'Dying Light' Patch 1.4 Re-Enables User Mods

Danilo Napalan Plays the New Zombie Survival Game 'Dying Light' in the Warner Bros. Booth at E3 in Los Angeles — Danilo Napalan plays the new zombie survival game "Dying Light " in the Warner Bros. booth at the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, in Los Angeles, California, June 10, 2014. REUTERS

"Dying Light" has had a shaky start with the modding scene. After a much publicised public outrage against its initial anti-modding stance and the ensuing bad press it received for the same and subsequent damage control, developer Techland is making up to the game's modding community. The latest patch to the game has now re-enabled modding support, which was earlier patched out by the 1.2.1 update.

The patch comes after an earlier update had banned modifications after its Jan. 27 launch. The patch allowed Techland to ban anyone caught modifying the game's data files. Worse yet, the developer had been proactive enough to slap the existing modders with DMCA notices, thereby forcing them to retract their mods. Claiming that the mods infringed on their copyright, the developer went after even benign visual mods, such as those that allowed players to deactivate the always-on film grain effect or those that allowed deactivation of shadows for performance improvement.

The latest patch 1.4.0 is set to undo all the overzealous mod cleansing undertaken by the controversial previous update, according to Gamespot. What's more, "Dying Light" now also allows the usage of mods even in online multiplayer mode. However, there's a catch. To maintain game balance and fairplay, players are allowed to connect only with others who have the same mod installed. All things considered, it must be noted that installing any sort of mod will decrease a player's chances of finding other human players online. Unmodded copies of the game will stand a better chance of finding more gamers to play with online.

IGN reports that the latest patch also brings in improvements for performance as well as stability. The game is now kinder on systems with modest installed RAM, thanks to better memory management. The game's inordinately long loading time was a major complaint from the community. This has been addressed in the patch as well. Gameplay changes include a fix for the "infinite spit" exploit in the Be The Zombie mode, which gave players an unfair advantage.

The latest patch has even included the ability to disable the film grain mode as a legitimate option from the settings menu. This is noteworthy because earlier this month Techland had issued DMCA takedown notices to a user mod that allowed the same functionality. The patch has also fixed the rather annoying bug that would display really low-quality textures on certain objects irrespective of the graphics settings. Those using dual-GPU hardware implementations will also benefit from a better experience, thanks to reduced screen tearing.

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