Dying Light: The Beast developer Techland has revealed in a recent interview that the studio wants to switch its processes to support a development cycle that would take 3 to 4 years to make a game. Speaking to WCCFTech, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektała spoke about how the upcoming The Beast became a standalone title rather than its originally planned fate as a DLC for Dying Light 2 Stay Human.
“I understand why some players might think, ‘oh, it started as a small thing and now they charge full price, they just want to sell it as the next game.’ But it actually is, it is the return of Kyle Crane,” said Smektała. “The campaign is comparable to the previous games, and I think it really is the best Dying Light game we have ever made. One day, we realized we had a new game on our hands.”
In the interview, Smektała spoke about how Dying Light 2 Stay Human came out seven years after the release of the original Dying Light. With Dying Light: The Beast, he said that the studio wanted to change its approach to making games so that it can develop and release more of them more often.
“That realization is also something that we would like to assume moving forward as a developer,” explained Smektała. “Because both Dying Light 1 and 2 took seven years to make. We think that with a slightly different approach, with a bigger focus, we can release games more often. We are probably looking at a three or four year cycle, and I think that Dying Light: The Beast is the first step in that direction.”
In a previous interview, Smektała also spoke about how the reception to Dying Light 2 Stay Human informed the studio’s decisions when it was developing Dying Light: The Beast. Smektała admits that the studio “forgot” what fans of Dying Light loved about the game.
“With [Dying Light 1], we really managed to create a game where every piece fit together, and maybe we didn’t appreciate it enough,” Smektała said.
“Dying Light 1 was a game for our core community. It was a hardcore survival horror, open world, action adventure with very strong survival aspects. For Dying Light 2, we forgot about it. The game was a commercial success, but the players who should be closest to our hearts said we kind of lost the edge, we lost the threat, we lost the horror, we lost the tension.”
Smektała also spoke about Dying Light: The Beast being considered internally at Techland as a third mainline game rather than seeing it as a spin-off. While ambitions for the project were smaller when development first started, but over the course of making it, Techland started considering it to be more of a full-fledged sequel.
“For us, it really is Dying Light 3,” he said. “Maybe the project started with a slightly smaller ambition, but we got so excited about Kyle Crane returning. We got so excited about, actually, what we can do with this new iteration of the engine, how confident we feel about the gameplay mechanics.”
Dying Light: The Beast is slated for release on August 22, and will be coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.