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My hands-off Gamescom preview of Dying Light: The Beast has me grinning from start to finish. As Kyle Crane – the series' first hero, now freed following thirteen years of torment – makes his way through the overgrown expanse of Castor Valley in the thrilling dead of night, it feels like coming home. But The Beast is not the game anyone expected developer Techland to make next – least of all, I learn when I sit down with its key production leads, Techland itself.
"It started as a DLC for Dying Light 2, but we experienced a leak of the story last year," explains franchise director Tymon Smektała. As a result, it was a "no-brainer" for Techland to make the upcoming game totally free for all Dying Light 2 deluxe edition owners. "The community was very eager to learn everything about Dying Light, and they managed to dig out some very juicy and very crucial details about the narrative. So this made us think, 'Okay, what can we do with this?'"
Following a week of conversations, the team landed on a striking notion: bring Kyle Crane back for an 18-hour action-adventure, taking us further into the narrative heart of the series and unifying all of its entries so far.
Doing it Kyle style
Taking place after the events of Dying Light 2 and set in a brand new hostile area, The Beast serves two purposes. First, to bring us back to the series' roots, and secondly, to push one of the best zombie games to new heights in terms of combat, immersion, and storytelling. But Techland needed the help of one very important person to pull the whole thing off.
"We weren't sure if we could get Roger back on it," Smektała says of the initial idea to bring Kyle back. "Without the man, it would've made absolutely no sense." At this, Roger Craig-Smith – or the voice of Kyle Crane, as you might know him – smiles humbly.
If you thought Kyle Crane died at the end of 2015's Dying Light, you're not alone. "I was, I think, just as surprised as anybody," the voice actor laughs. "I was like, 'but I thought I was dead?' So I was pleasantly surprised. I was super intrigued to see how we made this happen and what has taken place for us to have Kyle come back. Obviously, I'm thrilled just to have a chance of tying up some loose ends – I can't say too much, obviously, but I was extremely excited [to reprise the role]. And it's a very surreal thing, because it's not something that happens very often in one's career."
Surreal just about covers it. As I watch the hands-off demo, drinking in a turbo-charged Kyle acrobatically parkouring across rooftops in this decaying urban jungle, The Beast already looks like a gorgeous rendition of everything that Techland does best. I'm talking high-fidelity action, clean combat – though gunplay has been given "a lot of love" this time around, says Smektała – and that sinking moment of dread as Kyle's digital watch alarm sounds. Day surrenders to night, and along with it, all the horrors that await within. Here's where The Beast truly shines, as in true Dying Light fashion, we stealth past the hulking volatiles stalking the night.
These monsters are beastly enough, but the game's title itself is something worth a mention. "Actually, we had quite a few other ideas for the title, but there was something a little bit unexpected about it," Smektała says of how the title applies to the contents of the game itself. "Dying Light: The Beast is a compact, super impactful dose of Dying Light gameplay. So we also wanted to reflect how it feels to play the game through being super strong, super focused with the title."
This gives rise to the ultimate question of who – or what – The Beast actually is. We know that Kyle has been in captivity for over a decade following the events of the first Dying Light game, experimented on by rogue commandos. Does that mean that he, Kyle, is the beast in question? "I think it's more connected to the narrative of the game. It's kind of easy to make an assumption that 'Okay, so it's Kyle Crane. He has those beast-like powers, so probably he's the beast.' But actually, it's not that easy, and there's more to it than you might expect at this stage. Of course, no spoilers. But I think the after players play the game, I think that there will be a question in their heads about 'So, okay, who is the real beast?'"
According to Smektała, the title, like everything in The Beast, is "a conscious choice. Like, if you analyze the trailer, there are already some leads, some traces of what it's really all about. But I think the full picture will be uncovered only when you play the game and see the end after those 18 hours of play."
Renegades
"What I said about the evolution of Dying Light's gameplay, it also relates to all of our enemies."
Tymon Smektała
As a super-condensed bite of what Dying Light is, The Beast could have settled for being a shorter, more aggressive offering. That's not all there is to it, though – after watching the trailer, keen fans might have realized how much more gunplay seems to factor into this latest chapter, bringing a first-person shooter flavor to the proceedings that hadn't been as prominent in earlier games.
"Dying Light is also a game about freedom," Smektała says of how the FPS slant came about in production. "Parkour gave you the ability to go wherever you wanted [in Dying Light 1 and 2], however you wanted to go there. There were no obstacles in the world that you couldn't cross or climb on." In The Beast, it seems Techland is simply applying that philosophy of freedom to its combat as well as its traversal.
"We added a cocktail of the usual survival things, but then also grenades, handmade grenades, and then firearms as well. We just realized, okay, so we need to kind of push the boundaries a little. We need to unleash what Dying Light can be." Still, melee-loving players need not panic: "we still see melee combat as a very important, super strong part of it," says Smektała. "But now we're saying, 'Let's allow players to have the option to use firearms, and some additional weapons that we're not revealing yet, but the firearms have definitely got some love."
With new weapons comes one very important thing: new bad guys. Namely, human enemies in the form of the rogue militia that has kept Kyle captive, and a host of experimentally-enhanced volatiles. "What I said about the evolution of Dying Light's gameplay, it also relates to all of our enemies," Smektała says. "So even when it comes to the behavior of a regular biter, the slow moving zombie, you will see some differences [from previous games]."
"We made sure that all of the enemy reactions are very immersive," Smektała says of how gunplay factors into the gritty survival tone of Dying Light, lest any worries of imbalanced power fantasies start bubbling up. After all, "beast-like powers" plus an arsenal of AK-47s? Is Kyle Crane just The Punisher now? "Immersion is something that we look out for in all of the aspects of the game, even in the small details like how you reload the weapon," Smektała explains. "We really wanted to give those elements personality, and also give those elements something that you can feel."
All of this, Smektała says, boils down to Techland's unifying goal. "We want Dying Light to be the ultimate zombie experience, the ultimate zombie game. You think 'zombie game?' You say, 'Yeah, of course, Dying Light.' So we have built on the foundation of Dying Light 1, and with each project, we are adding to it. So we hope that at the end, there will be a game that will combine all of this into a very special, ultimate zombie adventure."
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