Dying Light: The Beastcame as a surprising announcement last month, bringing players back to the zombie-ridden world of the franchise in an unexpected new adventure. The title originally began as an expansion toDying Light 2, but after a massive story leak, developer Techland opted to move in an entirely different direction. The story returns to the protagonist of the first game, Kyle Crane, several years after the events of the original title.
The upcoming release brings back actor Roger Craig Smith to the role of Crane, though he’s a changed man since players last saw him.The Beasttakes place13 years afterDying Light: The Following,after Kyle has spent over a decade in captivity. Despite being an entirely new title, the game will be available at launch in 2025 for free to those fans who own the Ultimate Edition ofDying Light 2: Stay Human.
Screen Rantinterviewed Franchise Director Tymon Smektala at Gamescom to discuss the journey that led toThe Beast, bringing back Roger Craig Smith, and taking creative risks in the brand-new entry.
The Creative Freedom Of Dying Light: The Beast
Transforming A Leak Into New Opportunities
Screen Rant:This has been in the works for a while. Can you talk a little bit more about the original inception of this project and how it’s evolved since the project first started?
Tymon Smektala: Its origins trace back to DLC we had been working on for Dying Light 2. We had some elements of it already done, but unfortunately last year, the second half of last year, we experienced a story leak; a lot of very juicy, very important essential story elements, details had been leaked online. We realized that this probably means that for the most dedicated Dying Light players, this will spoil the DLC.
We had this war room meeting, which actually lasted about a week, where we were discussing what we can do with this, and we said, “Okay, maybe let’s put the DLC on the side, remembering what’s there, but let’s try to approach this differently.“Not how to save this, but how to build something new using some of the elements, also adding some new ones.
One of the ideas was that: hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could get Kyle Crane, the hero of the first game, back? Everyone got excited. But then there was a conscious calling - this doesn’t make sense if we don’t get the actor that gives the voice to Kyle Crane back as well. We had contacted Roger, super scared that he will have a busy schedule, and it’ll be impossible for him to join us. But he realized that, yes, there are some slots in the schedule that we can use. He was up for it, super interested. He also treated this as an actor’s challenge to return to a character that he portrayed 10 years before.
We went back with this information to the whole team, and it was really like a sudden explosion of creativity. I think everyone felt energized and inspired by bringing back this old character. Every department - the art, narrative, gameplay, assets even - everyone brought a lot of ideas. This means for the project:how we can now make this thing even bigger because Kyle is here?We pitched it, created a design overview for it, we looked at it, and we said, “You know what? This is actually not a DLC anymore. It’s something completely else, it’s a new game - 18-plus hours of gameplay, new gameplay mechanics, new environment, new story.
How has having it as its own standalone project versus originally the DLC as it was planned allowed you to be more creative and bring in new ideas?
Tymon Smektala: Extremely.I think it liberated us very much. When you work on a game, there are different types of developers. There are developers that create stuff, but there are also developers who are more on the side of making sure that the project actually ships. Of course, those are the producers that look at this, timing schedules, all of that stuff, resource management.
Usually, when you work on a DLC, the producers tell you, if you come up with a new idea, they tell you, “Nice idea, but we are doing a DLC - keep it for the next game, keep it for something new. We don’t have time, resources, et cetera, to experiment with that.”
But right now, this card doesn’t work because it is a new game. It is a new project, so the producers, I think they were the most scared when we made the decision, because they realized how much more work it’ll take us to complete it, but they also got on board.We allowed ourselves to go crazier. We allowed ourselves to have more in the scope than we have initially planned, so this changed the narrative. We have introduced more characters, more locations. This changed the world. It allowed us to use the elements that we had, but put them on a different map, shape them up differently, name them up differently, have more locations that are more secrets hidden in those locations. It was generally a very liberating experience for us.
Once you knew that you wanted Kyle to return, how did you decide, “Okay, it’s been a decade since we last saw him. How have things changed for him?” How do you decide where you want to go?
Tymon Smektala: We said, “Okay, so if we bring Kyle Crane back, we also understand that he actually left some questions unanswered.” Like what happens to him at the end of the first game, and especially following the expansion for Dying Light 1? What happened in between? There were some references to Kyle Crane in the second game, but very minimal. All of those questions, they were unanswered. Also, lots of players were asking us, “Okay, so what’s the canon ending of Dying Light 1? Dying Light 1 has a few of them, so which one is the canon?”
We wanted to answer that, andwe wanted to present and actually evolve Kyle Crane as well as a character. We were kind of thinking, “Okay, so now what do we want to tell? Are we answering all of those questions?” And we said, “Yes, let’s answer all of those questions,” because we want The Beast to be kind of a culmination of Dying Light 1 and Dying Light 2, close this part of Dying Light saga, and then Beast also opens some new doors for what’s going to happen in the future.
When we’re working on the narrative, we really looked at everything that’s unknown, that’s interesting to players about Kyle Crane after the first game. But we also looked at the second game - it’s absolutely not abandoned. The second game also plays a big part in the narrative of The Beast.
Kyle Crane by himself, he’s definitely more matured, more experienced, maybe a little bit more bitter at the end,because a lot of bad things have happened to him, and he has been taken out of this world and now brought back. He feels that something bad has happened to him, that someone did something bad to him, so the first thing that’s in his head is revenge. Revenge is usually: you are super focused, you don’t distract yourself - if you want to take revenge on someone, you really just go straight to the guy. He’s doing that, but then he discovers that there’s actually a bigger plan behind it. The rest I cannot really spoil, sorry.
The Biggest Changes In Dying Light: The Beast
Evolving Gameplay & Kyle Crane’s Character
In terms of the gameplay and how Kyle is defending himself and traversing, how has how he plays changed since the first game?
Tymon Smektala: First of all, we understand that this is a Kyle that has already been in the first game. His skill set, his move set is, at the start of the game, already developed. You don’t get to learn the basic skills at the beginning of the game like in most games, you know them already. We kind of cut [to] the chase,we go straight to being a quite competent survivor in the zombie apocalypse, so I think that’s something that a lot of our fans will appreciate.
At the same time - because during the experiments, his DNA has been intertwined with the DNA of zombies, and so he got some additional beast-like skills - there is a dedicated skill tree focused just on that. Aside from being this very competent survivalist, who knows crafting, who knows combat, who knows traversal, he also gets access to those powerful beast-like skills. We really wanted to build a character that’s strong and powerful at the beginning of the game for a reason: the world has also evolved. The threats, the zombie aggressiveness, how much of a danger the zombies are, is also bigger than it was in the first game, and actually even in the second game, so we wanted to have a character that balances this out.
For fans of the first and the second game, what do you feel like will surprise them the most about this new one?
Tymon Smektala: I think the narrative will surprise them in a way that they will find some answers, unexpected answers to the questions they might have. Actually,I think they will also be surprised with the direction in which the narrative goes. Because right now, based on the information that most of the players have, it might look relatively simple to them: “Okay, so the game is called Dying Light: The Beast. We know that Kyle Crane returns, he has those beast-like powers. I get it, so Kyle Crane is the beast, it’s as simple as that. He’s just doing some crazy powerful stuff and that’s it.”
Actually, there’s a very important question about the game that you will discover as you play it:who is the real beast?Is it really Kyle, or maybe someone or something else? I think this will be another surprise for them. I think one element that maybe people started feeling already, but they don’t really know what they’re up to is how it actually feels to play as Kyle Crane again.
We have experienced that, because internally at Techland, I would say half of the team that works on The Beast are people that have worked on the first game. There’s a lot of nostalgia, a lot of memories connected to it, and we have experienced that already. For the majority of the development, we were using placeholder for the voices just to get the feel of the narrative, because usually the voice actors come in at the end of the project. We were playing with those voices.
One day, we had implemented the first batch of voices from Roger, then we put on our headphones, and we started playing, and it’s a completely different thing when you are in the shoes of the character, when you hear him talk - it’s like the waves of emotions basically overflow you. That’s something absolutely amazing. I think this is also something that will surprise a lot of people.I think they kind of underestimate right now how it actually feels to return to the characterthat you have loved many years ago.
Can you talk a little bit more about what the co-op experience will be like?
Tymon Smektala: Not much, because we are just focusing on the introduction of The Beast. We’ll talk about online aspects, co-op aspects in the future quite soon. But what I can say right now is that, yes, the same way as all of the Dying Light games, The Beast can be played in co-op up to four players, and you can play the whole story together.
For me, it’s kind of similar to Wolverine from one of the firstWolverinemovies and then Wolverine from Logan. I think that’s the difference. - Tymon Smektala on Kyle Crane
In terms of transitioning this from the original DLC plan to the new full standalone and returning to Kyle and all of that, what were the biggest challenges in returning to this world that you weren’t originally planning on going back to?
Tymon Smektala: Creatively,I would say there were none, to be honest. The biggest challenge was on the production side, which is probably boring to most players. Like how to organize team that they now working on this bigger project, how to make sure that we have the resources, we have the people to actually do that.
But in terms of creative aspect, it was not a challenge - it was an opportunity. Because - as I said before - when you work on DLC, you are constrained. With working on something like this, you can really feel liberated, unleash the beast, the creative beast, within you. That’s how we felt - there were no challenges. I would love to give you something, but actually everything that comes to my head is actually actions and opportunity.
You’ve talked a lot about it giving you these broader opportunities to be creative. Do you have any examples of areas where you’re like, “We were really able to swing for the fences way more in this regard creatively than we would’ve been?”
Tymon Smektala: I would say definitely the narrative. We managed to pull all the important, correct strings from both games. I am super happy about how we have managed to create a slightly unplanned story that actually is a great conclusion to everything that happened in Dying Light 1 and Dying Light 2.
But one very important aspect of this is our creative collaboration with Roger Craig Smith, the voice of Kyle Crane. I like this a lot, because what I will tell you right now is an example of us being really mature developers that are looking at subtleties, that are looking at nuances, and it’s the voice performance of Roger. When he joined the project, the first takes that he recorded, they basically sounded like Kyle Crane from Dying Light 1.
Of course, it was super nice to hear the guy coming back, but then - it was us, but also Roger - we looked at it, heard it, and we said, “That’s not really it, because the character has been affected by the years of captivity, by everything that happened during that time, by him being taken out of this world and now being brought back, so we need to find a way to convey that true voice.”
Actually, that’s the best instrument that we have for it. Because the game is, of course, first-person perspective, so you see the world with the eyes of Kyle Crane. You can express that in animations, but most of the animations are about combat. We also do some tweaks here and there, but it’s not as powerful. But the voice, something that’s a constant presence in your headphones, that’s something that we can actually use to convey what Kyle feels and that gets you as a player more immersed in this new version of this character.
We spent some time with Roger trying to find that, and I’m super happy with this. I know that players don’t pay that much attention - they like the voice, but they don’t really listen that much to how the voice is used. But for The Beast, I really encourage everyone to listen to that and pay attention to this.
For me,it’s kind of similar to Wolverine from one of the first Wolverine movies and then Wolverine from Logan. I think that’s the difference. It’s the same actor, it’s the same character, but then if you watch a regular Wolverine movie, the first few ones, it’s just like an action Wolverine. There’s less weight to the voice, less gravitas. He’s just not as mature, but then you watch Logan, and you see him in Logan, and you hear him in Logan, and he’s a very much different kind of performance. We were trying to find something like that with Roger, and we did that, and I’m super happy with the voice that we have found for Kyle Crane after all of those years.
