Dying Light: The Beast turns one with a three-week event

Techland is throwing a three-week party for the first birthday of Dying Light: The Beast, and the guest list is anyone still swinging a blade in Castor Woods. Update 1.7 is live now, a double XP weekend runs from 18 to 21 September, and the Call of the Beast: 1st Anniversary Edition event starts on 21 September and runs until 12 October, with weekly global goals, community votes that decide the weekend's gameplay modifiers, tougher enemies and rare Bober Infected spawns.

What the anniversary run actually gives away

Alongside the event, Crane's Anniversary Drops is a 21-day reward calendar on Techland's Outpost web hub that also starts on 21 September, handing out in-game dockets, store points and festive weapon skins with blueprints for anyone who logs in. Miss a day and nothing is lost straight away: rewards can be claimed retroactively until 19 October at 2:00 PM CEST, after which anything unclaimed disappears for good. There is also a free Discharge weapon to redeem between 17 and 24 September, and the game itself is half price in the anniversary Steam sale.

The patch notes, in plain English

Update 1.7 is a fixes-and-festivities patch rather than new content. Race Challenge assets that sometimes refused to break, blocking the route and killing your run, now work as intended. Techland says it has cleared a batch of crashes, stopped the frame-rate spikes that hit during boss fights on PlayStation 5, fixed stuttering when you open the settings menu, and removed the screen tearing that could appear with ray tracing and frame generation running together on RTX 40-series cards.

Our opinion

An anniversary in a live-service game usually means a paid expansion with a bow on it, so Techland deserves credit for an event that costs nothing beyond the price of the game it is celebrating. The roadmap is still a retention machine wearing a party hat: log in daily, vote weekly, grind the global goal, and the reward calendar runs 21 days so that a fortnight of ordinary life is enough to lose a skin you already earned. The genuinely good news sits in the update notes rather than the roadmap. Fixing boss-fight frame times on PS5 and the ray tracing tearing on high-end Nvidia cards matters far more to the people still playing than another themed banner, and a studio that spends its anniversary patches on stability is one that intends to keep the game alive.