With the upcoming release of Dying Light: The Beast, we’ll finally get some answers about the ending to the original Dying Light’s The Following DLC. Franchise director Tymon Smektala has revealed that the upcoming title will avoid offering players a choice about how its story will end in an effort to solidify the canon of the franchise going forwards.
In an interview with GamesRadar, Smektala spoke about how developer Techland didn’t want to leave ambiguity when it came to the future of the Dying Light series. “I think [linear storytelling] also allows us to be kind of a little bit more hands on and canonical in how we steer the future of the series,” he said. “When you give players choice, actually, to be fair, you shouldn’t be saying what’s canon and what’s not.”
“You shouldn’t be forcing your canon on the players if you give them choice[…] if you say to players, ‘hey, like, this is a game with choices’, you have to live by the fact that for each one of those players, the canon will be different.”
When it comes to the studio’s plans for the future of Dying Light, Smektala spoke about the studio wanting to make things “a little bit more canonical”. This, ultimately, means that the studio will keep tighter control on what kind of choices that players will be able to make in the stories of Dying Light games.
“I think moving forward, we would like to be a little bit more canonical,” said Smektała. “We would like to be a little bit more [in] full control over what we do with each and every next Dying Light game, especially since we have quite a lot of plans for the future. So we kind of want to be able to be sure that it drives where we want it to drive.”
Earlier this month, Smektala had spoken about how Techland wants to make sure that Dying Light: The Beast is worth its price, despite the relatively short 20-hour runtime for its main story campaign. In an interview, he brought up comparisons with massive games like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, where many players wouldn’t even see the ending due to the title’s sheer size.
“If I start playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, basically from the start I know that I will never finish it,” said Smektala. “I get my money’s worth out of the investment, but it’s not by completing the game.”
Techland had recently announced that Dying Light: The Beast would be getting delayed by four weeks. Rather than its original August 22 release on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the game will instead come out on September 19. In its announcement, the studio said that the delay allowed it more time for “extra polishing work” and to make The Beast “the best Dying Light game we’ve ever released.”
Dying Light: The Beast is also slated to have a playable demo at the upcoming Gamescom from August 20 to August 24. The studio has also not confirmed what the delay means for the release of the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game, which are set to come out at an even later date.
