A few weeks ago, we mentioned that Techland would be releasing free DLCs for Dying Light for the year to come. We also included the video announcement of the DLCs by Techland, which you can see here below.
I wanted to talk to Techland about this development some more and see if there was anything else coming our way. Fortunately, Maciej Łączny, Techland's Head of Process, Event & Project Management and the producer of the Dying Light DLC program, was kind enough to spend some time discussing this with me this morning.
INTERVIEW WITH MACIEJ ŁĄCZNY
Techland has just announced that another year of free DLCs will be made available to players. What was the motivation behind such a gracious gift?
We’ve been keeping an eye on the numbers since our release and found that there are still 500,000 players who are still playing the game. We’ve had some discussions about it and came up with the idea that if we create a core team, dedicated purely to create DLCs for Dying Light, then we can do 10 of them throughout the next 12 months. We love our community, so giving them a bit of extra so far after release hopefully makes them enjoy the game a bit more.
How have you found the interaction with players in the last year to be? Is it something that drives development in future games?
Our community is very important for us and we’ve tailored so much of our changes, fixes to make sure that they will benefit from it. It’s a game at the end of the day; we need to make sure that players are having fun at all times while playing it.
In the video released on youtube, it was mentioned that 10 new DLCs will become available in the year to come. We'll be seeing some new enemies, events and mysteries. Care to give us some more insight?
Now that Content Drop #0 finally have arrived, it’s sort of all out there. A new enemy type, a new skin and a new weapon are in this DLC. Like we’ve been saying it at E3, we would like to use our social media platforms as well as Gemly (our new digital distribution platform that soon will also turn into a full-fledged community hub) to gather feedback after each and every drop to make sure that we know what the players want next.
Were any of the new DLCs directly inspired by player feedback?
Drop #1 and #2 are already in the works because we have a pretty good understanding about what our fans have been asking for. This can all, of course can be moulded to player feedback later.
What would you say are major improvements the DLC will bring to Dying Light, if any?
Techland is closely following up on feedback received from our community, therefore we'll keep on continuously improving the general feeling of the game and fixing bugs if they appear. In order to improve Dying Light we will work on the balance, new modes, weapons and opponents to add variety to the total experience.
When Dying Light was being developed, did you expect such a large following? Such as 500k players per week 2.5 years after the release? How does that make the team feel?
Extremely humbling and awesome at the same time. Such level of player retention only happens with the best of the best. We knew at the beginning that Dying Light will be successful, but could only hope for such great and supportive fans.
Of course, I cannot have an interview about Dying Light without asking: How is the development of Dying Light 2 coming along? Will we be seeing any teasers or trailers for DL2 anytime soon?
As you can see, Dying Light is still alive and kicking, and we're hard at work developing the 10 free DLCs we've promised. With the 10 DLCs in the next 12 months, we believe Dying Light fans will have quite a lot to be looking forward to. And if you like our trailers, I would recommend subscribing to Techland's official YouTube channel so you can enjoy all the great videos created by our assets team.
It was a real pleasure to be able to speak to the team behind one of my favorite survival horror games. Thank you to Łączny for taking the time during Techland's very heavy schedule, and a very big thank you to Techland's International PR Manager, Joe Bognar, for arranging this interview for me.
