Techland has kicked off the first week of community challenges as part of the Call of the Beast contest for Dying Light. Besides the contest itself, the Dying Light players are now given an opportunity to get awesome rewards of a lumberjack theme. The contest is for an entire season and it has been called “the season of dismemberment”. The grinders will get the Lumberjack Car Skin and the Woodchopper weapon merely for hitting community goals.
The news came with the tweet from the official Dying Light Twitter account announcing the event subway got the news, in which they told the players to participate if they wanted to get the laurel. “Do not forget: if you do not take part, you do not receive!” the tweet warned, directing the concerned gamers to the Dying Light Outpost for detailed info on how to participate.
And the community reaction has been… let’s put it this way, it has been pretty much the same old craziness of the Dying Light fanbase. A few fans are arguing that the dismemberment theme is rather unwelcoming and Diedre Barlow, a user, very loudly declared that “Limb removal in this game is one of my favourite things!”.
One user couldn’t hold himself back and quickly requested a “Bober the beaver outfit” in the replies, referring to what seems to be an inside joke regarding the car skin called “Bober”. Another person that seemed to be in the loop even shared a screenshot of the message, but what the reference is exactly remains a mystery. Maybe Bober is a Polish legend concerning a lumberjack or something? No idea but the community sure finds it amusing.
In contrast, there was also a situation where the comment section quickly morphed into a mix of thanks and irritation. One player showed gratitude to the developers for “adding cloud save to epic game store,” and another one quoted the weapon mechanics and requested the devs to “consider adding the launching effect back to the spectral bat and EXPcalibur” because they are “the weapons that are boring as hell to use” without it.
The negativity also brought up some unresolved issues that the gamers were facing. A few of the users said they were still waiting for PS4 release dates while others were inquiring about the physical disc and balanced mode implementation. One player who seemed quite displeased stated that “the game’s dead the moment the credits hit” and accused the developers of “just throwing scraps now,” but such a strong criticism seems a bit too much for a game that is still holding regular community events and updates.
It has been somewhat captivating to watch the Dying Light account actually interact with the users in these threads. Someone worried about having enough time to participate in the event and the official account responded “You have a whole week to participate 😎” with a cool emoji depicting a guy wearing sunglasses. It is really lovely to see the developers getting directly engaged with the players instead of just making an announcement and then disappearing.
The community challenge format is identical to that of the previous Dying Light events—everyone collaborates to achieve global targets, and everyone who participates receives rewards. It is a perfect method to maintain the player base active and working together towards one shared goal. This is particularly true for a game that is all about cooperation and slaying zombies.
In case you have not been playing Dying Light for some time, this could be the perfect reason to play it again. The lumberjack theme goes hand-in-hand with the game’s brutal combat, which has always revolved around the creative dismemberment of zombies. It is so much fun to decapitate the infected in hordes with themed gear, and the Woodchopper does seem to be one of those toys that will indeed provide what the name implies.
The comments may contain some complaints, but one thing is certain, Techland has not yet abandoned their zombie parkour masterpiece and is still providing new content regularly. Community challenges, Epics Games Store cloud save, and the future difficulty modes that are still in development are just a few of the activities that have made this undead world very much alive.
So if you’re looking for a reason to revisit Harran and do some zombie woodcutting, here is your chance. Just a quick word of caution—you must be a very active participant if you want to grab those sweet lumberjack prizes. Looks like there are no free rides during the apocalypse, huh?
