'Dying Light 2' On PC To Launch With Deeply Controversial Feature

We’re now just two days away from the release of Dying Light 2, which is the point you’d normally be seeing fans’ excitement reach fever pitch. However, there’s been a sneaky last minute addition to the game on Steam, and no one is happy about it.

Yesterday, it was spotted that the game’s page had been updated, and has a new note which reads: “Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper”. Basically, it’s an anti-piracy software, so when you’re playing the game, it’ll need to run connection checks, and you might suffer performance issues as a result. 

Dying Light 2 releases on 4 February - check out the trailer below.

While the severity of these issues will obviously depend both on players’ PCs and the game itself, the software has gained notoriety amongst gamers, and was previously linked to some performance issues in Resident Evil Village. Given that its inclusion in Dying Light 2 has only just been revealed, and even then, very quietly, it’s pretty clear that the devs knew this wasn’t going to be a popular decision.

One Techland representative responded to disappointed fans on the Steam forums: “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,” they wrote. “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.”

Obviously, this inclusion is only on the PC version of the game - console users have nothing to worry about. At this time, it’s not known if there’ll be any significant performance issues as a result, but given that we can supposedly expect around 500 hours of gameplay from the complete experience, you’d certainly hope it’d run smoothly.