Dying Light: The Beast received a new trailer during the Summer Game Fest showcase, with Techland revealing that the all-new, standalone game will be released on August 22. That prompted fans everywhere to start questioning Techland’s initiatives, especially as, not too long ago, the team confirmed that 2022’s Dying Light 2: Stay Human would be supported until 2027.
At Summer Game Fest, I sat down with Tymon Smektala, the franchise director behind Dying Light, to ask him about that very topic. Fear not, Stay Human fans, this isn’t the end of the road for your beloved live-service zombie RPG.
‘Lots of Very, Very Cool Ideas’
I’m a huge fan of the Dying Light franchise, and despite some of the bad rap given to Dying Light 2: Stay Human when it was released in 2022, I’ve remained a stalwart player and have sunk hundreds of hours into it across multiple platforms.
That’s one of the reasons why I asked Tymon Smektala what the future of Dying Light 2 looked like now that the team is mere months away from releasing Dying Light: The Beast. The secret is out, and Techland is referring to The Beast as Dying Light 3, so it stands to reason that such an ambitious project would surely overtake Dying Light 2?
That’s not the case at all.
This is a message to the Dying Light 2: Stay Human community, because they worry. We’ve heard a lot of voices and we try to listen to what our community is saying. We keep hearing this right now, ‘Oh, you’re abandoning Dying Light 2 because The Beast is coming,’ but what we want to do is something different.
Yes, we had to slow down the pace of the updates and improvements to Dying Light 2 because of The Beast, but right after it launches, we’re getting back — we will be able to free up more resources to get back to Dying Light 2, and there are lots of very, very cool ideas of what we can do with it.
Even this summer, we are starting to do more with Dying Light 2: Stay Human. There will be a very nice collaboration happening, there will be a couple of interesting events over the summer months, and then when The Beast launches, we will be able to allocate our resources differently and there will be much more things coming to Dying Light 2: Stay Human.
Dying Light: The Beast is effectively a one-shot title, but an important one. I learned from Smektala that it effectively sets up the future of Dying Light, opening up a new era that so far has spanned ten years of gaming history.
Are you looking forward to what Techland has planned for Dying Light 2: Stay Human? Let me know on the Insider Gaming forum.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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