Techland launched a bomb tweet to send the whole community surrounding Dying Light into an uproar. Players are invited to lose themselves in Castor Woods and share some of their wildest photos ever from Photo Mode. Just throw #TheBeastSnap their way to get a possible shout-out on their X account. Simple, right? But then came the replies… Man, those replies are a whole other story.
Then came the official Dying Light account, dropping this nice scenic shot of Castor Woods with a big beaver emoji: all very peaceful and inviting. Dive into Photo Mode, capture those stunning, vibrant landscapes, they say. What a great way to get the community involved in showing and sharing some of the game’s visual brilliance! But the gamers, clearly with a-thousand-other-things-in-mind, brushed aside visuals to voice lots and lots more.
And then came the entries, and they started pouring in almost immediately. Thomas Cannard posted several gorgeous shots under the hashtag. Nur Mahmud accompanied several snapshots, calling Dying Light “the best zombie game ever.” Foxy submitted a dark, moody pic worthy of representing the entire game’s ambience, while JoshefThe shared one captioned with “It doesn’t matter how dark the light is is the answer,” which… pretty much sums it up in Dying Light terms? Meanwhile, skizzerido is showcasing some serious zombie smacking with one shot being called a “Homerun.”
Moving onward, among all the gorgeous photo submissions lay very specific requests and complaints from the player base. Diego Maya almost demanded New Game Plus by saying, “i really want the Replay with all My stuff.” And he was not alone; Lewis Booth shared this same desire of hoping for one soon.
Now on to photo mode improvements. MissE033 politely pleaded for more filters and borders in photo mode, whereas MaurimanSoza was more blunt with just “Improve photo mode please.” In other words, even while taking part in the photo contest, players are thinking about ways to improve the feature.
Then came the technical complaints. James aired the gripe with grapple mechanics, “That thing is easily the worst thing in the game. Next being the movement mechanics overall.” Ouch. Fury said: “co-op buggy as hell,” and c0nstantin detailed a very specific issue of multiple corpses piling up in one spot. SlinkDiamond1 found a spoiler issue when fighting The Beast that reveals who it is during the death screen – definitely something that needs patching.
The fervor for feature requests continued; Brendan Chwascinski was REALLY passionate about katanas, in fact demanding, “TECHALND ADD MORE WEAPON BLUEPRINTS PLEASE KATANAS ARE MY FAVORITE MUST NEEDED BLUEPRINT!!” He also wanted more stats on gear. Meanwhile, xFirsTNG questioned whether DLTB Bounties and Armory would be added to the Pilgrimoutpost website.
Visual and performance crew said theirs: Leat’eq and angel asked about PS5 Pro enhancements while jonathan demanded: “Where is Ray Tracing? What happened to ‘our top priority’ and ‘right after launch’ regarding RT?”
TylerMorto39107 was contrasting a little when saying, “Just beat your game (Awesome story), Best Dying Light ever! Plenty of exploration to do even with 60 hours in.”
But let me halt you with an “UNLIMITED XP GLITCH” from random YouTube promotion by XboxMBWesleyYT; as expected. Then BeingJustified launched into a biblical doodle about UFOs and Daniel 2:43, which… I’m not even going to try to unpack that one anymore.
What is being said here is that aside from the amazing submissions and excellent engagement, Techland’s photo contest also became a voice for players’ wishes for the game: New Game Plus, photo mode improvements, bug fixes, ray tracing, more weapons – the community knows what it wants, and they’re not shy to cough it up with some beautiful pictures.
And so, in one regard, the whole back and forth thing is great – the Dying Light community is passionate, engaged, and hungry for the game to be the very best it can be. They are giving fabulous screenshots while simultaneously listing a ton of quality of life improvements and feature requests. Techland must be seeing these replies as marketing gold as well as a well-laid-out blueprint for what to do next.
Speaking of which, while you’re playing Dying Light The Beast, step into Castor Woods and get to shooting some shots for the contest. And maybe while you’re at it, think about what you want to see improved. Developers are clearly canning. Who knows, maybe your photo will get featured, and that suggestion might get rolled into the next update.
