SegmentNextDying Light: The Following: Countryside, Buggy and Six Levels of Trust
The Following arrived on 9 February 2016, a year and a fortnight after the base game, and it is an expansion in the old sense rather than a side story bolted onto the menu. It takes the three things the first Dying Light is built on, which our main Dying Light guide reads the whole folder through, and breaks one of them on purpose. Parkour stops being the way you get around, because the new map is too big to cross on foot. Everything else in the expansion follows from that: a vehicle you build piece by piece, a cult that will not talk to you until you have earned it, and a night that is worse than the one in the city.
What you need before you can start it
The Following is an expansion, not a standalone release, so it needs the base game underneath it. You do not have to finish Harran first. You do have to be past the prologue, and Techland's own recommendation was to arrive somewhere around level 18, which is advice about survival rather than a lock on the door: the Countryside opens the moment you take the quest, and it does not scale down to meet an underlevelled character. It shipped alongside Dying Light: The Following - Enhanced Edition, which bundles the base game, this expansion and the content updates in one package, and some version of that bundle is how most people now own it, the Switch Platinum Edition included.
The place: a map twice the size of the city
The Countryside sits outside the quarantine, and it is roughly twice the size of the Slums and Old Town put together. That is the single fact that changes the game. Harran is vertical and dense, which is what makes the rooftops on our poster challenges page work as a route; the Countryside is farmland, open road, tunnels and caves, with sightlines long enough that firearms finally have something to do. It arrives with new ones to use, submachine guns and revolvers among them, and with the Compound Crossbow, which the cult hands over in two stages: a poorer version once you have helped the survivors out there, and the upgrade once they trust you further.
The vehicle: a buggy you maintain rather than drive
The buggy turns up early, at Jasir's Farm during the opening quest, and from then on you can call it to any safe zone rather than walking back to where you left it. It is the most un-Dying-Light thing in the expansion, because it is the one piece of equipment you are asked to keep alive rather than use up and replace. It burns fuel you have to find. It carries five parts, the engine, the suspension, the brakes, the traction and the turbo, each of which comes in levels one to five with an experimental sixth tier beyond that, and each of which is crafted and repaired from a component list the base game never uses: screws, wire, rubber, lubricants and synthetic, pulled out of wrecked vehicles, chests, shops and quartermasters. Its own driver skill tree levels off driving, jumps, kills and challenges, and the mechanic ranks inside that tree are what let you build the higher tiers of part.
| What you bolt on | What problem it solves |
|---|---|
| Nitro | Outrunning a road you can see the end of |
| Ultraviolet headlights, and a UV safe zone | The night, since a Volatile will not cross the light |
| Flamethrower, electric cage, ramming bar | The crowd that gathers when the engine noise carries |
| Mine dispenser | Whatever is following you rather than whatever is ahead |
| Reinforced cage | Keeping the five parts above alive longer |
| Remote control and car alarm | Pulling the infected somewhere you are not |
| Paint, bobbleheads and charms | Nothing at all, which is rather the point of shipping forty paint jobs |
The rank: six levels of trust, and the story behind them
Kyle Crane goes to the Countryside chasing a rumour that a cult out there, the Children of the Sun, has beaten the virus with an elixir rather than the Antizin that the base game spends thirty hours rationing. The cult does not simply explain itself. It ranks you, and the story unlocks as the rank climbs, which is why a player who tries to run the marked story quests back to back in the Countryside hits a wall the base game does not use. Trust comes from side quests and from the small work, finding missing persons and the like, and it is the expansion's answer to the question of how you make optional content compulsory without making it a story quest.
| Level of trust | What it marks |
|---|---|
| Outsider | Where you start, with nothing open |
| Stranger | The first rank that pays out, with an outfit |
| Newcomer | Progress without a reward attached |
| Ally | A second outfit, and the point the Countryside starts opening up |
| Believer | Progress again, one rank from the top |
| Disciple | The last rank, an Acolyte outfit, and the level at which the Faceless will speak to you directly |
What the Faceless eventually admit is that their elixir works the way Antizin works. It holds the infection down; it does not clear it. The figure behind them, the Mother, turns out not to be a survivor at all but a hybrid of human and Volatile, and the expansion ends by putting a choice to Crane rather than a boss fight. How many endings that choice produces is a question our sources do not agree on: the encyclopaedic account gives two, defiance or the nuclear option, while at least one walkthrough counts a third, hidden one alongside them. Either way the decision is final and the expansion does not hand it back, so take the save file seriously before the last quest.
What it adds to the base game you already have
Some of The Following stays in the Countryside and some of it follows you back into Harran. Legend levels are the big one: a fourth progression track that opens only once the three base trees are maxed out and then runs to 250, paying incremental stat gains rather than new moves, which is what gives a finished character somewhere left to go. Nightmare difficulty is the other structural addition, and it is not simply a damage multiplier: it stretches the night out, strengthens what lives in it, and drains stamina on every action, so the tools on our Volatiles page stop being optional. Bounties round it out, a rotating set of objectives split into basic, daily and community tiers that refresh on a clock rather than on your progress.
The night out here is not the night in the city
The Countryside adds a second kind of Volatile, the blue one, which is faster, tougher against melee weapons and spits with an accuracy and a bite the ordinary kind cannot manage. Worse, it sees through the Cloak Potion that our items guide files as a Witch side quest reward, so the one trick that reliably buys you a way out of trouble in Harran stops working on the enemy you most want it to work on. In exchange the expansion gives you something the base game never does: a way to reduce the population. Volatile nests are marked on the Countryside map, and clearing the breeders inside one before daylight thins the number of Volatiles roaming at night from then on. The buggy's ultraviolet headlights exist for exactly this reason.
The six DLC blueprints on our blueprints page are not from this
Worth clearing up, because the folder invites the confusion. Our blueprints page lists 86 recipes, six of them marked only as a DLC reward with no effect given, and none of those six comes from The Following. Buzz Killer, Lacerator, Night Club and The Constable ship with the Ultimate Survivor Bundle, while Punk Queen and Wrench Kiss are each their own small weapon pack, and the Enhanced and Definitive editions fold those packs in, which is why they turn up in a modern player's crafting menu inside the first hour. Their component lists on our page also predate a decade of patches and do not match what the community wiki records today, so treat those six rows as a list of what exists rather than as a shopping list. The other 80 recipes, and the rule that ties them together, are in our blueprints, components and posters guide.
And one room that is just a joke
The Countryside hides the same sort of thing the city does. Our news desk wrote one of them up in February 2016: a room out there that appears to belong to a Mr Potter, with his glasses and a sorting hat among the things he left behind in a hurry. It is the expansion's version of what the base game does twelve times over on our easter eggs page, six of which hand over a developer blueprint rather than a punchline. If you are playing The Following on a machine your friends do not own, our cross-platform page explains why the co-op invite is not going to work.
FAQ
Do you need the base game to play Dying Light: The Following?
Yes. It is an expansion rather than a standalone release, and you have to be past the base game's prologue, though you do not have to finish Harran first.
How big is The Following's map?
Roughly twice the size of the Slums and Old Town combined, which is why the expansion hands you a buggy in its opening quest.
How do you unlock the story quests in The Following?
By earning trust with the Children of the Sun through side quests and smaller jobs. The story opens in stages across six ranks, from Outsider up to Disciple.
What are Legend levels?
A fourth progression track added with the expansion, unlocked once the three base skill trees are maxed and running to 250 levels of incremental stat gains.
Is The Following included in the Enhanced Edition?
Yes. Dying Light: The Following - Enhanced Edition bundles the base game, the expansion and the content updates, and it launched on the same day as the expansion.