Techland’s Dying Light: The Beast launched last week and is, sources say, “a good Dying Light game, and a fine open-world zombie game in general, full of crunchy combat and simple but satisfying number-go-up loops”. Being a new videogame, it also has some bugs. The most dramatic of these appear to be problems with its day/night cycle and weather system.
On the one hand, you’ve got rain falling inside buildings. I quite like this one, myself. I grew up with 3D first-person games that had slightly magic precipitation. I used to enjoy wobbling back and forth in entrances, trying to coax the weather into following me in-doors. I actually feel slightly dissatisfied when I play one of those fancy modern shooters in which water bounces off corrugated metal roofing as it should.
On the other hand, Techland say they’ve identified some problems with the day-night cycle, inasmuch as it sometimes stops cycling. This seems more urgent, because Dying Light: The Beast is a very different game in the dark. You’ll have to worry about Volatile zombos who are both resilient and inconveniently athletic, capable of chasing you all over the scenery while making frightful gargling noises in your ear. A few Redditors report encountering Volatiles in blazing sunlight. Others say they can’t seem to progress their worlds beyond mid-morning, which doesn’t seem quite as harrowing.
Techland are working on a PC hotfix for these things, but say they need to take their time testing the patch, because these particular issues aren’t that frequent and they don’t want to screw up anything else. “We already have a fix prepared, but because this bug only appears in rare situations, it takes a lot of extra testing,” reads a post on Steam from yesterday. “We’ll continue these tests over the weekend and most of Monday, and if no new occurrences of this issue appear, we’ll release the hotfix to players right away on PC. This is our goal.
“If, however, we still spot any occurrences of the bug, we might need to go back, adjust the fix, and then re-test it again,” the developers caution. “Thank you for your patience. We know these issues are frustrating to those who experience them, and we’re doing everything we can to deliver a stable solution as soon as possible.”
As is tradition, Techland’s promises have met with an avalanche of comments telling them that they’re prioritising the wrong fixes. Some people are mad about the frame rate, others complain about getting stuck in falling animations and quests not progressing. It doesn’t seem like there are any catastrophic problems with the current PC build, but I’m keen to hear your thoughts, as ever. As for myself, I’ve played about three hours of Dying Light: The Beast, including 30 minutes of preview time, and I think that’s probably enough for me. I like scampering over roofs but I just can’t be arsed re-killing zombies any more.