Techland revealed a new trailer for Dying Light: The Beast at the 2024 Game Awards. The latest clip highlighted the new open-world game’s villain, showed a bit of gameplay, and confirmed a summer 2025 release window.
First revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live, Dying Light: The Beast is a spinoff of Techland’s zombie series. It brings back the first game’s hero, Kyle Crane, who finds himself battling a nefarious scientist named The Baron, who is conducting ruthless experiments in an attempt to splice human and zombie DNA together. The new trailer gives us a glimpse into the character and further teases the series’ most full-throated horror turn yet.
Ahead of the trailer’s reveal, I spoke with Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala about the new installment. Smektala stresses that The Beast is an important moment for Dying Light in a few ways. Not only has it reinvigorated the team at Techland creatively thanks to its more compact size, but it’s also set to cap off the series’ 10-year journey to this point. It both marks the end of an era and teases what’s next for the zombie series.
“We kind of feel like we’re 10 years younger when we’re making this game,” Smektala tells Digital Trends.
A more compact Dying Light
At first glance, Dying Light: The Beast doesn’t sound too different from previous games in the series. It’s still an open-world game where players beat the snot out of zombies using guns, melee weapons, and dropkicks. There’s still parkour, as its new trailer shows off a player running on walls and launching themself at zombies. So, what’s new?
Quite a bit has changed here, though not in the ways you might expect. The biggest difference is that it’s a much more concise game than the enormous Dying Light 2: Stay Human. Smektala notes that the team didn’t name it Dying Light 3 for a reason, as that might have set the wrong expectations. It’s more of a spinoff that sounds about on par with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales from what Smektala describes. Ironically, that small scope allowed Techland to accomplish much more.
“It’s slightly more compact than the numbered games in the series, but we like that format because I think it’s easier for players to digest,” Smektala says.” It’s around 20 hours of gameplay, so not as big as Dying Light 2, but because of that, we can focus more on the details. It’s very handcrafted. Our environment artists were extremely happy with that approach, because it allowed them to focus on every square centimeter of the map. It will be very hard for you to find two interiors that look the same … For Dying Light 2, we went super big, and because of that, it was harder to keep that human touch. Especially for the developers, they felt like they were part of this big machine and didn’t have that much space to express themselves. Right now, I think it’s easier to find those spaces.”
Looking at the current state of the industry, I think it makes sense to not overdo it.
There’s a practical reason for staying smaller too. When asked if The Beast has changed the way Techland thinks about making games, Smektala sounds excited about what the team has gained from scaling down for the project. While he can’t say for sure what the studio will do next, he notes that more compact games like this might become a necessity in a volatile gaming industry competing for players’ limited attention.
“This might impact how we approach games in the future,” Smektala says. “I understand the allure of those super big, sprawling games, but it gets harder and harder for players to complete them and they pose a bigger and bigger risk for the studio. Looking at the current state of the industry, I think it makes sense to not overdo it and risk the projects.”
Survival and horror
It’s not just the scale that’s different this time around. The Beast is aiming for horror more than any Dying Light game before it. Its new trailer emphasizes that with its mad scientist premise and an unnerving scene where Kyle Crane is the subject of a dark experiment. Even its setting is meant to bring more horror elements this time around, as players will find themselves hunting through the woods at night with a flashlight.
“With every Dying Light game, we want to give it a different tone,” Smektala says. “The first one was focused on survival. The second moved more towards action and the pure thrill of smashing zombies. This is more intimate. We want to bring back the survival from the first game, but also make it darker and scarier … You use your flashlight. There’s lots of shadows so it’s hard to see what’s what. Zombies [blend in with] the trees. It’s easy to confuse them in the bushes. You think you’re in a safe place and suddenly you’re surrounded by them.”
Though that’s a new direction for the series, Smektala stresses that The Beast is a return to form in other ways. That’s most apparent in its survival mechanics, as the game moves just a bit away from the bombastic action of Dying Light 2 to emphasize careful item management. Smektala believes that The Beast might even be a deeper survival game than Dying Light in some ways.
“In terms of overall balance, I think we’re going back to the survival feel of Dying Light — maybe even manage to make it more challenging, but in a good way. I think survival games are about using your brains more than making your skills. Survival games ask you to make a series of very difficult decisions where you manage a limited amount of resources. Sometimes a small decision can make your survival much harder later … I think we’ll hopefully be able to go a little bit deeper, but in a way that feels rewarding for players.”
If it sounds like a bit of a full circle moment, that’s by design. Next year marks the 10-year anniversary of the franchise and Techland very much sees The Beast as an end of one era. That doesn’t mean that the series is going to drastically change in the future. Smektala says that the team’s focus, first and foremost, is to create the best zombie games it can, ones that push the genre forward with each entry. But he sees a future where the series is ready to grow beyond that and reach places it’s never been.
“I think The Beast will be a summary of the last 10 years, but also an opening for the next decade. We’ll release The Beast, it’ll be the ending of the first decade, and then we’ll move quite rapidly to the future. I think we can do much more … More and more games and companies are moving broader outside of just games. They’re moving into transmedia. I think there’s a future for that for Dying Light.”
There’s a pause as Smektala seems to consider his next words carefully: “We have quite a few interesting ideas in that regard.”
Dying Light: The Beast is scheduled to launch in summer 2025 for PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
