The Techland urges players not to get their hands on the Dying Light 2: Stay Human too early if they already own it.

The studio wrote on Twitter, “Fellow survivors, we see that some of you got access to the retail copies of Dying Light 2[: Stay Human] before the release date (it’s this Friday, only three days left!). We understand you want to start exploring the City ASAP, and we couldn’t be happier! That being said, we kindly ask you to wait until February 4 as, by that time, you’ll also get access to all improvements and fixes we’ve implemented within the last weeks and will introduce with the day one patch. That’s the way to experience Dying Light 2 the way it’s meant to be played.” Is that patch 1.0.3? Because it’s 1.0.2 now).

One of the respondents asked a very clever question: “Hey guys! Loving the look of the game, but may I ask whether the reviewers have the day one patch installed? Because if not, then surely by your definition, they’re not able to review the true experience? I’ve loved how you’ve been open and honest, though. We need more of that.”

Open and honest? We can refute that. If you look at the Steam page for Dying Light 2: Stay Human, you can see that Techland is releasing the game with Denuvo. It is ridiculous because the Polish studio announced this publicly on February 1st, 3 days before the game’s release, but that’s not the end of the story: the first Steam forum thread confirming Denuvo shows that the thread-opening user who denounced this copy protection has been banned (…which is interesting enough in itself). Still, the studio’s justification is also ridiculous.

Here it is: “Dying Light 2: Stay Human was in development for seven years; throughout that period, over fifteen hundred people invested their time and talent into making the game. To protect the efforts of the whole team from piracy we suffered when we released Dying Light 1, we’ve included the Denuvo system, at least for the launch period. It’s a solution used widely for AAA games nowadays.

Being gamers ourselves, we understand your concerns, and we want to ensure that it will not impact your gaming experience. We continue putting extra resources into testing the game, and at this stage, we do not see any noticeable impact on the performance. We’ll be actively reviewing feedback during the game’s launch. Do not hesitate to share yours with us too.”

The first episode of Dying Light was pirated. There was no Denuvo on it. Yes… but the game was enhanced with content by Techland for seven years, and not all of the DLC was paid. Therefore, it did make sense to buy the game, i.e. what they thought they had lost at launch, they certainly made it back many times over the years. On the other hand, wouldn’t it have been easier to release paid DLC for Dying Light in 2020 and 2021 and highlight that this income would have funded the development of the sequel by the fans? (The sequel, which won’t be on DRM-free GOG because of Denuvo…)

The other is the “noticeable impact on performance” thought. Suppose you have to point out that there is no noticeable effect, on the one hand. In that case, it doesn’t prove anything (because who knows what rigs were used for testing? Not to mention, the older the config, the more effect the unnecessary “calling home” DRM has), and on the other hand, Techland just underlined that there is an effect. No matter how it is implemented, it increases the exe size, which requires more memory and CPU cycles…

Dying Light 2: Stay Human is out on Friday 4 February for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The Nintendo Switch version will run in the cloud and be released later, in early August at the latest. Oh, and the PlayStation 4 version is already on torrents. We’re not linking to that. Karma?

Source: PCGamer