In January of this year, Dying Light celebrated its tenth birthday. But don’t let that fool you; Dying Light is still going strong, despite its sequel only dropping three years back, and its standalone DLC, The Beast, launching in August. Even all these months later, the developers are still cooking, announcing a free audio and visual update for Dying Light. It’s called the Retouched Update. And it’s out today.
Seeing Dying Light in a whole new…
To be clear, this isn’t a remaster. Developer Techland makes this clear in its most recent blog post announcing the update. This is still the same game you remember, but with a cleaner, more modern look. And it’s coming to last-gen consoles as well, so nobody is missing out. Except for Nintendo Switch owners. For whatever reason, the developers have left Nintendo’s hardware — new and old — out of the equation.
“One of the best things about working with your own engine is that the people building it are just next door,” explains Techland’s Grzegorz Świstowski. “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.”
Read More: There’s a Silent Hill remake on the way
As such, you can expect massively improved textures — the game’s lead 3D artist says he walked around the entire map looking for assets to be manually retextured — offering up an overall sharper look regardless of the platform you’re playing on. The lighting is better (expect ‘8K Ultra shadow quality’), too, as is the game’s physics-based rendering. Still, keep those expectations low. That ageing PS4 is not going to look as good as PC.
Arguably more important than pure visuals is Dying Light’s intensely creepy atmosphere, and that’s getting a bump as well in the form of an audio update. The original composer for the first game, Paweł Blaszczak, returned to completely remaster that epic soundtrack. He’s even added in some new tracks to ramp up the creepiness, and upped the hit reaction audio to ensure you really “feel those hits.”
