How do you know when a DLC isn’t a DLC any more? That was the question that faced Dying Light developers Techland as they worked on the next entry for the long-running zombie-battling parkour franchise. Intended to be the second major piece of DLC for 2022’s Dying Light 2, what has now been announced as standalone release Dying Light: The Beast made this transition through a process of disaster and inspiration. When I asked the opening question of Tymon Smektala, franchise director of Dying Light, he answered, “When it explodes.
” It was a term that came up again and again in my sit-down with Smektala, art director Katarzyna Tarnacka-Polito, and Roger Craig Smith, the voice actor behind Dying Light’s returning original hero, Kyle Crane. This explosion began with a whimper. During the development of what was intended to be the next DLC, the game’s perhaps.
..overenthusiastic community managed to unearth and leak details about the narrative plans, spoiling the developers’ intentions and causing an internal rethink.
And during that process, people fell in love with the idea of entirely changing directions and bringing back the original hero of 2015’s Dying Light, Kyle Crane, who ended the game in somewhat unfortunate circumstances. This, says Smektala, “was a boost of adrenaline, an injection of something powerful in our arms [and] almost overnight everyone had so many ideas of what we could do, things they really wanted to do to pay homage. And it exploded.
” W.