If society does come crashing down amid a terrifying zombie apocalypse, at least we'll have had plenty of practice dealing with that sort of thing. Techland's upcoming first-person zombie survival horror game Dying Light is one of the latest upcoming spins on this familiar genre, promising to shake things up a little by throwing Mirror's Edge style parkour traversal into the mix.

As is so often the case, we found in our E3 2014 preview of Dying Light that the ambitious plans of the previous year's demo had been stripped down to leave behind a clunky, awkward traversal system. The game was originally announced as a 2014 release for PC as well as current- and last-gen consoles, but since Dying Light was delayed to February 2015 those plans have apparently changed.

Techland has announced that Dying Light will no longer be coming to Xbox 360 and PS3, and will instead release only on PC, Xbox One and PS4. The reason? Apparently it's simply too awesome for last-gen consoles to handle:

"Up to 200,000 objects can be displayed in the game at once. Add to this our use of realistic, physics-based lighting technology and you really start to push the next-gen systems to the limits. Features like these along with our core gameplay pillars – such as the player-empowering Natural Movement, threefold character development system, and vast open world – are all an inherent part of how Dying Light plays. However, combining all of these into one fluid experience is only possible on technologically advanced platforms.

"Therefore, after thorough internal testing, we have come to the conclusion that we have no choice but to leave past-gen systems behind and release Dying Light exclusively on the next-gen consoles and PC. Put simply, older consoles just couldn’t run the game and stay true to the core vision of Dying Light at the same time."

It's important to be a little skeptical about this spin-laden statement. There are almost certainly other factors that went into the decision, such as the fact that Dying Light is supposed to release in just a few months and developing it for three platforms instead of five during crunch time is going to make things much more manageable for Techland.

The fact that Dying Light is now releasing post-holiday 2014 is also no doubt a factor, since we can expect a lot more PS4 and XBox One units to be bought or gifted over the next couple of months, and that in turn will mean a larger consumer base for releases on those consoles. While it's definitely possible that the Xbox 360 and PS3 simply aren't equipped to handle Dying Light's lighting technology and "threefold character development system" (is that just a skill tree?), don't go taking this announcement as evidence that Dying Light will be the most next-gen game of all time just yet.

Dying Light is set to release on January 27, 2015 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.