Dying Light 2's 1.8 update is now live, bringing several new features and improvements aimed at smoothing over some lingering gameplay issues and making the game more accessible to those prone to motion sickness. Players can now run benchmarks to test their PC's performance when running Dying Light 2, and the new Intel XeSS upscaling gives players more options when balancing visual quality and performance.
Techland's Dying Light 2 has been mostly well-received as a worthy sequel to the surprise hit from 2015 which combined the fluid movement and parkour of Mirror's Edge with the open-world zombie slaying carnage of Dead Island, another Techland classic. Dying Light 2 builds on the original with a bigger map with more to do, and the increased scope and scale lends well to the new paragliding mechanic as players fly among the city's rooftops. Dying Light 2's bugs have been its main point of contention, with many players frustrated by a significant number of game-breaking bugs at release which developers have continued ironing out with periodic updates.
Following up the recent release of Dying Light 2's first story DLC last month, update 1.8 is focused on a number of performance and visual improvements along with a healthy dose of fixes across PC and consoles. One of the most important additions is a motion sickness reduction preset, since Dying Light 2 features some intense first-person camera motion due to the parkour movement and it can be particularly jarring for those who are sensitive to motion. On the gameplay side, Biter behavior has been adjusted to make them more aggressive, which should make the environment a bit more risky to navigate in their presence.
This update for Dying Light 2 has added a LOD range multiplier so that players can boost the LOD distance although at a significant performance cost, which leads to the next big addition: a proper benchmark for PC. Along with the new XeSS Upscaler from Intel which is comparable to NVIDIA's DLSS, the benchmark will be useful when trying to find a stable balance between visual quality and frame rate. Players should notice some performance gains thanks to many minor fixes, with the PS4 seeing load times up to 10 seconds faster than before.
It's good to see Dying Light 2 still receiving new features and fixes despite Techland moving on to a fantasy RPG reportedly in the works, and the game's many updates since release seem to have resolved the majority of glaring issues that were present in its early days.
Dying Light 2 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Dying Light 2
