It’s a big year for Dying Light; the open-world zombie series is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and developer Techland is marking the occasion with a variety of projects. That includes a newly detailed audio and visual refresh for the series’ debut instalment, which arrives in a free update – titled Dying Light: Retouched – this Thursday, 26th June.
“One of the best things about working with your own engine is that the people building it are just next door,” Techland explains over on its blog. “Over the past couple of years, we’ve added a lot, customised 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.”
As such, players can expect the likes of increased texture resolution and quality, as well as improved lighting and physics based rendering. Techland also promises a new 8K Ultra shadow quality (“a lot of surfaces that previously looked rather flat now really pop out and get depth!”, it writes), and there’s an increased maximum level-of-detail option for those with hardware to support it, meaning Dying Light’s most detailed assets can now be seen much further away.
As far as audio goes, original composer Paweł Blaszczak has remastered Dying Light’s soundtrack for the update, while new tracks and ambient sounds have been “woven in” throughout. That’s alongside “seriously juiced up the hit reaction audio in combat”, which is said to sound “more satisfying [and] more impactful.”
Techland does, however, take great pains to stress – over the course of three whole paragraphs, in fact – that Dying Light’s Retouched update is all about “enhancements” and is “not a complete overhaul or remaster.” Additionally, the “level of changes” players can expect will “vary by platform”.
Dying Light: Retouched launches Thursday, 26th June for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Notably absent from that list is the original Switch, and Techland has confirmed to IGN the update is “not coming” to Nintendo’s platform, which received an impressive port of Dying Light back in 2021. Don’t expect a version of Dying Light for Switch 2 either, as Techland says it has “no plans [to release one] at this moment.”
It’s apparently all-hands-on-deck for the studio’s upcoming 18-hour standalone adventure, Dying Light: The Beast, which launches for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on 22nd August. And there’s more planned for the series beyond that; Techland previously revealed it’s working on “multiple unannounced projects” that “go beyond video games”, including board games, a webcomic series, merchandise, and “more”.