Before he left Techland to lead Bloober Team's horror imprint Broken Mirror Games, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala sat down with us for nearly two hours on The Beast, bringing Kyle Crane back, the C-Engine, the truck everybody loves, and the "two directions" he had in mind for the series.
This one is a cool look back. Dying Light: The Beast started life as a planned expansion for Dying Light 2 Stay Human, grew into a full standalone game, and launched on Sept 18, 2025, a day earlier than planned, after more than a million players had already secured a copy. In October 2025, a few weeks after it launched, we sat down with Tymon Smektala while he was still Techland’s franchise director, the person steering Dying Light after more than a decade at the studio. He told us Techland was “working on something bigger to be announced for next year,” and the free Restored Land update that landed on March 26, 2026 turned out to be that something bigger, adding a survival mode where zombies stay dead, hunger to manage, an optional One Life run, Roadkill Rallies and 36 new quest encounters.
Tymon has since moved on. After more than 13 years at Techland, he joined Bloober Team in September 2026 as Executive Director of Broken Mirror Games, its curated horror imprint, where he is working with the teams behind Saw: Genesis. That makes this conversation a snapshot of the Dying Light boss at the peak of his Techland run, talking openly about the series he helped build.
Over nearly two hours, Tymon talked about why The Beast isn’t called Dying Light 3, the scariest part of bringing back a legend, a scar the community wouldn’t let go, the C-Engine, and a very specific two-handed axe strategy he’d never seen before.
Answers below are lightly edited for length and readability.
What you need to know
- Who: Tymon Smektala, Dying Light franchise director at Techland at the time of recording (Oct 2025). Now Executive Director of Broken Mirror Games at Bloober Team.
- Game: Dying Light: The Beast, on Xbox Series X|S and PC. The free Restored Land update launched March 26, 2026.
- Length: 1:50:21.
- Highlights: why there’s no “3” in the title, Kyle Crane’s return, the C-Engine, optimizing from day one, the truck, Easter egg day, and what’s next.
The elevator pitch
Tymon Smektala: “First of all, this is the best Dying Light game that we have ever made. We have been working on this series for 10 years and this is the culmination, the apex of everything that we have done so far. So if you heard anything about Dying Light, like were interested at some point, this is the entry point for you.”
On the day and night cycle: “During the day, you try to survive, but you are in control… But when the night falls, the freaks come out, the volatiles, our kings of the night, the apex predators. They leave their hives and they keep chasing you all around the map. So it’s kind of like a Pac-Man you could say, but of course in 3D.”
And Beast mode: “You can flip the table… destroy everything in front of you, but then you get back to your normal self, and then again, you have to survive.”
Why it isn’t called Dying Light 3
Context: The Beast was first planned as downloadable content for Dying Light 2 Stay Human before Techland turned it into its own game.
Tymon Smektala: “We didn’t want to name it Dying Light 3 because actually we didn’t want to scare people that didn’t kind of get into the series before. Like when you see a game and it says blah blah blah 3, you think, okay, maybe I should have played the previous ones.”
“To be honest, this is the next Dying Light… it grew a lot, it exploded over the last months before the release. We really kept adding and adding and adding.”
The “aha” moment: hearing Kyle Crane again
Context: Kyle Crane was the hero of the original Dying Light, and The Beast puts him back in the lead role.
Tymon Smektala: “We uploaded his voice to the build that we were playing every day as developers… I saw their faces when they first heard the voice, the actual voice recorded, and there were so many emotions on their faces, and especially for the guys, and we had a lot of them, that have worked on Dying Light one as well. You could basically see them kind of freezing in time and going back in time to what we were doing 10 years ago. It was really a magical moment.”
The scariest part of the project
Tymon Smektala: “If you are a Dying Light fan, then Kyle Crane is… royalty… a legend, a myth, something that you cannot really mess with.”
“There’s always a chance when you bring back someone like that, you can miss just one line… can feel out of character and it can destroy the memory for those people, and you don’t really want to mess with people’s memories. This is one of the precious things that we have on this planet.”
The scar the community wouldn’t let go
Tymon Smektala: “After one of those showings we read a lot of, ‘Hey, what happened to the scar? Where’s the scar?’ And we said, but what scar?… In the last scene of Dying Light one, Kyle gets stabbed in his arm, and obviously there should be a scar after this, right? But we didn’t have that scar… Of course, the scar is there in the final version of the game, thanks to the community.”
Experience is a blessing and a curse
Tymon Smektala: “Back then we were [crazy], like we just, you know, ‘Hey, I have this idea,’ okay, let’s do it, and then the whole team was jumping and doing it.”
“If you are a AAA big studio and you have a hit, then basically the best thing you could do, or at least on the surface level, is just do another part of this hit… At the same time, it’s actually very risky, because players don’t really want to get the same stuff over and over and over again.”
(Editor’s note: one mild expletive in this answer was softened.)
Why the visuals matter
Tymon Smektala: “We as Techland as a company have a very simple, very clear mission… first-person perspective open world games where the level of immersion into this world is basically taken to the maximum… It’s almost like having a virtual reality headset without the actual virtual reality headset.”
“I have never met a game developer that has said this is the pinnacle of what I wanted to do.”
Optimizing from the start
Tymon Smektala: “What we have discovered is it’s much, much better when you are trying to be kind of healthy in terms of performance right from the start of the production. We actually do optimization passes basically every big milestone… There’s a number of people that just work on optimization.”
On playing on handhelds: “Those platforms get so popular because people want to play on those platforms, and I think it wouldn’t be right for us to say, hey, but you know, you shouldn’t be playing on those platforms.” (I told him The Beast runs great on my Xbox Ally X.)
Why Techland builds its own engine
Context: The Beast runs on C-Engine, Techland’s in-house technology.
Tymon Smektala: “For us, basically what happens is I just put on my flip flops and I go from the fourth floor where I work to the third floor where the engine team is, and I say, ‘Hey guys, we need this over the next week.'”
“This is almost like our secret weapon. The fact that we have our engine which is optimized as it is, which we have so much flexibility to work with, which has all of the elements of the game already nailed down.”
The leg-chop technique
I told Tymon my go-to move: two-handed axe, crouch, sweep the legs. His answer:
Tymon Smektala: “To be honest, I don’t think I have seen that particular behavior any at any time in my life.”
“What we give players is creative brutality… We create those systems so it’s not really very tight, very scripted. It leaves a lot of space for players to come up with their own strategies.”
Techland’s motto for player exploits: “Good for that guy. Like good for him, he came up with this idea, he executed this plan, it worked, okay, it’s fine with us.”
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The truck, and a dream game mode
Tymon Smektala: “I will pass the kudos to my friend Sebastian Koval, who’s kind of the lead engineer on driving… he’s almost like a one-man army.”
“About 20 years ago, Techland was actually publishing racing games… Sebastian is the guy that worked on that 20 years ago.”
“What I would love to see is almost like, you know, Dying Light Carmageddon, something where you just drive a vehicle.”
(Editor’s note: Roadkill Rallies, the vehicle challenges added in the Restored Land update, landed after this conversation.)
What he wants from the next generation
Tymon Smektala: “I would like the new gen to bring something that changes how we play.”
“Xbox 360… that generation made online play popular and kind of almost like a new element of almost every game… That generation actually changed how we play.”
(Editor’s note: part of this answer comparing rival hardware was trimmed. It’s in the full video.)
Easter egg day
Tymon Smektala: “At the very end of production we do those Easter egg days, where the developers don’t focus on their actual tasks… it’s almost like a Friday evening feeling where the atmosphere, the tension is a little off and everyone just comes up with crazy ideas.”
“He has a list of all of the Easter eggs in Dying Light: The Beast, but on purpose I haven’t looked at the list because I want to discover all of them by myself.”
What’s next for Dying Light
Tymon Smektala: “If you would force me at gunpoint to tell you what’s the next Dying Light, I would not be able to tell you, because we at least have kind of two ideas, two directions… But yes, things are happening. We are thinking about the future. We have a lot of plans for that. Very nice plans. Some of them very surprising.”
His message to fans
Tymon Smektala: “If you are a fan of Dying Light, thank you for supporting us. Thank you for being part of the community, of the family. If you are new to the franchise… please give it a try, because that’s quite a unique combination of various gameplay mechanics, something that you cannot find anywhere else in gaming.”
OnPoint’s take
Dying Light: The Beast was already one of the best action games on Xbox Series X|S, and hearing Tymon explain the thinking behind it makes Restored Land make even more sense. A studio that builds its own engine, optimizes every milestone and lets players “flip the table” with their own strategies was always going to keep pushing this game further. Zombies that stay dead, One Life runs and Roadkill Rallies are exactly the “creative brutality” he described. If you haven’t jumped in yet, there’s never been a better time, and Techland having “two directions” for the next Dying Light has us very excited, and so does seeing what Tymon brings to horror at Broken Mirror Games.
Watch the full interview
This conversation premiered on Her, Him, and a Dev on the OnPoint 4 Gamers channel on Oct 30, 2025, a few weeks after The Beast launched and well before Tymon left Techland, so a few references (like the then-upcoming Nightmare difficulty) reflect that moment.
From the Vault: Tymon Smektala’s Techland Days, The Beast, Kyle Crane and the Future of Dying LightPhoto: PLAYCON Summit. Graphic: OnPoint 4 Gamers
Sources
- Tymon Smektala on LinkedIn (Sept 2026): www.linkedin.com/posts/tymon-smektala-4205534_maybe-youve-seen-the-news-already-but-i-activity-7510686910185582593-yrai
- Game Developer, “Former Dying Light franchise lead joins Bloober Team” (Sept 29, 2026): www.gamedeveloper.com/business/former-dying-light-franchise-lead-joins-bloober-team-horror-imprint-broken-mirror-games
- GamesRadar+: www.gamesradar.com/games/horror/ex-dying-light-lead-wants-to-find-the-next-kojima-in-new-role-at-bloober-team-publishing-division
- OnPoint 4 Gamers interview with Tymon Smektala (YouTube): www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnYMbLKchiM
- Gematsu, “Dying Light: The Beast release date moved up to September 18” (Sept 12, 2025): www.gematsu.com/2025/09/dying-light-the-beast-release-date-moved-up-to-september-18
- Dying Light: The Beast, Wikipedia (origin as Dying Light 2 DLC, C-Engine): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Light:_The_Beast
- Techland, “Dying Light: The Beast Restored Land Launches Now!” (Games Press, March 26, 2026): www.gamespress.com/en-US/Dying-Light-The-Beast-Restored-Land-Launches-Now
- Xbox Wire, “Exclusive Look at New Quest Encounters in Dying Light: The Beast Restored Land” (March 27, 2026): news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/03/27/dying-light-the-beast-restored-land-quest-encounters
- Xbox Store, Dying Light: The Beast RL Definitive Edition: www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/dying-light-the-beast-rl-definitive-edition/9n9gc3fxkllx
