Dying Light: The Beast dev says "we are not Call of Duty" and the series has a "complicated relationship" with guns, but The Beast's firearms should finally be "on par" with melee

Dying Light: The Beast will have a greater focus on guns being just as viable a combat option as melee weapons, despite the series' focus on hand-to-hand combat.

To say the Dying Light series has had a complicated relationship with guns isn't an assumption on my part; it's literally the words of the series' franchise director, Tymon Smektała. Talking to GamesRadar+ during Summer Game Fest 2025, Smektała walked us through Dying Light's messy history with guns and pew pewing.

Smektała (half-) joked that "if Dying Light and guns were on Facebook, their relationship status would be, 'it's complicated'."

He explained that Techland received a lot of feedback from people playing the original Dying Light and asking "why did you even bother to have the guns" in such a melee-focused game, and so "in the second one, we didn't." But then, naturally, "the first thing we heard after the release [of Dying Light 2] was 'but, where are the guns?'"

Future Dying Light 2 updates would eventually add guns, even though this presented a unique "lore and narrative challenge" because "we even specifically put that in the world building, in the lore, that there are no guns in this world."

Although Techland somehow "managed to squeeze them in," there are still pretty prevalent narratives online that guns in Dying Light 2 are either not as viable as melee weapons or just plain don't belong.

You can probably understand then that Techland decided to put a bigger focus on balancing firearm combat in Dying Light: The Beast. "For Dying Light: The Beast, we decided, 'let's give the players the guns if they want, but also let's focus on the guns so they really feel on par with melee combat in terms of how physical they are, how brutal they are, but also balanced they are, so they don't feel too overpowered."

I genuinely feel for the team at Techland on this, as yes, the Dying Light series is built around fast-paced parkour traversal and, chiefly, the comically gruesome slicing and dicing of zombies, particularly toward the endgame when you can start crafting wildly silly killing machines that make mincemeat out of the undead.

Guns have always felt a little out of place, but with Techland making this public commitment to improving them, there's reason to be hopeful for a more balanced assortment of weapons overall.

Techland announced during SGF that Dying Light: The Beast is launching on August 22 across PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC.

"For us, it really is Dying Light 3": Techland admits Dying Light 2 "lost the horror, lost the tension," but says The Beast is "the best Dying Light that we have ever made"