I didn’t like Dying Light 2 much when it launched back in 2022. But I can’t deny that Techland has really committed to supporting and turning around its controversial sequel. Over the last four years, Techland has reworked the game’s parkour system, added Volatiles to Villedor’s nights, injected its combat with greater oomph, and added various features like New Game+ and replayable bounties.
While its lofty narrative ambitions were never quite realised, the foundations of Dying Light 2 are now far more robust. Now, the game’s latest update aims to let players expand upon those foundations, bringing significant improvements to the game’s modding and UGC functionality.
“Patch 1.28 is something we wanted to do for a long time—opening Dying Light 2: Stay Human much more to player creativity and giving you not only new ways to play the game, but also inviting you to create it with us,” writes Techland’s UGC program manager Rafal Polito in an article on Dying Light’s website. “The Breach is our way of opening up Dying Light 2: Stay Human even more to UGC content and adding new gameplay ideas and different kinds of experiences.”
What all this amounts to, essentially, is a combination of official mods and better mod support for Dying Light 2. Once players have completed the game’s Prologue, they can talk to two reintroduced characters from Dying Lights’ universe—Tolga and Fatin—who act as the gateway to a broader portal of UGC experiences.
As for what these experiences are, they include official mods like a third-person mode and a low-gravity mode, to featured mods created by the community. Polito highlights a couple of examples like The Atomborne, a map that attempts to transform Dying Light 2 into a gothic-as-heck soulslike, and the upcoming Dead Circuit, which converts Dying Light 2 into a snazzy-looking Dead Space knockoff.
As for why Dying Light 2 is going down the UGC route, Polito states in his article that “a lot of you have asked us for this”. But it is worth pointing out that UGC is the engine that powers the biggest games in existence today. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite: If you want to make a truly obscene amount of money in the games industry, convincing your community to make new stuff for your game is the way to go—assuming that you have the resources and the community to make your game a platform.
I think it’s fair to say that Techland has the resources—the Dying Light games have been enormously successful for the studio. Whether it has the community is another matter. According to SteamDB, Dying Light 2’s daily steam concurrents are in the low thousands. That’s decent for a four-year old, primarily single-player game, but those aren’t the kind of numbers that power a Minecraft-style behemoth.
Still, a UGC world filled with decaying zombies is probably more appropriate for your child than Roblox is, what with its endless child safety concerns and exploitative approach to monetisation. So, all the more power to Techland, I say.
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