Dying Light: The Beast Q&A – Techland on the Game’s Origins, The Return of Kyle Crane, Vehicles and More

At Gamescom 2024, Techland surprised everyone by announcing Dying Light: The Beast, a standalone game in which Kyle Crane, the protagonist of the first game, returns.

Fans were waiting for the second Dying Light 2 DLC, which was originally slated for 2023 but got delayed. The studio has instead pivoted to focus on The Beast for reasons that were thoroughly explained in the below group interview I had with the team, which also featured Kyle Crane voice actor Roger Craig Smith in addition to Franchise Director Tymon Smetkala and Art Director Katarzyna Tarnacka.

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Dying Light: The Beast doesn't have a release date yet, but it will be available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X. It's important to note that it will be free to owners of the Ultimate Edition of Dying Light 2 to compensate them for the lack of a second DLC. Moreover, it will support co-op just like the previous installment.

I know the game started as the second Dying Light 2 DLC, right?

Tymon Smektala: Yes, but also, actually, not really. We were working on the DLC, and last year, we experienced a leak for the narrative. So, a lot of very important elements of the story have been leaked out, and we were wondering how we could deal with this. We could ignore it, but then I think it would be ruined for a lot of players, actually, the most dedicated ones, because if you are a dedicated fan, you follow all the leaks, you learn about them, and it's kind of hard to unsee what you have already seen.

We came to this dilemma, and we started discussing this. We spent about a week internally talking about what we could do with this. Out of those conversations, the idea came that we could ask Roger Craig Smith to return as Kyle Crane.

That was the trigger, the moment where we actually stopped thinking about DLC and started thinking about it as a completely new product,