It's a wrap!
After 2 years and 3 months of development, I'm closing down a part time project and all of it's development efforts after Techland contacted me this week with a verbal cease and desist for my Patreon content that was created as a "Thank you bundle" for my supporters who endorsed and supported my work.

This project has been an incredibly exciting and interesting journey into reverse engineering many of the Dying Light 2 system mechanics, to be able to create new and exciting content for the PC gaming community.

During it's progress since Feb 2022, there were:
- over 2 million line changes and additions to the games code,
- over 490 released code updates,
- 2 custom launchers (python and C#),
- Auto-updating mechanics with player selections,
- a character creation engine (Infinity Designer),
- 5 custom game difficulties,
- 9 optional extended modules players could install to add systems like Hunger and Thirst mechanics,
- 2 unofficial events,
- 5 "pathways" the player can choose with background stories and custom gear when starting the game,
- multiplayer support tools for pairing and syncing data,
- a code customization layer for the community to create their own configurations and balancing for the game,
- savegame support tools,
- over 1600 new NPC models,
- new enemy types,
- Companions,
- Base Building,
- new factions,
- new spawn systems,
- new weapons,
- new armor tier systems (weight/movement systems/swimming/parkour effects, class systems),
- new AI behaviors and unique custom AI entities inside the game,
- with 6 ingame and 27 application translation languages supported.

There were unofficial discussions of the acquisition of this project for over 6 months, with discussions of Official support utilizing developers and designers, and the playing of this work internally at Techland with shoutouts from the Franchise Director Tymon Smektala. After the Tencent acquisition in August 2023, communications ceased and were left unanswered until Nov. 2023, when it was offered that the deals had fallen through and would not be possible at that time. No further contact was heard from Techland until this verbal cease and desist. Due to these ups and downs and not being able to properly say thank you to my community, I am discontinuing this project to continue Indie development and collaborations with more teams on game development.

But there are many great things coming from here, so utilizing this opportunity to bolster and dive back into Indie game development in Unity. I wish Techland and their teams the best in their future titles and I appreciate the opportunity and time they offered to support my work unofficially.

It looks like the mod may become officially supported as part of Dying Light 2 in the future! Early word is that Techland is looking to support the mod officially with Developers and official integration into the game. More coming stay tuned

Hey @subscribed, last ping for the start of the week, stay tuned for the upcoming Armor overhaul and make sure to get in your feedback on the latest gameplay in ⁠ialr-mod-feedback. Another week in contact with Techland, official support for the mod may be just around the corner! I put together a summary of the mod to send over to Techland and I wanted to share here as well.
...

Hey @subscribed, I wanted to let you know that regretfully, after the latest EULA update that Techland put out this morning, that I have decided to cancel future development on IALR pending a response from Techland. I have truly enjoyed developing for this community and have really appreciated the feedback and support from everyone. The short and simple answer is that Techland has given enough reason to feel like my work and efforts will be taken from the mod and used as part of their product and monetization strategy without my permission. To avoid this I will no longer be able to launch the game without agreeing to their new EULA, so for now I apologize but the mod cannot receive proper testing for future development. I hope you understand and I hope you have enjoyed my work thus far!If you want to review the discussion from this morning for more information, follow the link:

Regarding the Techland Mod Licensing Agreement, After thoroughly reviewing the licensing agreement provided by Techland in relation to mod content, I've decided not to consent to its terms. I believe in the importance of creators having control and rights over their original content. The stipulations set out in the agreement are not in line with my views on this matter. While I understand the need for companies to protect their interests, I also believe in a fair balance between corporate and individual rights. Therefore, I will not be submitting any of my mod content under this agreement. I encourage other creators to read the terms closely and make an informed decision about what's best for their work.



Hey Modding community, BestGamerAli did an interview with Tymon last week and here is the video that may answer some of your questions about the future of DL2. 

Use this link to skip directly to the conversation about I Am Legion Reborn:

First I just want to say that I truly appreciate BestGamerAli pushing forward some of these questions and attempting to get support for the modding community. I've reached out to him to say thanks for his hard work and for the discussion points.
I've spent some time thinking about and rewatching the interview, and honestly I can share that I am confused and frustrated and I want to share my experience with trying to work with Techland as a mod dev. 

Just to catch everyone up on a simple timeline, last year January 2023, Tymon reached out to me to talk about how interested he was in my work. 

In Mar-June 2023 I started applying for jobs at Techland and met with the recruiting team, who said I would be an excellent fit for their team, and then Tymon personally interviewed me for the job over video. I was currently working as a Software Director in Simulation and Training but badly wanted to switch to Game design/Development, as it's my daily passion in design and development. Tymon mentioned in the interview and multiple times later on that he did not think hiring me would be a good solution, but wanted to continue the discussion on official support for IALR.

We continued to have back and forth conversations after this video interview about supporting Console players and I was extremely excited for the collaboration and only offered that I would be more than happy to improve the quality of the mod to prepare for bringing it into the game, but that the reason the mod suffered in quality was also due to the update patterns and that I was fighting to keep up with the backend changes with limited hours while working full time as a Director. I asked multiple times for support in getting early access to the update data paks and to be able to better support the community of players whose savegames were being corrupted, but I did not get answers for that request. 

In July/August 2023, Tymon offered that he was pushing to have IALR added to the base game of Dying Light 2. We had many conversations about how the mod could go on to be a part of the base game and had a few solutions in place, including that I was being assigned a Producer, Designer, and UX team to help with some of the development. It was my understanding that we had somewhat of a solution for the Technical challenges and that he was going to present my work to the Board on August 9th, 2023. 

After that email I didn't hear back from Tymon. I sent 3 emails following up on our conversations, the final email which was sent in Novemenber 2023, again stating my desire to continue to support the players and expressing my regret that the collaboration didn't work out. I asked for more information regarding the savegames and someone to talk to to discuss the savegame corruption and what more I could do to prevent this. 
Tymon responded on November 20, 2023 and expressed his apologies for the lack of information and that they would not be able to officially support IALR this year. 

Sorry for the longer message, but I've been very frustrated and confused by the responses over the last year. I would love to see this work continue and be a part of the main game, and I have offered many many different avenues for collaboration with the Techland team to make it happen, some at my own expense. So for now, I have not been responded to since November 2023 from Tymon, so I'm waiting to learn more. I am hopeful that this may still happen in the future, so here's to the future of the work and let's hope that Techland figures all their internal things out so the players can get back to enjoying new content and exciting gameplay. :potato:

Hey Modding community, I just got off a call with Sheri, the Influencer Lead at Techland and they informed me that someone from the community reported the mod for having content on Patreon that they wanted access to but didn't want to have to pay for. I've been given a verbal cease and desist to pull down my thank you content on the Patreon so that there is no content available by supporting me on the Patreon.

1. The mod has been and always will be completely free, and has never had content hidden behind a paywall, rather it has had a thank you pack and single pathway available to supporters that allow them to enjoy the game faster, such as unlocking all of my custom mod content (ruins the balancing and experience but is good for people who just want to mess around in the game). 

2. The Patreon was never intended to contain better versions of my work or content that was behind a paywall. If there were members that joined the community and were unhappy with the status of the work due to the bugs from the official updates and somehow felt that the better work was hidden on the Patreon, then I apologize, that was not the case.

3. After speaking with the representative, I believe this is the final nail in the coffin for me, as some of you may know the relationship with Techland has been a very strange ride since early 2023 and I have concerns about continuing working on a project that gained so much attention from their leadership and then was ghosted after the Tencent merger, only to then result in this next contact being a verbal cease and desist on support for my community. I do wish Techland, what it used to be, the best. I don't think I have as much faith in their support of the community and the player base any more. 

4. As an inspiring indie game dev it becomes less obvious why any additional hours are spent of my own time in supporting Techland's game and the community without being able to provide support to my community the way I would like to support them. A large percentage of this community has encouraged and supported me, and I appreciate their support and I want to be able to support them back through content and game dev. Due to this, I am shifting my Patreon away from Techland related projects and onto my own indie game development. 

5. I apologize that this message may be familar to some of you, as I've done this post before, when Techland first released the EULA changes last year after they introduced microtransactions and shady writing into their EULA after their acquisition from Tencent, and yes it was ultimately this EULA that gives them the ability to enforce the verbal cease and desist. I'm very sad to see this 2 year project stop so abruptly, especially with all that I was building for this 1.6 update, but I do not wish to continue to support the Dying Light series after all of the strange communications and rollercoaster ride from Techland. I do not plan on expanding the content for the mod for Dying Light 2 any further. Any work that needs to go into maintaining and supporting the mod will need to be done by the community and after asking permission to release patches, mods, or spinoffs.

But this is not the end of the journey:
I'm currently working full time in the indie game dev space, and you can be sure that I'll be working just as hard to return with my own IP that is better suited to supporting the community and the players of my work, one that will not break with every update. If you would like to collaborate on a indie dev project in Unity, please let me know.

Thank you everyone for the support of this work, I had a lot of exciting things in store for this 1.6 update, but those will all be coming to my indie game in the future. I will be sharing my next project here shortly, stay tuned and stay safe.

A few members of the IALR community have had follow up questions so I just wanted to share my responses and last thoughts here.

Q: Do you plan on atleast updating the mod with future updates?
A: Sadly no, at this time after another confusing and disheartening move by Techland, I don't have plans to continue to support updating the mod with each official update. I hate that but it takes anywhere from 4hrs to 80+hrs to fix/balance the mod after each official update, and I would rather be committed to the project if I'm going to continue to update it. That time is better spent working on something I'm excited to continue and grow, without waiting for Techlands next bs move. I supported all updates within 8-24 hours for the last 2 years and 3 months, time to take a break and focus on what I need to be actually doing if Techland isn't going to actually support modders like myself and impact my community.

Q: It's a shame but I can understand it. I thought updating the mod was something more "simple"? but of course it's such a complex mod that I understand that keeping it updated is very difficult.
A: I fully agree, I was working on some more experimental research and code for dynamically rebuilding the code after every update, but based on how Techland treats the modding community, it's only a matter of time before that also requires refactoring and more updates. Which is hundreds of hours to do correctly.

Techland/Tencent is currently doing a large number of concerning things that have caused a great deal of discomfort over the last year, including how they interact with and ask for work from the modding community, promising support, financing, and other things, and then ghosting those projects. It's embarrassing that you have people like Sheri , an influencer lead, handing out verbal C&D's to individual projects. While I understand he's just trying to do his job, Techland is behaving extremely shady and it not delivering on what they promise, while also giving thumbs up, playing, and scrutinizing small development projects they don't plan on being transparent with. 
They've done it with more than just my project and it's not ok to be a large company, with a billion dollar buyout, engaging with and communicating with solo developers trying to learn, create, and grow in a failing industry (mainly due to corporate greed) with such confusing and run-around language. They know better than anyone, that it doesn't matter what is said verbally, it matters what is offered through a contract (free-lance, part-time, full-time, etc).

I would encourage any mod developer for the game to find a better company to work under if they plan on creating mods and trying to help sustain their games. For their own sanity and legal security, not worth burning out over a company that doesn't carry themselves in a more trustworthy manor. Just my thoughts.