Techland is set on making their upcoming zombie survival game Dying Light: The Beast the most visually brutal entry in the series. There will be a lot of blood as Kyle Crane returns with a vengeance to rip through the undead in terrifying fashion.

They’ve done some major upgrades to the body damage system. In previous games, you could hit a zombie and chop its limbs clean off. But this was only possible on preset parts of the body. While they had a decent amount, they’ve now doubled these “Gore Notes,” as they call them. This will make fighting the zeds more realistic, as it can more accurately visualize where you cut them with your blades. It also adds a greater pool of unique enemy looks, now that they can be missing more parts of their bodies.

Blood is another huge part of gore, and the devs showed some behind-the-scenes tricks they used to create environmental storytelling through blood. In order to get it looking as realistic as possible, they bought a lot of fake blood and hired an actor who would act out the scenes they wanted. For example, if they wanted to show an area where someone covered in blood ran away from a zombie while tripping a few times, it would leave a lot of blood marks and smears all over the floor. They would take pictures of this and send them to the art team, who can use these as references for the game. This was also done for the text on the walls, as long as it had blood involved, they would create it in real life first. 

After a slight delay, the game is now set to release later this year, on the 19th of September, for Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Do you think Dying Light: The Beast will deliver what players felt was lacking in Dying Light 2? Let me know in the comments.