At the Summer Game Fest event, I caught up with Techland to talk about all things Dying Light: The Beast. We took a deep dive into what this game means for the studio and what it took to bring it to life, pivoting the project from a DLC for Dying Light 2 to a full-fledged, standalone game.
It was a couple of weeks ago that Techland revealed a voice actor change for the French-speaking version of the game that rocked a portion of the community, replacing Benoit DuPac as Kyle Crane. I was curious to know what impact it would have had if Roger Craig Smith couldn’t have returned to fulfil the role of Kyle Crane in the English-speaking version of Dying Light: The Beast.
It turns out that without Roger Craig Smith coming on board, Dying Light: The Beast never would have happened.
‘I Thought You Killed Me’
I spoke with Tymon Smektala, franchise director of Dying Light, at Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles. One of the first questions I put to him concerned bringing back Roger Craig Smith. Given the recent departure of Benoit DuPac, I was interested to know how far the project would have gotten without Smith’s vocal talents being brought back on board.
Tymon advised me quite transparently that without Roger Craig Smith, there would be no Dying Light: The Beast.
With the idea to bring Kyle back, that was one of our foundational moments of Dying Light: The Beast.
We said it’s conditional – we will not do it unless Roger signs up for it. The first thing we did, we called Roger and said, ‘Hey man, do you want to go back?’ He said, ‘What, I thought you killed me or at least turned me into a Volatile or some kind of a zombie monster.’
We said, ‘We have a solution for that.’
It was definitely a very fundamental thing to get Roger on board and I would not be able to imagine, to be honest, a different actor doing the English voice of Kyle Crane, the essential representation of the character.
It was back in 2015 that players were introduced to Kyle Crane in Dying Light, an ambitious, open-world zombie slasher with intense parkour mechanics. The story evolved in 2022’s Dying Light 2: Stay Human, but the story had evolved and moved on from Kyle Crane, who remains a fan-favourite character to this day.
This revelation from Techland is a testament to the studio’s involvement with voice actors. In this day, it’s easy enough to suggest that Techland could have used AI voice replication or an impersonator to portray Kyle Crane, but the team was willing to reject the base idea of The Beast if Roger Craig Smith couldn’t be involved.
Dying Light: The Beast is being thought of as the next AAA game in the series. Tymon advised me that although it isn’t titled Dying Light 3, it has been referred to as that internally for several months.
Having played Dying Light: The Beast, I can firmly say it has the potential to be the best game in the series thus far. It has been upgraded tenfold from what we had in 2022’s Dying Light 2, and everything from the lighting to vehicular traversal, and from the parkour to the gritty combat mechanics has been overhauled.
Are you looking forward to Dying Light: The Beast’s release on August 22? 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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