If Dying Light 2 is crashing when you start a new game, here's a fix

Dying Light 2
(Image credit: Techland)

Zombie parkour first-person-kicker Dying Light 2 launched today, complete with a day one patch that included more than 1,000 fixes. These things never do run smooth. Even with the patch, some players have found that clicking on New Game causes an immediate crash to desktop—which is less than ideal, to put it mildly. 

Fortunately, there's already a fix for it, via Techland's community manager on Discord. If you're playing the Steam version, right-click on Dying Light 2 in your library, go to properties, and then add /nolightfx in the launch options. If you're experiencing the same crash but you're not playing on Steam, well, I'm afraid you might have to wait for the next patch.

Our reviewer experienced some bugs in Dying Light 2, like disappearing map icons and vanishing zombies in exterior locations, but nothing quite so major as this startup crash. He enjoyed the kicking in particular and said, "Dying Light 2 is a huge and exhilarating playground for crunchy, kinetic, two-footed combat and satisfying first-person parkour. It doesn't start out like that—there's a few long hours before the game really opens up and gets fun, and there's a lot of not-so-great storytelling along the way. But it's worth it."

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.