Since the release of Techland’s Dying Light on PC last week, the experiences of multiple players have been plagued by unfortunate performance issues (including Rely on Horror staff members Zack and CJ) ranging from optimization issues to poor draw distance. Even those with high-end gaming PCs were affected by these problems, and the three patches issued since launch have done little to quell the discontent with the port (some are even accusing the second patch of cutting the draw distance intentionally to boost performance).
We reached out to Techland to see what plans they have in store for improving the PC version in the future, and they responded very cordially:
We didn’t cut the draw distance in half in order to improve performance – in the original PC release we implemented a slider to set the view distance but slider’s maximum value was too high. So it did not make any sense as in theory since it made the engine draw farther but in practice these objects were culled by size in the renderer anyway, so the only effect that you could achieve was a heavy CPU load that brought the performance down and you did not achieve any visual improvement; so in a patch we have adjusted the scope of this slider. Currently there are very intense works happening now to improve the performance on PCs; it’s mostly related to poor performance on AMD CPU based systems; we have also a lot of things to fix related to multi-GPU systems. Essentially the PC version will be constantly improved and further patches will be released regularly to help everyone as best as possible.
On top of this, it is already known that they have a fix in the pipeline for the bug that accidentally disabled mod support in the latest patch (in fact, they’re actually prepping a set of 100% free “extensive modding tools” to give the game official mod support, as well as a modicum of other various performance improvements.
Although it’s unfortunate that these numerous issues keep popping up, Techland’s ongoing dedication to identifying and ironing out all reported wrinkles in performance is encouraging. Here’s hoping the PC version receives the improvements that it needs so players can enjoy the game’s content. And if you’re wondering where our review is, stay tuned. Zack is working on that!
