Techland boss says Dying Light 2 'forgot' what made the series special, but Dying Light: The Beast gets back on track: 'For us, this really is Dying Light 3'

My first surprise of Summer Game Fest came with the very first game I played. Dying Light: The Beast looked excellent in my hour-long demo, which I did not expect coming off Techland's previous disappointing sequel, Dying Light 2: Stay Human.

The Beast is leaving everything distinctly Dying Light 2 behind—its crowded city, characters, and wonky dialogue choices—and instead making a direct follow-up to the original Dying Light, with its main character Kyle Crane returning. In an interview with PC Gamer at Summer Game Fest, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektała was humble about Techland's missteps with Dying Light 2.

"With [Dying Light 1], we really managed to create a game where every piece fit together, and maybe we didn't appreciate it enough," he said.

"Dying Light 1 was a game for our core community. It was a hardcore survival horror, open world, action adventure with very strong survival aspects. For Dying Light 2, we forgot about it. The game was a commercial success, but the players who should be closest to our hearts said we kind of lost the edge, we lost the threat, we lost the horror, we lost the tension."

So Techland took that feedback and fed it to The Beast, using the original Dying Light as a blueprint.

"The benchmark for which we try to compare the experience and balance the experience is Dying Light 1, because in that game, you really felt like you were alone in this big city, on this big map, surrounded by zombies."

I could detect the Dying Light 1 in The Beast before Smektała even brought it up. The new setting is reminiscent of that game's first area, and crucially, it's not so dense with rooftops that I never had to touch the ground. I was constantly making decisions about my next jump, grab, or roll—judging when it'd be faster to car-hop on the streets or risk a jump onto a narrow beam. I also died four times because I got too bold with my jumping decisions, which I don't remember happening often with Dying Light 2.

The Beast is a much larger game than I assumed it'd be based on its non-numbered subtitle. It has a completely new map, characters, and story—Smektała said his last playthrough was around 37 hours with the main story and sidequests considered. It's not a standalone expansion, it's the next Dying Light game.

"For us, it really is Dying Light 3," he said.

"Maybe the project started with a slightly smaller ambition, but we got so excited about Kyle Crane returning. We got so excited about, actually, what we can do with this new iteration of the engine, how confident we feel about the gameplay mechanics."

It's true that aspects of The Beast seem relatively unchanged (the UI is still janky), but you can do a lot that you couldn't in DL2 at launch, like shoot guns and drive vehicles. Guns were a casualty of DL2's refocus on melee and "medieval apocalypse" aesthetic—you eventually found bows and crossbows, but ranged combat was deliberately an afterthought.

The Beast flips the script, reintroducing guns early on and even adding new highly-lethal options like a flamethrower. Then there's Kyle's "Beast" form, a new upgradable stance triggered by taking damage that lets him run around Glory Killing anything that moves.

So why not give Dying Light: The Beast the '3' treatment? "It doesn't bring this very spectacular breakthrough new feature that maybe you would expect from the next numbered entry in the series, but it's a very proper triple-A game. Very chunky," Smektała said.

To my eye, The Beast is about refinement—a spiritual do-over for Dying Light 2. And to Smektała, it's easily the "best Dying Light that we have ever made."

The Beast is unleashed on August 22.