Dying Light 2 has a game-breaking crash – but there’s an easy fix on Steam
Or at least one that seems to work for some affected gamers
Dying Light 2 is now out, and the much-awaited zombie game sequel has received a somewhat mixed reception looking at reviews – but regardless of how you feel about the game itself, there are some folks frustrated by the fact that they can’t actually even play it.
Yes, there’s an unfortunate glitch whereby some gamers are finding that clicking to start a new game simply results in Dying Light 2 crashing to the desktop. Not good.
As PC Gamer points out, there’s an easy potential fix – at least for those playing via Steam – for this nasty bug.
Just find Dying Light 2 in your Steam library, right-click on it, select ‘Properties’, and in the ‘General’ tab that pops up, see that box at the bottom labeled ‘Launch Options’? In there, type the following:
/nolightfx
You can then close the panel, and your change will be saved automatically. The next time you fire up Dying Light 2, this option will be applied and should hopefully save you from the jaws of the dreaded crash monster.
Analysis: A big bug amongst little glitches?
This fix comes from Techland’s community manager, by the way, who delivered the news via Discord. Going by anecdotal reports, it seems to work for some, and perhaps not for others, but considering how easy it is to try, you’ve obviously got nothing to lose to give it a shot.
The community manager posted on Discord to ask for feedback from those affected, saying: “Please let me know if the game is working for you or not [after the fix] – we will keep investigating this issue.”
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If it doesn’t work for you, or you’re not playing on Steam, then it looks like you’ll have to wait for the problem to be patched in the next update (presumably). We should hear more from the developer soon in terms of the results of its investigation of this problem.
Dying Light 2 came with an initial patch applying over a thousand fixes and tweaks to the game, but with hugely ambitious open world titles like this, it’s not uncommon for that kind of day one update to drop – in fact, it’s expected.
It’s no surprise folks are encountering glitches, but from what we’ve read online, in general the bugginess isn’t too bad – there are definitely some bugs, but it’d be a miracle, frankly, for it to be otherwise. Most gremlins in the works seem pretty minor too, although this particular game-breaking launch bug is definitely not. Fingers crossed that if you are affected, the above quick fix works to remedy the situation.
For those successfully getting stuck into the zombie horde, we have a couple of guides on Factions: how to take facilities and what upgrades they give, and also an explainer on how long the game is. Also worth noting is our dive into how good the game looks and performs with ray tracing (remembering there has been criticism leveled at the visuals of the base non-RT version).
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).