Dying Light: The Beast canceled on PS4 and Xbox One

Published Jul 14, 2026, 10:45 AM EDT

“Dying Light: The Beast was built from the ground up to take full advantage of current-generation hardware,” the Dying Light series’ account on X posted on Tuesday. “Its open world, advanced visuals, and fluid combat and traversal all depend on processing power and memory that previous-generation consoles simply cannot provide.”

Techland’s latest installment in the survival series came out on Sept. 18, 2025, for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. Like previous entries, Dying Light: The Beast is an open-world first-person action game. Its defining feature is how its zombies change throughout the day: In sunlight, the undead are slow-moving Romero types, but at night they transform into aggressive predators.

While it seems a bit surprising that the game was announced for consoles that are more than a decade old, it’s possible this was an extension of how The Beast was originally envisioned as a DLC expansion to 2022’s Dying Light 2: Stay Human. That game is available on PS4 and Xbox One.

The announcement coincides with a shift in the industry. While it has been common for many of the biggest multi-platform series to release versions of their games for the previous console generation, that trend has more or less ended as of late. The clearest example is that after releasing Call of Duty games on last-gen hardware for years, the next entry, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (2026), will only be available on Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.

Although this current console generation has bled into the last, console manufacturers are unsurprisingly looking ahead to when they can sell us a new, exorbitantly expensive system. Sony was reportedly aiming to release the PlayStation 6 in November 2027, but the ongoing RAM shortage, among other factors driving up costs, may have changed that. Despite the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X having been released close to six years ago, both systems now cost more than they did at launch. Between the current hardware prices and the slow switchover from the previous console generation to the new one, this seems like a poor time to release a system.

After all, if games are still being released on the old hardware four to five years after the latest one, what’s the point? With studios like Techland finally fully focusing on the newer systems, it sort of feels like this generation is just beginning.