Dying Light's freshly-announced spinoff, The Beast, started life as DLC for the sequel, but it leaked, so developer Techland decided to switch things up.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ at Gamescom, franchise director Tymon Smektala recalls how the spin-off came to be, with one pivotal moment being the response to a big story leak.
"We have a very eager community to learn everything about Dying Light, and they managed to dig out some details - very juicy, basically crucial details about the narrative," he says.
"So this made us think, 'OK, what can we do with this?' We had a week-long set of meetings where we discussed different scenarios. The conclusion of those meetings was the idea to bring Kyle Crane back. At first, we weren't sure because we weren't sure if we could get Roger [Craig Smith, Kyle's voice actor] back on it, and without the man, it would make no sense."
As luck would have it, Roger Craig Smith was down to return, providing the spark Techland needed.
"When this decision was made, the whole project just exploded. Why? Because almost half the team has worked on Dying Light 1 or The Following. There are many fans for those games internally at Techland, so everyone's suddenly so inspired. Every day, people came to the office like, 'Hey, it would be cool if you do this, can we do that, where can we add this?'"
And there you have it - that's how we got Dying Light: The Beast. As we've learned from Gamescom Opening Night Live, the standalone spinoff sees original protagonist Kyle Crane back as the lead. The open-world zombie parkour game takes place 13 years after the original game and sees Crane finally escape a set of mysterious captors who subjected him to experiments for over a decade. Thanks to those experiments, Crane now has zombie DNA mixed into his blood, giving him a "beast-like power" that ought to change things up a bit.
Initially, fans thought Crane had died following Dying Light's 2016 DLC The Following, which either ends with him dying from infection or a nuclear explosion. You'd think either would be fairly definitive, though I imagine the events of The Beast might make the infection ending canon – you know, for reasons.
Dying Light: The Beast will be released for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, though no release date has been given.
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