A decade after launch, Dying Light is getting major enhancements with the Retouched Update.
It's always exciting when older games get revitalized in the modern gaming era by surprise major updates, and later this week, one is coming to what is widely considered to be one of the best zombie games of all time: Dying Light. Techland's 2015 open-world survival horror title may be a decade old, now, but that hasn't stopped the developer from working on a new patch for it.
First teased in scarce detail in January, the patch has been revealed as the Dying Light: Retouched Update — a huge glow-up for the title that's significantly improving the quality of its textures, lighting, physics-based rendering (PBR), and draw distances while also integrating a remastered score, new music tracks, and enhanced sound effects.
News of the Retouched Update came on Tuesday morning, with Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektała publishing a blog post that goes over the changes in full detail. In it, he also announced that the patch will be free, and is coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows PC (Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store), PS5, and PS4 on June 26 (this Thursday).
(Image credit: Techland)
(Image credit: Techland)
(Image credit: Techland)
Something important to note is that Techland has stressed the Retouched Update features enhancements, and is not a full-fledged remaster. To that end, fans can look forward to upscaled, more detailed textures, better lighting, and more realistic PBR reflections (see the above gallery), but none of the in-game assets have been completely rebuilt from the ground up or anything like that.
"Over the past couple of years, we've added a lot, customized a lot, and learned how to squeeze more from the tech we already have. One day, someone just started applying those learnings to some old assets — and it just clicked that we could do that across the whole game," explained technical game director Grzegorz Świstowski.
“It was a lot of manual work — but increasing the texture resolution or quality can have a huge impact on how the environment appears on screen,” added lead 3D artist Krzysztof Knefel.
The two then discussed PBR and draw distance enhancements, with the maximum level-of-detail (LOD) for the latter getting raised from 260% to 340% in the settings menu. By taking advantage of that with "modern and better systems" (at the moment, it's unclear if this specific feature is limited to PC or not) you'll be able to see high-quality detail farther into the distance.
On the audio side of things, Dying Light's original composer Paweł Blaszczak returned to remaster the game's soundtrack, even going so far as to record it on tape to preserve the game's "retro-tape sound." New tracks and ambient sound effects have been implemented to enrich the soundscape, too, and Techland "seriously juiced up the hit reaction audio in combat" as well.
An official screenshot of a brutal melee fight against infected in Dying Light.
(Image credit: Techland)
Smektała concluded the post by addressing why the Retouched Update took so long to develop, explaining that it was difficult to bring these enhancements to Dying Light without causing issues due to the game's age.
"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," he said. "And let me tell you, it was a massive amount of manual work."
Notably, Techland committed to making sure the Retouched Update didn't change Dying Light's system requirements — something many budget PC users and last-gen console players will no doubt greatly appreciate. "You can't just crank up the details and hope it still works on everyone's system, specially on consoles — we were testing endlessly to ensure we didn't run out of memory on last-gen consoles," added Grzegorz.
All in all, Dying Light: Retouched looks like a fantastic update for the beloved classic, and gives fans a great reason to return to it as they wait for the August 22 release of Dying Light: The Beast (notably, Dying Light protagonist Kyle Crane will be the protagonist of that game as well; he didn't appear in 2022's Dying Light 2). I never finished the game myself, but with all these improvements elevating it to new heights, I've finally got some motivation to do so. See you in Harran.
Oh, and now also seems like a good time to mention that the Definitive Edition of Dying Light with all of its DLC content is selling for just $7.09 on CDKeys — a massive discount on its $49.99 MSRP. Take advantage!
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