‘Dying Light’ Patch Aims At Fixing Issues, Frustrates Modders

Techland’s Dying Light released earlier this week and many PC users right away started noticing some issues with the game. FPS fluctuations, audio issues, pop-in textures, and so on plagued many player’s experiences within Dying Light’s zombie-infested Harran. While the issues affected players across the board, it seemed to be felt most by those running AMD configurations.

[Note: The above video is a performance analysis pre-1.2.1.]

A recent patch to Dying Light seems to fixed many of the issues regarding the game’s optimization for AMD. Patch 1.2.1 hit Steam early Friday morning in an effort to resolve many of the performance issues plaguing the open-world parkour game. While the devs have not stated that the issues are completely fixed, they are working on issues related to AMD processors, which has been a sticking point for many fans.

Dying Light is a game developed for hardware with multi-core CPUs, yet in the most trying scenes, only one core is under any load. Some players have reported seeing Core 1 under 100% load, which creates massive bottlenecks in the performance. Hopefully, these fixes will allow the game to fully take advantage of the PC hardware and allow the fluid movement that is supposed to define Dying Light shine through.

The FPS fluctuation affected the performance of gaming rigs robust and meager, and after the patch dropped, users started to notice an improvement in the game’s performance.

Latest Dying Light patch has resulted in a large performance boost. Now hitting about 90fps with SLI at max view distance, >120fps at low

— TotalBiscuit (@Totalbiscuit) January 30, 2015

Personally, I play on an AMD PC and have been having similar issues to those reported on Steam and NeoGaf. Framerates have been in the teens while the PC I run is well within the specs needed to play the game. Digital Foundry did a performance analysis ofDying Light on PS4/Xbox One and reported the game plays pretty near a constant 30-FPS on both, meaning that the console versions of Dying Light played more stable than my more powerful PC. After the patch hit, I tested out the performance and it has greatly improved. The areas where I was experiencing 16FPS consistently are up in the 40s.

However, the patch has not dropped without some controversy. A lot of modders are upset because one of the sticking points of Dying Light’s 1.2.1 patch locks the data files to discourage cheating. While this prevents those from tampering with the data files to gain an advantage in multiplayer, it also has locked them away from those who dislike Dying Light’s film-grain effect, as well the Chromatic Aberration used to keep players from getting motion sickness (though it sometimes has the opposite effect). Many modders sounded off in the Steam comments section of the patch, claiming that by locking away those files, they are shuttering the lifespan of the game.

When Dying Light released this past Tuesday, players were eager to get their hands on the parkour zombie cross between Dead Island and Mirror’s Edge. In fact, the developer sweetened the deal by giving the former pre-order bonus “Be the Zombie” game mode to all players. Hopefully this patch will make Dying Light more playable all around and players can really sink their teeth into this gritty story for survival.

Were you experiencing issue with Dying Light on PC? Sound off on whether the patch worked for you in the comments below.

[Images via Techland]