For any game developer, seeing the culmination of a decade's work finally come to fruition is an assumedly daunting thing. That's what Dying Light: The Beast is for Polish developer Techland. But despite all the pressures that come with shipping a game during one the most stacked years in the industry to date, game director Nethan Lemaire's confidence in the project seems to have outweighed his nerves.
"I knew we were making a good game," Lemaire tells me of his headspace as Techland approached its September 18 release date – which had already been moved forward a day as a little thank you to the one million fans who'd preordered it. "When we launched, I told the team beforehand that whatever happens, the game is good. No matter what happens and what the reception is, the game is good."
A week on from launch, the game hit an aggregate review score of 80 on Metacritic. "It basically confirmed the assumption that we were having about the state of the game," he says, highlighting the privilege of having released "the highest-rated Dying Light title" yet. There hasn't been much time to celebrate yet, though, especially given how the studio immediately mobilized on a swathe of post-launch updates and hotfixes in response to player feedback.
Warning: Spoilers for Dying Light: The Beast ahead!
Don't look back in anger
Dying Light: The Beast review – "A playful sandbox of horror and mayhem with a surprising amount of depth"
With a community outreach team relaying feedback to the developers and strike teams working around the clock, it's clear that the decade of work in delivering The Beast isn't quite over yet. Atop the immense passion, talent, and drive, Techland takes every drop of earnest feedback to heart.
"I think this is part of why The Beast is successful, because we know how nitpicky they can be," he says of the passionately vocal Dying Light fanbase – not unkindly, but with appreciation, stressing how the community's high standards push the team to strive for perfection. It's the fans who alerted Techland to day-one bugs like indoor rain, or night-walking Volatiles roaming the streets of Castor Woods in the harsh light of day, and the studio is "working overtime" to implement those changes.
But still, I want Lemaire to bask in the glow for just a little bit. He's right that Dying Light: The Beast is so far the highest-rated game in the series so far, with the first game clocking in at 74 on Metacritic and Dying Light 2 having achieved an aggregate score of 76. How, then, was the developer able to deliver such a bombastic, mature, purified iteration of the beloved survival-horror-action series despite the game's far narrower scope compared to either?
"In design direction, we have the saying about less is more," Lemaire tells me of The Beast's streamlined approach to everything from narrative to open world experience. He came to Techland two years ago from Ubisoft, off the back of Far Cry 5 and Far Cry: New Dawn, and by that point, the developers had already started weaving the threads together to make The Beast a cohesive experience that tied up the series' loose ends.
"It's like this from start to finish, because when you finish the game, the ending is actually quite intense. It's like a final chapter, but a strong chapter that is basically giving you a feeling of satisfaction," Lemaire says of the finale that – spoiler alert – sees protagonists Kyle Crane and Aiden Caldwell storm The Baron's fortress in a mission the game director describes as the "peak Dying Light experience."
That is what The Beast is trying to be – not something brand new that totally puts the franchise on its head, but Dying Light to the very marrow.
Of course, everybody would like to have 500 skills and whatnot.
Nathan Lemaire
This seems to have been Techland's guiding principle. "I have mixed feelings when it comes to the pursuit of novelty," Lemaire says, commenting on the lack of huge, format-changing twists in The Beast.
"It's important that we have fresh ideas and we put new things in where needed, because it needs to refresh [with each new game]. Now, I think what Dying Light needed was actually a retake." The goal was never to fix something that wasn't broken – namely, its already iconic, genre-defining core gameplay – but enhance and tune up what was already there.
The core of Dying Light is fused to the heart of The Beast, taking precedence over pressure to overcorrect elsewhere. "We'd try to focus on core elements," Lemaire says of how the team stayed on task. "For example, the combat experience was more important. It was more important for me to cover world-class, industry standard combat experiences and physicality in combat than having 1000s of tools and [ending up with] clunky combat."
Another trimmed down element many players have commented upon is Kyle's four-pronged skill tree, which builds on his agility, survival, power, and Beast Mode, and is far more compact than past iterations of the game.
In response to cries for a more complex skill tree, Lemaire reiterates that Dying Light: The Beast is "a game of moments"; in order to think big, the team had to think small, streamlined, but detailed to the nth degree.
"We could have made the skill tree twice as big by reusing Kyle's abilities from Dying Light 1. Kyle is weakened [in The Beast], but he doesn't have amnesia, right?" Lemaire laughs, but he has a point. The fact that Kyle is a returning protagonist gives Techland an excuse to build core parkour elements into his default skill set – "like wall running" – instead of locking them behind tree progression.
"Of course, everybody would like to have 500 skills and whatnot. But the main focus for us was [creating an] individual experience that felt very connected and dense, so we made choices based on that premise."
Fever pitch
I have mixed feelings when it comes to the pursuit of novelty.
Nathan Lemaire
As such a dense, connected experience, one of my favorite aspects of Dying Light: The Beast is its tightly-hewn story. Kyle's journey through Castor Woods ends in a crescendo, and it's during a particularly powerful cutscene at The Baron's mansion that the stakes are made plain – not just in terms of the game's action, but in its implication for what could come next.
"It's the culmination point in time, where everything merges together," Lemaire says of the nailbiting "dinner party" where players see a series favorite NPC meet a shocking end (don't worry – it's not Kyle or Aiden). It's the definitive dramatic boiling point, something Techland communicates not only through a tense series of extremely Dying Light-shaped survival horror moments in the leadup – driving through zombies in a burning tunnel, stealthing or shooting your way through enemy territory, parkour puzzles galore – but through cinematic subtleties only the die-hards will notice.
Listen hard during this final mission, and you'll hear the theme melodies for Dying Light 1 and 2 overlap to form a unique motif for Kyle and Aiden's iconic team-up. "Same thing for during the castle boss fight," Lemaire points out. "When Aiden is there fighting alongside [Kyle], you have all the soundtracks hitting some cues from Dying Light 2, which is a very nice idea from Olivier [Deriviere, composer]."
It's a beautiful touch, symbolizing a key overlap between both past games as their heroes unite. But Lemaire stresses that it's not about "fan service". Instead, it's to showcase these characters in their best (pardon the pun) light.
It's also a chance to give Aiden a little more gravitas as a leading man himself. "Yes, Aiden is the beast, but Aiden is [also] the hero, and the hero behaves like a hero." True, he's not the main character this time around, but he was the main character, Lemaire argues. "We could not treat him as an NPC, just following Kyle."
It's poetic, then, that when I try to cheekily get a little out of Lemaire about the future of the series, he takes us right back to those final moments. "I think right now the whole team at Techland is like Kyle at the end of the game, looking at the horizon, at the opportunities that are in front of us, and I trust our team and our company to make the right choice. To make sure that we are committed to delivering always the best Dying Light experience, no matter what that means," he says.
"At the end of the day, what I see in the team is people that are proud and, most important, I see people that would like to continue working with each other. People want to continue working together, striving together. We have new ideas, so we need to make them come alive." Now, it's just a question of when and how.
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