Dying Light: The Beast reflects Techland's passion for games players will finish

Techland's Dying Light games are pretty dang big. Step into the parkour-driven, zombie-riddled open worlds of Dying Light or Dying Light 2 Stay Human and you'll be hit by a flood of sidequests and extra challenges that add heft to a pair of already-lengthy campaigns. With over 30 million copies of both games sold, you'd be forgiven for thinking the completion rate for the pair is somewhat low.

But it's not. In 2019 franchise director Tymon Smektala told Game Developer that about 50 percent of players had completed Dying Light, though that number apparently dipped with the sequel. In a conversation with Game developer at Gamescom 2024, he told us that the completion rate for Dying Light 2 was about 10 percent smaller. He said both numbers are "higher than the industry average."

Those are all respectable numbers, especially when the completion rates for single player games (and especially open-world ones) can run as low as 20 percent. Still, Smektala seemed perturbed by the dip, especially with the team now working on Dying Light: The Beast, a smaller standalone game spun off from an abandoned downloadable expansion that was leaked to the public. "Imagine that you work on the grand finale for your game and only half your players see it," he said. "It's especially important for The Beast where we cap a lot of threads from the history of the series."

Related:Deep Dive: Harnessing the power of player feedback with Dying Light 2

As he and art director Katarzyna Tarnacka told Game Developer, the team want to push that number back up with The Beast—a goal that spotlights the challenge of making smaller, faster games with triple-A tech and timelines.

Dying Light: The Beast is on track to ship in under 3 years

In an era where ballooning development timelines are cranking up budgets and demanding a need for higher and higher sales, The Beast acts as an interesting experiment. It's a smaller—but still hefty—game built on its predecessor's tech, with some minor advancements that take advantage of a new console generation (it'll also ship on last-gen consoles to honor previous promises of making all Dying Light 2 DLC available to all players), a minor technical miracle in itself.

But can a smaller game still hit the sales goals that justify its production? Smektala thinks so—though the game's length will be critical to determining that. "We have to definitely hit a sweet spot between this thing being too short—something you might avoid—and something that's so big you don't have time to finish it," he said. "We want this game to be finished by everyone that plays it because it really answers a lot of questions, and we really believe in the narrative that we have there."

That narrative is built around Dying Light protagonist "Kyle," played by Roger Craig Smith, who's returning to the role after 10 years away from Techland. Smith and Kyle are apparently a huge draw for Dying Light fans, as the actor told us he was watching reactions on social media and in live chats during the Gamescom opening night awards, and was blown away by the enthusiasm for his return.

Image via Techland.

Kyle's return moves the series out of the walled cities and into a wooded environment, where players will spend more time surrounded by nature than run-down buildings. Players gain the ability to unleash "The Beast" and transform into a beefy zombie that can rampage through foes (though another Beastlike creature apparently stalks the woods...)

Bringing the setting to a Twin Peaks-inspired forest (Smektala's words) gave the art and design teams more freedom than they had under the previously planned DLC. Tarnacka explained that she and her colleagues had been holding back "a lot of great ideas" due to the constraints of the smaller project. "When the decision was made, we could just unleash all the ideas and get this project to the state we knew it could be."

She said the smaller map means high-quality art assets aren't as big a drain on older consoles, and since Dying Light 2 was already a cross-gen title, having to go backwards didn't dent the process.

Smektala joked that Techland's producers lost some of their power with this move. "The producer's job isn't to [make] the best game, it's to deliver that part of the game on time," he said. Techland producers had the power before to gently shoot down the art team's ideas with the phrase "leave it for the next game."

"For The Beast, they weren't able to say that," he said (before praising them for supporting the team and finding time for them to execute their harebrained plans).

The Beast's fast turnaround raises the specter of generative AI tools, often pitched as helping developers work faster. Techland hasn't adopted any at this point, Smektala said (beyond "simple stuff," like taking notes in meetings).

Smith, a SAG-AFTRA member currently on strike over studios' refusal to agree to protective terms over the use of AI voices (The Beast is not a struck production), seemed amused at the idea of AI having the capability to replace him. He said he's interested in tools that help developers and actors work more efficiently, but there's a "spark" that he thinks makes characters like Kyle stick with players.

AI isn't the only thing that can threaten that spark—Smith said returning to work with Techland to voice the same character 10 years later is a rare experience. He's an actor known for many recurring roles, but sometimes he's returned to the studio to find a different creative team waiting for him.

Image via Techland.

"I've had situations like that happen, where you go back and they say 'we got a different crew, we've got a different writer, we've got different everything,' and it just doesn't have that same sort of spark," he said. It's another endorsement of an idea many developers are hammering home these days in the wake of mass layoffs—that studios that keep talent around can use their learned experience to work better together.

Can more games follow in Techland's footsteps?

The practice of releasing expansive DLC for big-budget games is common, since they add value to the initial game and drive retention needed for success.

But The Beast is a different kind of project, one that recycles tools and tech for a larger game to get something smaller and more efficient out to the world.

If it's a success, it'd be an argument for companies the size of Techland (or bigger) to build processes that get more individual games out the door faster, alternating between large titles that push their tech forward, and smaller games that let them make the most of it.

Smektala seems personally invested in that completion rate (he brought it up unprompted to us in 2019, and hammered home its importance in this conversation). Boosting that number would definitely be a boon for The Beast—and a great tactic for propelling interest in the next numbered game as well.