10 years later, the original Dying Light is getting a chunky visual upgrade with audio improvements this week, but it’s not a “complete overhaul or remaster”
Dying Light’s free Retouched Update is coming to all platforms on June 26, Techland has announced.
Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala first teased the Retouched update back in January for the series 10th anniversary, but details around what exactly the update entails have been pretty unclear until now. That’s led to some speculation that Dying Light is being remastered, which Smektala says he had a visceral reaction to.
“When I looked online the day after the video, my heart skipped a beat,” Smektala said in a new dev blog. “Quite a few of you were expecting a full remaster of some sort.
“So, let’s set the record straight: the Retouched Update is about squeezing out even more from the Dying Light you already love. It’s not a complete overhaul or remaster.”
Honestly, I think Techland is being a little modest here. I definitely appreciate the clarification, but from what I’ve seen of Dying Light’s Retouched Update in screenshots, which you can see for yourself below, it looks like more of an improvement than a lot of official “remasters” I’ve seen before.
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Techland says the update took so long to develop because they were working with 10-year-old technology and had to manually retexture all assets that needed to be improved, and do so without making the game any more demanding on systems.
“I basically walked through the entire map, looking for assets to be improved,” said lead 3D artist Krzysztof Knefel. “And all of those had to be changed manually by our artists.”
Plus, the game’s audio system has been beefed up with all new tracks from original composer Paweł Blaszczak, not to mention new ambient sounds and juiced up hit reaction audio.
All of this packaged for free, and with assurances from Techland that it won’t affect PC system requirements, is enough to warrant a remaster label, in my humble opinion. But I guess Techland is just too humble for that.
Dying Light: The Beast director says he’s “a little bit surprised” that more studios haven’t followed Techland’s “go anywhere” approach to open-world game design.
