dying Light 2 initiates who went back to the first game, largely thanks to a definitive edition re-release shortly after the sequel’s 2022 launch, were nonplussed by the game’s survival focus and more dense and vertical city setting, which requires a different approach to the game’s parkour.

That’s sort of how one arrives at Dying Light: The Beast’s synthesis of a more open, ground-based setting (out in the woods, basically) where survival gameplay takes precedence over straightforward action. There will be something familiar for fans of both games, in other words, but they will also be outside of their comfort zone in another big way.
 

‘Night as hell’: The Beast brings a more suspenseful sundown

While developing The Beast, three design elements came together that “kind of surprised us how well they connected,” Smektala explained. “The feeling of night—our night, our basically ‘cranked up’ night, which is night as hell, as some people put it—how well it works in the new environment with the forest.

“The feeling of being there at night with our game mechanics, which we also have tweaked a little bit,” Smektala continued, “to make sure that we kind of use the environment to spawn the zombies in a way that keeps you on your toes, that keeps you tense. That has a tendency to surprise you from time to time.

“We wanted to have this environment, we wanted to do the night as scary, at least as in previous games, and then the dots connected. We realized that there is something here, something special, that we can push a little bit further with additional tweaks.”

Some of those tweaks (the third component Smektala had in mind) are technical improvements the team wanted to implement to deepen the player’s sense of immersion; think of things like weather effects as well as the foliage, season, and light in the day-night cycle. 

With all of these improvements combined, “I am getting more and more surprised by how truly beautiful the game looks,” he said. “You can get really immersed in its beauty and then, of course, get grabbed by a Biter, by a zombie that has sneaked behind you.”

The cohesion Smektala found in the new setting of Castor Woods, along with the art and survival gameplay supporting it, wasn’t a goal put forth by any design document, he said. Techland’s ambitions for The Beast, broadly speaking, were to reintroduce Kyle Crane, the popular hero of Dying Light and its 2016 story expansion, The Following, and to rule on the true narrative ending to The Following.

“A question we have been getting over all of these years can be summarized as ‘Which is the canonical ending of Dying Light: The Following?” Smektala said. Careful to avoid spoilers—particularly because he hopes fans will revisit The Following, if not play it for the first time—Smektala noted there’s a choice players can make in The Following that results in two different endings for the main narrative, plus a third “more hidden” outcome that fans have chewed over for long enough.

“No matter where we went, in Brazil, in Japan, in the U.S., in Europe, in Poland, this question was asked,” Smektala said. “And of course, obviously, [The Beast] will answer this question.”
 

A classic revenge tale with an unusual inspiration

The Beast’s premise came after developers made the decision to bring back Crane and tie off all the loose ends from The Following. Smektala points to the 2003 South Korean thriller Oldboy as an inspiration for The Beast’s story. In that film, a man held captive for 15 years gains his freedom and embarks on an action-packed campaign of revenge to find his captor and the reason for his years of torment.

In The Beast, Crane has been held captive for 13 years and subjected to cruel experiments by a mysterious villain called The Baron (real name: Marius Fischer). “As we started developing the story, we got into the theme of it being the revenge of Kyle,” Smektala said. “There are a lot of people at Techland who are fans of South Korean culture, movies, music, cuisine, everything. [Oldboy] is one of the classic movies of South Korean cinema.”

These experiments have given Crane an array of superhuman powers, enhancing the tension and threats that players will face in more survival-focused gameplay by giving them some heavy tools in their arsenal.

“We have flirted with those kinds of mechanics since the first game even,” Smektala said. “It started as a relatively grounded, realistic zombie apocalypse, but then we tried some side quests, some Easter eggs. We tried to stay grounded but add a little bit of the crazy stuff, and we realized it resonates with our players.

“With Dying Light: The Following, we kind of started going in the direction where the grounded mixes a little bit with the supernatural,” Smektala said. “So what you see at the ending of The Following, what you see that happens to Kyle Crane, what you think that happens to Kyle Crane, is that he’s already kind of turning into this kind of half-survivor, half-monster.” A core story conceit in Dying Light 2, that protagonist Aiden Caldwell is infected but can control the infection by finding and using inhibiting treatments, also opened that game up to superhuman powers, Smektala noted.

“We realized from all of our players”—fans of Dying Light as well as Dying Light 2—“they want more of it, that they find something interesting in it. Maybe we didn’t have it in mind 10 years ago, but it was a conscious evolution of the characters. We want it to be a grounded zombie apocalypse game, but at the same time, we realized that there is space to break through a little.”
 

Castor Woods expands on a brief Dying Light 2 setting

Another unexpected player wish, Smektala said, was to return to the prologue area of Dying Light 2, or at least a setting similar to it. In the beginning of the game, where the player learns gameplay basics and how a typical boss fight will play out, Caldwell meets up with another courier—adventurers crossing the post-apocalyptic hinterland—outside the city of Villedor. “[Fans] were saying they would love to get back to it, that they felt that there was something interesting there,” Smektala said. “It was another thing that pushed us into this direction.”

If you’re thinking that The Beast may require some brush-up preparation, Smektala says you’re right. “What I would do, I would replay Dying Light 1 before playing Dying Light: The Beast,” he said—even for veterans who already favor the first game. “Just to remind myself of who Kyle Crane is and to set my expectations regarding the survival horror aspect and how smart I need to be to survive in this world because I think that’s one of the things that makes Dying Light unique.”

Dying Light 2 deserves a revisit after finishing The Beast, Smektala said, especially for those hard-to-please fans of the first game. “I think after Dying Light: The Beast, they will give [Dying Light 2] a little bit more appreciation,” he said. “And actually, that's also a good moment to get back to it because Dying Light is constantly evolving and changing.”
Dying Light: The Beast was announced at Gamescom in August 2024 but still hasn’t been tabbed for a launch date. It will launch for PC on the Epic Games Store as well as for consoles on their marketplaces. Fans can expect a core experience of around 18 to 20 hours, owing to The Beast’s origins as a story expansion for Dying Light 2 before the project evolved into a standalone game. The story was leaked in 2023, an incident that Smektala is wary of discussing, even as he acknowledges its influence on the project’s final form.

Those who bought Dying Light 2 Stay Human Ultimate Edition, a launch version of the game that promised a story expansion along with other content, will receive The Beast for free. The Ultimate Edition is no longer available, but Dying Light: The Beast is available to wishlist on the Epic Games Store now. 

A summer 2025 release window is expected with a more specific date to be announced soon.