Dying Light continues celebrating its 10th anniversary with a big graphical facelift, but don't you dare call it a remaster

(Image credit: Techland)

Free-running zombie survival extravaganza Dying Light is 10 years old this year, a fact that my rapidly rotting brain simply refuses to accept. Developer Techland is determined to hammer the news home though, dedicating an entire year to anniversary celebrations. Back in January, the developer gave away its first DLC for the game in four years. Now, it has given the game a big lick of graphical paint in what it's calling the "Retouched" update.

These changes are fairly extensive, including higher resolution textures, improved clouds and skyboxes, higher quality shadows, and a fully remastered soundtrack. While Techland only provided a basic summary in its most recent Steam update, the studio went into greater detail in a longer post earlier this week.

"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," wrote technical game director Grzegorz Świstowski. "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."

Much of this learning has been applied to floor and wall textures, now that the studio has far greater experience with physically based rendering. Consequently, wooden fences have more realistic grain, while corrugated iron structures look more, well, corrugated. One of the biggest improvements players will see is on floors and cement walls, thanks to an 8K Ultra shadow quality setting that gives rough or cracked flooring much more apparent depth.

Alongside this, Dying Light's level of detail range has been increased, so Harran (the city in which Dying Light is set) should have sharper buildings and objects at longer distances. As for the soundtrack, it's been completely rerecorded on tape for a more retro feel. This is an interesting choice considering Dying Light is set in 2015, but there's a whole video explaining Techland's approach to the remastered soundtrack, which you can watch below:

Dying Light — Behind the Music - YouTube

Watch On

Techland is keen to stress that the Retouched edition is not a remaster, even though I've seen remasters that do less.

"Back in January, when we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Dying Light, I announced that we are working on a new update," writes franchise director Tymon Smektała. "When I looked online the day after the video, my heart skipped a beat. Quite a few of you were expecting a full remaster of some sort. So, let's set the record straight: the Retouched update is about squeezing out even more from the Dying Light you already love. It’s not a complete overhaul or remaster."

Fair enough, I suppose. That said, I sincerely hope "retouched" doesn't become part of the lexicon for describing updating old games. I already have enough trouble delineating between reboots, remakes, and remasters.

In any case, the Retouched update is now live. Among this and the broader 10^th anniversary celebrations, let's not forget there's a new Dying Light coming in just a couple of months. Dying Light: The Beast brings back the original game's protagonist Kyle Crane, now imbued with monstrous superpowers, and aims to be a bit more like that first game after the mixed reception to Dying Light 2. While I am beyond weary of zombie games at this point, the Dying Light series has always tried to do a bit more than bashing undead humans on the noggin, so I'm intrigued to see how this latest game turns out.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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