The story of how Dying Light: The Beast started life as Dying Light 2 DLC has been well-reported, but franchise director Tymon Smektała shared with me that the press has never had the full story. During a video call, Smektała explained, “Maybe miscommunicated is not the right word, but we didn’t explain [what really happened] clearly at the beginning.”
Last year, Game Developer spoke with The Beast’s director Nathan Lamaire, who told the outlet that Dying Light: The Beast started life as the second DLC for Dying Light 2, but following a leak released by hackers including key story details, the team decided to pivot the title into a standalone game. While the promised DLC was cancelled, Dying Light 2 Ultimate Edition players received more than they asked for when The Beast was given to them for free.
However, this isn’t exactly how things played out. Techland is no stranger to hacks and leaks. A few weeks before Dying Light 2 launched in February 2022, the company suffered a massive hack where several hours of footage from the game were stolen and leaked online, revealing story details and several cinematics. What happened with The Beast wasn’t on the same level as a leak like this; in fact, all of the information came from inside the studio.
“We said we experienced a leak, but really it was data miners,” Smektała told me. “They dug out a number of dialogue lines, basically the script for the second DLC. We were very heavily, very intensely supporting and updating [Dying Light 2] as well as working on the DLC… We were really adding a lot to the game and basically a human error made it so some of the lines that weren’t supposed to go into the build that went live went in.”
Soon after games are released or updated, tech-savvy members of their communities will often read the games’ code to find out what’s new. This is how Dying Light fans and data miners discovered the lines of dialogue meant to be included with the upcoming second DLC.
“We actually faced a very difficult situation,” Smektała explained. “Even though we consider our games to be mostly gameplay centric, you can’t escape the fact that a narrative-driven experience is the backbone [to Dying Light].”
The key issue is that the type of fans who would datamine to look at leaks from a game are also the ones who are most looking forward to the DLC. “We could try to change the story,” Smektała said when describing the challenge that the team faced after the lines of dialogue were discovered. “But actually what we did is, we said, ‘let’s scrap it. Let’s cancel it and let’s start a new project.’”
The fact that the community had uncovered the story for the DLC before its release wasn’t the only reason that Techland steered from add-on to standalone, and you can see this in what has been carried over from the original project. “It was something that we wanted to do anyway because we knew that we wanted to get [Dying Light protagonist] Kyle Crane back at some point.” **Smektała said. **“We used the work from the DLC to kickstart the process, taking a number of small elements from the DLC, [mostly] the foundation of the open-world map. If you would compare how [The Beast] looks right now, and how it looked back then two years ago. The only thing that you could say is the same, is the fact that it was also very nature based.”
Dying Light: The Beast launched on September 18, 2025 for PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
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