With Dying Light: The Beast out in August, Techland has a special surprise for fans of the original – the Retouched Update goes live on June 26th for Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S. It features several enhancements for Dying Light 1, though franchise director Tymon Smektala clarifies that it’s “not a complete overhaul or remaster.”
What it offers is increased texture quality for environments, improved lighting, and physics-based rendering. Players can also avail of the new 8K Ultra Shadow Quality. Under the hood are also “smaller tweaks and changes to the code,” increasing the maximum level of detail range from 260 to 340 percent.
Techland has also remastered the soundtrack with original composer Paweł Blaszczak returning. However, he’s also added some new songs and “ambient sounds.” Hit reaction audio has also been “juiced,” resulting in much more impactful fights and takedowns.
As to why the Retouched Update took this long, Smektala reveals, “We were working with 10+ year old technology. Even with all the new experience we’ve gained over the years, figuring out how to apply those learnings to the original Dying Light engine while keeping everything stable was a challenge.”
That’s not even counting the “massive amount of manual work” with lead 3D artist Krzysztof Knefel walking “through the entire map, looking for assets to be improved. And all of those had to be changed manually by our artists.” Despite the extensive improvements, the system requirements remain the same.
Stay tuned for full patch notes when the update goes live. As for Dying Light: The Beast, it launches on August 22nd for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC.
