Dying Light 2 developer Techland has issued an apology for setting the goal way too high for the Winter Tales holiday event, which meant that many players would have spent hours grinding for no payoff. As an apology, Techland is letting Dying Light 2 players claim the event reward for free for a limited time regardless of the event's outcome.
The Winter Tales event originally kicked off last December to celebrate the holiday season with a variety of themed zombies and special rewards. Like other seasonal events for Dying Light 2, Winter Tales introduced a $2.99 DLC that could also be earned for free through gameplay during the season as an incentive for players to participate. Similarly to Dying Light 2's Halloween event, Winter Tales also brought a community-wide challenge requiring players to collectively gather presents by killing zombies, and the event would reward participants if the community managed to collect the specified number of presents.
Techland appears to have severely missed the mark when setting the community goal for Winter Tales, which required players to gather 6 million presents in total. Over the course of several weeks, Dying Light 2 players only managed less than half that amount, with under 3 million presents gathered. Since this wasn't just a matter of the players falling a little bit short but was rather an oversight on the developer's part, Techland is allowing players to claim the Bauble Mace legendary weapon reward from the event for free until February 12. Techland also issued an apology for setting an unreachable goal in the first place.
It's extremely rare for Dying Light's community events to be failed, but a similar occurrence happened last year when the Dying Light 2 community fell exceedingly short of a goal requiring players to inspect 7 million Hag tracks, and players globally only reached around 2.3 million. This could have been due to Dying Light 2's Bloody Summer event being smashed in only a few days, which set Techland's expectations a little too high moving forward. Meanwhile, the original Dying Light hosted a successful community event around the same time requiring players to knock 5 million zombies off of rooftops.
Hopefully, Techland will use this experience to set more realistic goals for future Dying Light 2 events, or perhaps come up with more enticing rewards to push players to achieve higher numbers. With a new year underway, there will be plenty of other opportunities for players to meet future goals.
Dying Light 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X with a Nintendo Switch version also in development.