‘Dying Light’ Hard Mode Arrives With 50 New Weapons, 20 New Outfits, More Content Teased

Polish developer Techland has released a free update for its open-world survival horror game, “Dying Light.” The patch adds a new Hard mode difficulty option, tweaks performance, adds a whopping 50 new weapons and much more. The studio has also released a video thanking fans for their patronage and showing off future content coming to “Dying Light.”

Techland uploaded a showcase trailer for the Hard mode patch to the official Dying Light YouTube channel. Selecting the Hard mode difficulty option makes the nighttime portions of “Dying Light” even tougher, as they now last twice as long and volatile zombies no longer show up on the player’s minimap.

Enemies in general have been overhauled for the new mode, they now posses more health and are able to deal more damage, making combat a trickier proposition. Making loud noises will now attract more of the nimble viral zombies than before and Ria’s men now arrive at loot drops quicker than they used to. Additionally, player health regenerates much more slowly, even when using a medkit. To top it all off, hints have been removed, going into the player’s inventory no longer pauses the game and survival senses only illuminate dropped weapons and nearby volatiles.

Hard mode doesn’t just make life more difficult in “Dying Light” though, it also brings 20 new outfits and 50 new weapons, including the Bone Splitter and Rune Hammer. A new gold tier weapon rarity level has also been introduced, which offers extremely rare tools of destruction. A full breakdown of the PC version’s patch notes was listed by a Techland mod on the game’s Steam announcements page as follows:

Features:

- Hard Mode added

- National outfits added

- 4 outfits as a reward for finishing the story campaign added

- Over 50 new weapons added

-New weapon rarity level -- extremely rare Gold weapons added

Gameplay:

- Various balance tweaks of weapons, loot chests, shops and crafting

- Various improvements to game quests

- Improvements in natural movement flow

Technical:

- Resolved various stability issues including co-op

- Improved overall game performance

Visuals:

- Various improvements in world and character art

Be the Zombie:

- New option to enable zombie invasions with co-op disabled added

Linux specific improvements:

- Added AMD Radeon support (Please note - the NPC dialogue lip-sync will be enabled in a future patch)

- Improved performance significantly

- Fixed glitch when changing resolution

- Improved mouse scroll speed in map menu

- Disabled SSAO and AA options (TBD)

- Fixed minor rendering issues

- Fixed screenshots capturing

- Fixed crashed related to audio driver

Game Informer reports that Techland also released a second video detailing future content the studio is working on for “Dying Light.” The video, uploaded by YouTube user, Ethan Shapiro, sees PR manager, Paul Milewski thank fans for helping make the game such a massive success. As previously reported, “Dying Light” has done extremely well in the U.K., outselling rival AAA titles such as “The Order: 1886” and “Evolve.”

Milewski states that the developer has listened to gamer feedback and is working on ways to improve “Dying Light” further. As Milewski promises content that lets gamers experience the game in a new way, brief snippets of footage are seen showing off a bow and arrow and the player speeding across an open field in a buggy, hinting at what’s to come.