Techland's Dying Light 2 releases tomorrow, though some early copies have already found their way into the wild, and something of a theme among those with early access (including reviewers) is that this is a buggy game. When the game snuck out, developer Techland asked players not to judge the game until it had received a day one patch.
"We kindly ask you to wait until Feb 4th as by that time you’ll also get access to all improvements and fixes we've implemented within last weeks and will introduce with the day 1 patch. That’s the way to experience Dying Light 2 the way it’s meant to be played."
Techland has now expanded somewhat on the contents of this patch, which adds "over a thousand fixes and improvements on all the platforms [...] and of course, we are continuing our efforts to improve the PC version in real-time."
Most notably there's a fix for a very hairy bug that could block your story progression at a certain point if you chose the 'wrong' dialogue option. There are a bunch of incidents that were causing the game to crash which have been fixed, a problem with the difficulty level not adjusting as it should, and rather amusingly a fix "for AI sometimes freezing/becoming immortal when the owner changes during death."
The general theme of all the fixes is stability, and it's hard to shake the sense that this is a game coming in hot. Dying Light 2's scale makes it an absolutely enormous endeavour, of course, and as Techland regularly emphasises has been worked on by over 1500 people during the course of its development. Bugs are not just to be expected but inevitable.
At the same time some players are wondering, and rightly so, about the distinction between retail copies and the game that was reviewed by journalists and streamers. Techland clarified to PC Gamer that much of this day one stuff had already been rolled-out to such players, and the version of the game on the disc is several weeks older (which when you think about physical media makes complete sense).
"Like almost all modern games, our journey as developers doesn't end when we share copies with reviewers or on launch day. We will support Dying Light 2 with new content for at least five years, and at every step on the road, we will actively listen to the community and work diligently to address any bugs discovered as players experience our most ambitious game to date. In this way, as developers devote themselves to serving the community, a game's 'very best' version is always being redefined. Even the version reviewers can play right now is markedly improved over what was first delivered about two weeks ago."
PC Gamer's Chris Livingston ran into a few bugs (there's a parkour joke for you), but overall didn't feel they detracted from his enjoyment. "One story quest in particular was bugged for me: a character needed to complete an optional task was stuck in the wrong location and non-responsive, which meant having to advance a side-quest before he'd return to his correct position for the main quest. Instead of pop-in, I weirdly had some pop-out: sometimes zombies would simply disappear from exterior locations. At times icons for locations I'd discovered on the map would vanish, and one utility building I'd cleared wouldn't register as completed, but overall there was little in the way of bugs that really disrupted my experience."
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