Dying Light

• 1. Introduction

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  Dying Light is a 2015 survival horror game from the Polish studio Techland, and it turns the usual zombie story into a question about what time it is. The setting is Harran, a fictional city in the Middle East, cut off from the world by a quarantine after a viral outbreak. Players enter it as Kyle Crane, an undercover agent whose orders are secret even from the people who shelter him. The game is played through his eyes, in first person, across rooftops, alleys and dark interiors.

  Behind it sits a stranger set of questions. Why did a studio fresh from another zombie hit walk away from its publisher and throw away most of its story? What does it take to teach a computer to climb almost anything? And how did a game that critics argued about so fiercely end up with a record on its shelf?

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• 2. Leaving Dead Island

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  Dead Island, released in 2011, was the game Techland had just finished when work on Dying Light began in early 2012. The team spent time reading the feedback on that title and listing what to improve. Their new idea drifted so far from the old one that it seemed to deserve a separate identity.

  Creative direction was part of the problem. Adrian Ciszewski of Techland said that Deep Silver, the publisher of Dead Island, held a different vision and that its control over the title stopped the studio from realising its own. Techland chose to split from Deep Silver and start a fresh property. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment signed on as publisher and granted the studio complete creative control. Techland saw the project as a chance to prove it could build a AAA game.

  Tone was the next break. Dead Island had a lighthearted story and mostly hack and slash combat. Producer Tymon Smektała said the team wanted something "more mature and more serious". The writers worried that a team of Poles might struggle to write for North American audiences, so Techland invited the DC Comics writer Dan Jolley to consult on the story. The novels The Plague and Heart of Darkness shaped its themes.

  Serious did not mean sober about weapons. Game designer Maciej Binkowski described the result as "Hollywood realism" and said the team did not want the over-the-top arsenal of the Dead Rising series.

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• 3. Natural Movement

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  Mirror's Edge was the model that Techland first held up for its movement. In that system, players climb specific rooftops or walls using a hook, an object in the environment that the character can grab. The team wanted parkour because a survival game should let players run from danger, and blocked paths would undercut the sense of being trapped in a city.

  Hooks soon proved to be a cage. Developers had to place each one by hand in a very specific spot. When a designer moved a single hook, he often had to adjust others nearby, which made the work slow and troublesome.

  Starting in 2012, programmer Bartosz Kulon proposed a different approach. His system scans every climbable object in the world and treats it as a hook automatically. The engine then works out what kind of object the player is scaling and picks a fitting animation. The team named it "Natural Movement", and it saved the designers a great deal of time.

  The freedom came at a price. Because players could now reach places from many angles, enemies could no longer simply appear out of nowhere. Existing animations caused glitches, and the player character often clipped through structures. Some playtesters felt motion sickness. Techland made major changes to animations, enemy artificial intelligence and the heads-up display, and it also had to abandon most of its story and quest ideas and start those again.

  To keep the movement grounded in reality, the studio invited David Belle, the pioneer of parkour, to advise on the animations.

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• 4. Two Games in One Box

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  Adrian Ciszewski first imagined the day-night cycle before Dead Island was even made. That game could not carry it, because the team was too small and its resources too limited. In Dying Light the idea became the heart of the design. The vision was for "two games in one box", with a daytime experience completely unlike the night.

  By day, the infected are slow, apathetic and easy to see. Players can set traps, rescue random survivors and race toward airdrops. Spikes, electrified fences and gas tanks can all be turned against the infected.

  Night reverses the balance. Without daylight, the senses of the infected grow sharper and more accurate. They sprint, hit harder and gain the ability to jump and climb buildings. Players use their "survivor sense" to find and avoid them, and ultraviolet light slows them down. Safehouses let players change the hour, so anyone who feels unready can skip the night entirely.

  The game rewards those who stay out anyway. Experience points are boosted for exploring at night. Survival points are lost if the player dies during the day, yet no such penalty applies after dark.

  Sound followed the same logic. Techland audio director Paweł Błaszczak composed the score and drew on film soundtracks of the 1970s and 1980s. He wanted a sadder tone than typical horror music, and he used synthesizers to "present a feeling of abandonment, emptiness and sadness". For the night sections he aimed for silence. The team eventually found a whistling sound that made enemy encounters feel eerier and more disturbing.

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• 5. Harran

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  Mumbai and Istanbul were the major inspirations for Harran. Its Old Town was modelled on Wrocław, the Polish city where Techland was located. Level designer Jula Arendt, a qualified architect, wrote the city's history, and that history shaped how its buildings look. The Rocinha favela of Brazil gave the designers a template for a dense city full of windows and interiors, each one a possible parkour route. Players start in an area called the Slums and later reach Old Town through the sewers.

  In the story, the outbreak has turned most of Harran's population into hyper-aggressive, zombie-like creatures. The city's Ministry of Public Defence has quarantined parts of it, while an organisation called the Global Relief Effort, or GRE, drops supplies to trapped survivors. Roger Craig Smith voices Crane. His target is Kadir "Rais" Suleiman, voiced by Jim Pirri, a political figure turned rogue who is using a stolen file for blackmail.

  An infected creature bites Crane soon after he lands. Jade Aldemir rescues him and takes him to the Tower, a skyscraper that shelters survivors. Her younger brother Rahim teaches him parkour. Rais leads bandits who hoard GRE airdrops, including Antizin, a drug that slows infection. The GRE orders Crane to destroy an airdrop of Antizin and buy the drug from Rais instead, to confirm who he is. Crane obeys and lies to the Tower that looters took the supplies.

  The deceptions pile up. Tower leader Harris Brecken sends Crane to negotiate with Rais, who rewards his unethical errands with only five vials instead of two crates. When the GRE stops its drops, Crane cuts his ties to the agency. Rahim tries to bomb a nest of dangerous infected with stolen explosives. Crane finishes the job, then learns that Rahim was bitten and has turned, and he is forced to kill him.

  The file turns out to hold proof that the GRE intends to weaponise the virus rather than cure it. Rais kidnaps the Tower scientist Dr. Imran Zere, and Crane cuts off Rais's hand during their escape. Dr. Zere dies after revealing that Jade carries his research for the scientist Dr. Allen Camden. Meanwhile the Defence Ministry plans to firebomb Harran and claims nobody is alive there. With the survivor group called the Embers, Crane sets off bombs in an apartment building in the shape of a sad face to alert the world, but a jet's missile hides the pattern.

  Jade is captured, and she is bitten too. Rais offers Crane a single dose of Antizin to save himself or her. Jade injects Crane at the last moment, then turns, and Crane has to kill her. He gets tissue samples to Dr. Camden, then reactivates a radio tower and tells the outside world that survivors exist, which stops the Ministry's plan.

  The GRE now needs Dr. Zere's research to convince the public it is pursuing a cure, and it offers Crane a safe extraction in return. Crane finds that Rais is selling the research to the GRE for his own escape. He storms Rais's headquarters and throws him off a skyscraper as a GRE helicopter arrives. Crane keeps the data for Dr. Camden and stays in Harran to help those who remain.

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• 6. Fighting Back

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  Krav Maga experts visited the studio to show programmers and designers "what it was like to hit something". That session shaped a combat system that is mostly melee. Players can find more than 100 weapons and, through crafting and customisation, over 1500 possibilities. Weapons wear down and eventually break. Players may repair a weapon a limited number of times or take it apart for parts. Crafting calls for ingredients such as gauze and metal parts, plus a blueprint that is found or bought.

  Guns arrive in the second half of the game, including two types of assault rifles, shotguns and small firearms. They never degrade, but ammunition is scarce and their noise draws enemies. Firecrackers distract the infected, and molotov cocktails burn them. Parkour is woven into fighting as well.

  The enemy roster includes slow, low-level Biters, Bombers that explode when the player gets too close, fast-running Virals, and the dangerous Volatiles that appear only at night.

  Crane's growth is split across three qualities. Health drops with damage and recovers through medkits or food. Fitness governs how long he can free run, and stamina decides how quickly combat tires him. Fighting earns power points, parkour earns agility points, and missions, challenges and quests earn survival points. All of it feeds a skill tree.

  A four-player cooperative mode lets friends explore Harran and play the campaign together. Co-op challenges include racing to an airdrop or competing to kill the most infected. Another mode, called "Be the Zombie", lets one player become a strong, fast mutant named the Night Hunter and invade other players' servers. The human players must destroy infected nests and survive, while the Night Hunter tries to drain their shared life pool. That mode started life as a pre-order bonus.

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• 7. Launch Week Troubles

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  The 27th of January 2015 was the release date for personal computers, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Techland had announced the game in May 2013 and first planned a 2014 release. It slipped to February 2015 because of a "desire to innovate" and the need to improve the parkour, and later moved up to the January date.

  The older consoles never got the game. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions were cancelled after what the studio called "thorough internal testing" showed those machines could not handle it properly. On the new consoles Techland originally aimed for 60 frames per second. It locked the game to 30 and gained native 1080p graphics, minimal input lag and what it described as smoother, more fitting performance. Dying Light was also the debut title for the studio's own Chrome Engine 6.

  On the 17th of January 2015, Techland said physical copies would be late in the Middle East, Asia, Australia and Europe, citing a "longer lead time than digital". Those copies arrived on the 27th of February 2015. To soften the blow, "Be the Zombie" became free for every buyer on every platform. Pre-orders of physical copies also received the "Cuisine & Cargo" and Ultimate Survivor Bundle packs at no charge, and Steam players could pre-order four copies for the price of three.

  On the 2nd of February 2015, a patch disabled mod support. Around the same time, the Entertainment Software Association used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove a mod that stripped film grain from the game. Techland said the problem was accidental and a side effect of the patch. The association later apologised, saying a third-party vendor had issued the requests erroneously on its behalf. A patch restored modding on the 15th of February 2015, and in April Techland released its source development tool so players could build custom maps and stories.

  The studio's promotions were bolder. On the 25th of February 2015 it announced the "My Apocalypse Collectors Edition", priced at £250,000, roughly $386,000 at the time. It included a physical zombie shelter, parkour lessons, night vision goggles and a trip to Techland in Poland. In June, Techland parodied a promotion between Destiny and Red Bull by giving premium weapon codes to players who tweeted a picture of themselves drinking a glass of water. That grew into the "Drink for DLC" campaign.

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• 8. Verdicts and Numbers

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  Metacritic recorded "generally positive reviews" for the PC version at release, while the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions drew "mixed or average" ones. Critics disagreed most about the story. Chris Carter of Destructoid called its characters "contrived and boring". Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot said it "lumbers through one cliche after another" yet remained "perfectly palatable". Mikel Reparaz of IGN called the villain "entertainingly cliched". Brian Shea of Game Informer praised the story as immersive, and said players would slowly grow attached to the characters.

  The night won the warmest praise. Jeff Grubb of VentureBeat called night play "exhilarating" and "truly terrifying". Mike Williams of USgamer said free running was "a ton of fun". VanOrd felt it "energizes moments of great tension". The critics were less kind to the systems around them. Arthur Gies of Polygon called many of them "clunky", and VanOrd likened the protagonist to an "errand boy" on frustrating missions. Others wanted the weapon breaking and crafting trimmed. Multiplayer split opinion too, with Christopher Livingston of PC Gamer calling the asymmetrical mode a half-baked version of Left 4 Dead.

  Players voted with their time. In the first week, 1.2 million people played. The retail version debuted at No. 1 on the US software sales chart, outselling Grand Theft Auto V and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. It also set the record for the best first month of any new survival horror property, a title previously held by The Evil Within. In the UK it topped the retail chart for two weeks, ahead of The Order: 1886 and Evolve. After 45 days, 3.2 million people had played, which made it Techland's most popular game. The totals reached 4.5 million players by May 2015, five million units sold by August, more than 17 million players by December 2019, and 20 million units sold by April 2022.

  Techland kept supporting it for years. The Following, a standalone expansion with a new campaign, drivable vehicles and a map as large as all the earlier maps combined, came out on the 9th of February 2016. In December 2017 the studio promised 10 content packs within 12 months, with crossover content tied to Left 4 Dead 2, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Rocket League. A story mode that sharply lowered the difficulty arrived in February 2020. Hellraid, a medieval-themed DLC pack, followed in July 2020. It was inspired by the studio's shelved project of the same name, which Techland had put on hold in May 2015 to focus on Dying Light.

  The world spread beyond the game. Raymond Benson's prequel novel Nightmare Row appeared on the 8th of April 2016 and follows Mel Wyatt and her brother Paul, trapped in a hotel after the outbreak. Dying Light: Bad Blood, a battle royale for 12 players, entered early access in 2018, failed to attract many players, and became free for all owners in January 2020. Dying Light 2 followed in February 2022. A further game, Dying Light: The Beast, was released on the 18th of September 2025 and brings back Kyle Crane as its protagonist.

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