Techland’s Dying Light: The Beast was set to release mid next month, August 11. However, in a press release published today, the developer has announced an eleventh hour delay to the zombie-fighting parkour game, moving the release date to September 19. It is “to allow for extra polishing,” including improving the UI, boosting physics, and tweaking cutscenes and player animations.
The follow-up to 2022's Dying Light 2: Stay Human was originally intended to be the second major DLC for that previous game, but after overenthusiastic fans unearthed and leaked everything about the game, the developers decided to entirely rethink the project. This led to the desire to return to 2015's original Dying Light hero, Kyle Crane, now a super-human half-beast man, the result of ten years of brutal, tortuous experimentation.
Earlier this week there were a bunch of hands-on previews published across various sites, and given that a delay has been announced just a few days later, you might imagine significant issues were raised. However, from reading through a bunch of these previews of the first four hours, people appear pretty jubilant about what they played. In fact, Techland’s own statement notes the same, describing the mostly YouTube coverage as “universally positive.” However, it seems the developers spotted something the critics did not, as they’ve now decided to hold things back for an additional month of polish.
“With just four additional weeks,” says the press release, “we can address final details that make all the difference between good and great. Areas we want to improve include finetuning the balance of gameplay elements, looking into clarity of UI, increasing the quality of physics, as well as tweaking cutscenes and player animations further as well as adding last little details.”
Given the short nature of the delay, and the relative specificity of the intent, this does sound more purposeful than the the ambiguous notes you’ll often read when a game slips its release date. It does seem hard to imagine what can be dramatically changed in just four extra weeks, especially with elements as integral as the UI, but it’s definitely far better than receiving these improvements in piecemeal patches after the game’s released.
So Dying Light: The Beast will now be out September 19, in the safe release territory left behind after GTA 6's delay into next year.
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