Embody: Immerse goes beyond conventional surround sound. Techland’s audio team places individual sounds throughout the world. A growl from a balcony, footsteps on the street below, and a gate rattling behind you can all have their own positions. Because Immerse Gamepack is built directly into the game, it can use those positions before the sounds are mixed together and carry those directional cues through to your headphones.

What makes it personal is how your ears and head shape those cues. A sound changes slightly as it reaches each ear, and your brain uses those differences to tell where it came from. An HRTF, short for Head-Related Transfer Function, is a model of how that works. A generic HRTF uses a standard model. At Embody, we use a short video of your head and ears to build one based on your own anatomy. Immerse uses that profile to recreate those cues through your headphones.

We worked with Techland’s audio team to tune Immerse for Dying Light 2 Stay Human and Dying Light: The Beast. Each game has its own soundscape, and the goal was to make it easier to tell where sounds are coming from while preserving the character of the original mix.

That’s what the one-time $19.99 purchase gets you across both games on the same platform. Whether it’s worth it depends on how much of a difference you hear. With the free 14-day trial, you can revisit an area you know, switch Enhanced Headphone Mode on and off, and compare using the headphones you normally play with.

Embody: Sound is a huge part of what makes Dying Light work. Hearing something move on the roof above you before you can see it is part of the tension Techland’s audio team built into the games. All of that is still there for every player. Immerse is a separate, optional layer for headphone audio. It uses the sounds Techland’s team already designed and helps you pick out individual cues and tell where they’re coming from in 3D space. That’s why it’s offered separately from the base-game audio. The original sound design is intact, and nothing from it has been moved behind a paywall.

And to clear up the pricing, it’s a one-time $19.99 purchase for a lifetime license covering both Dying Light 2 Stay Human and Dying Light: The Beast. There are no recurring fees.

Embody: Great question! Immerse Gamepack is an optional feature you’ll find under Enhanced Headphone Mode in both games. PS5 can personalize its 3D Audio with a listening test. Immerse takes a different approach. It uses a short video of your head and ears to create what Embody calls a personalized HRTF. It’s a profile that helps your headphones reproduce the cues you use to tell where a sound is coming from. Think of hearing an infected before you see it and being able to tell whether it’s on the roof above you or in the alley behind you.

As for Tempest 3D Audio, choosing Headphones in either game sets the game’s audio output. To turn on 3D Audio for headphones, go to Settings → Sound → 3D Audio (Headphones) on your PS5.

If you’re curious about the difference, you can compare both using the same headphones during the free 14-day trial. Turn off PS5 3D Audio while you try Immerse so you can hear each on its own. If you’re happy with how PS5’s built-in 3D Audio sounds, you can stick with it. There’s no need to buy anything extra.

Embody: Immerse setup uses a short scan of your ears and head to create your personalized HRTF, essentially a map of how you hear sounds coming from different directions. Everyone’s ears and head are shaped differently, and those shapes affect how you hear where sounds are coming from. Immerse uses them to build your Personalized Spatial Audio profile, also called a personalized HRTF. That profile helps your headphones reproduce the cues that tell you whether a sound is above you, behind you, or off to one side.

If you submit the video, it goes to Embody to create that audio profile. That’s what the video is used for. It isn’t used for facial recognition or any other purpose. After submitting the scan and creating your personalized HRTF, you can contact us and ask us to delete it, and we will. You can read more about how Embody handles data in its privacy policy.

Embody: We’ve read the Steam feedback on earlier versions, and we still read it as it comes in. That feedback helped shape the approach we took with Dying Light 2 Stay Human and Dying Light: The Beast.

Before, Immerse ran as a separate app that processed audio after it came out of the game. This time, Immerse Gamepack is built directly into the games. That lets it use the position of each sound before the sounds are mixed together, so it has more information to work with when placing sounds around you. We also worked with Techland’s audio team to tune it for both games, improved how we build personalized audio profiles, and moved setup into the in-game audio menu, making the overall process faster and easier.

Embody: At Embody, we’ve built personalized spatial audio technology, a way to tell where sounds are coming from through headphones, by using the shape of your head and ears. Bringing that to Dying Light meant making it work with each game’s audio system. We built the setup into the audio menu and worked with Techland’s team to tune how sounds like footsteps, growls, and movement above you come through.

That’s why Immerse Gamepack is a paid add-on. The price reflects both the work that went into building the technology and the work it took to make it part of these two games. If you want to use it, you pay once and get it for both games on the same platform.

Embody: Right now, Immerse uses the scan to personalize where sounds come from. There’s no separate listening test that plays tones at different pitches to find out which ones are harder for you to hear.

We really appreciate this suggestion. A sound can be coming from exactly the right direction and still be easy to miss. Giving players a way to make those cues clearer based on what they can hear would be a meaningful accessibility improvement. We’d love to explore that. Thanks for taking the time to share the idea with us!

Techland: We know plenty of you are still playing the original Dying Light and The Following, and it’s great to see you still having fun with them after all these years. Thanks for sticking with them!

There are currently no plans to bring Immerse Gamepack to either. It comes down to how the games handle sound. The original Dying Light uses an audio engine called FMOD, and much of its audio code and scripting was built around it. We switched to Wwise with Dying Light 2 Stay Human, and that’s the engine Embody’s Immerse plugin was built for. Bringing it to the original would mean reworking a substantial part of the game’s audio system so the plugin could work with it.

Embody: Yes, Immerse Gamepack works with stereo headphones, including IEMs, open-backs, and gaming headsets. You can use the pair you already play with. Once you enable Enhanced Headphone Mode, you can choose from dedicated EQ presets for more than 160 headphone models. See the list of models with dedicated presets. If your model isn’t listed, you can still use Immerse with the generic headphone profile. You can also ask Embody to add a preset for your model.

Embody: Yes. If you already bought Immerse Gamepack on PC or Xbox, you’ll need a separate license for PS5. The one-time $19.99 purchase covers both Dying Light 2 Stay Human and Dying Light: The Beast on the platform where you bought it.

And thanks for spotting the error in the Steam screenshots. The free trial is 14 days. We’ll update them!

Embody: Immerse setup uses a short scan of your ears and head to create your personalized HRTF, essentially a map of how you hear sounds coming from different directions. Everyone’s ears and head are shaped differently, and those shapes affect how you hear where sounds are coming from. Immerse uses them to build your Personalized Spatial Audio profile, also called a personalized HRTF. That profile helps your headphones reproduce the cues that tell you whether a sound is above you, behind you, or off to one side.

If you submit the video, it goes to Embody to create that audio profile. That’s what the video is used for. It isn’t used for facial recognition or any other purpose. After submitting the scan and creating your personalized HRTF, you can contact us and ask us to delete it, and we will. You can read more about how Embody handles data in its privacy policy.

Embody: One Immerse Gamepack license covers Dying Light 2 Stay Human and Dying Light: The Beast on the same platform. We don’t have a multi-bundle discount to announce right now, but it’s a great suggestion and something we can explore! The 14-day free trial is per game. You can start a separate trial in each Dying Light game and try them on your own schedule.

Embody: Building that technology was one part of the work. Getting it into Dying Light meant connecting it to each game’s audio system, putting the setup in the audio menu, and working with Techland’s team to tune it in both games. The price reflects that development and integration work. It’s a one-time purchase that covers both games on the same platform.

At Embody, we use machine learning to create your personalized profile: we look at the shape of your head and ears and estimate how that affects the way you hear sounds from different directions. The game then uses that profile to play Techland’s original sounds through your headphones. So when you hear an Infected growl, it’s the same growl Techland’s audio team made. The profile changes the cues that help you tell whether it came from above you or behind you!