Dead by Daylight
DBD aficionado Bear4s, or Andrew, comes by to explain, criticize, and endorse the game
What’s that behind you?!
It’s Bear4s, and he’s here to clap your cheeks as Dredge
Wassup gang, welcome back! Some of you might not know, but I am not a big horror fan? Would I like it? Maybe! I am easily spooked, so I do myself the service of staying away from spooky things. This is where Andrew AKA Bear4s comes in. Andrew knows his spooky things, and one spooky thing that he is a goddamn expert at is Dead by Daylight. Andrew is here this week to explain the intricacies of the game and how they aren’t THAT complicated, to criticize some development moves made by the studio, and to tell you how much fun this freakin’ game is and why you should play it!
Let’s dive in
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Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical PvP game that pits one Killer against four Survivors. The goal is simple: for the Killer, hook the four Survivors on one of the many sadistic, crude sacrificial hooks scattered throughout the map to appease The Entity, and for Survivors, successfully power five generators scattered throughout the area to power the exit gates to escape and live to see another day. And while these goals seem easy enough on paper, in practice it’s quite the opposite – there’s a reason each match is called a “trial.”
Before delving into the complexities of the game, let’s talk about the characters. The main cast of Killers and Survivors runs the gamut – from the hulking Trapper littering the map with bear traps around every corner and window, or the Nurse who uses her power to teleport around the map to catch Survivors off guard, to iconic figures in horror like Michael Myers, Leatherface, Freddie Kruger, and most recently Sadako from the Japanese series Ringu. Survivors include David King, a scrappy barfighter from England (who was recently announced to be the first LGBTQIA+ member of the cast, much to the delight of many community members), Feng Min, an esports pro thrown into the deadliest game she’ll ever play, and licensed characters like Cheryl Mason from Silent Hill, and a swath of Resident Evil representatives including Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine. At the center of all of this is the mysterious Entity, described as some kind of ancient, cosmic, eldritch evil that is constantly capturing new Survivors and Killers alike to feed off of the feelings of terror, frustration, and glee of both parties until they are eventually drained and discarded to the void.
Dead by Daylight’s gameplay vastly differs based on the role the player selects. Survivors play the game in third person and are able to freely look around the map and their character to dodge the Killer and spot hidden objectives like Totems that may be powering deadly hexes from the Killer, or chests strewn throughout the trial that hold a myriad of items ranging from first aid kits to flashlights. Killers play the game in first person, and as such have a much more limited field of view compared to Survivors. This means that the Killer must actively be looking for Survivors, be it checking behind that rock or inside a bush. On the plus side, by default Killers have a higher speed than Survivors, meaning it’s only a matter of time to catch someone running in a straight line. And it’s in these chases that the real gameplay begins to shine.
Dead by Daylight operates similarly to extreme tag (well, aside from the horrifying ancient evil snatching the players from their beds to compete in a cosmic game of cat and mouse) where the Survivors are able to vault through windows, drop pallets to stun Killers (and vault if the Killer doesn’t break them), fall from heights – all an act commonly known as “looping” the Killer. The Killer is able to vault windows albeit at a slower pace, and instead of sliding over downed pallets they smash them, permanently removing that escape option for all players in the trial. In most cases, a Survivor needs to be hit twice: once to put them into the injured state, which causes the victim to leave behind pools of blood and sporadically grunting in pain, and again to be put into the dying state (also known as “downing” or “being downed”). Once downed, the Killer grabs the Survivor off the ground and carries them to a hook; get hooked three times, and you’re dead.
Killers and Survivors have access to a dizzying amount of perks (at time of writing, there is a total of 204 individual perks) in order to maximize their chances for success, and players are allotted four slots to choose their best perks. Killers have perks to hinder Survivors in various ways (causing negative status effects on hit, perks that interfere with generators after damaging them, and hexes which provide a myriad of powerful effects including allowing the Killer to, well, kill Survivors instead of hooking them), and Survivors have perks allowing them to escape Killers with bursts of speed, protect an ally from being downed immediately after being unhooked (an act known as “tunneling,” aka focusing one player with tunnel vision), and even reset dropped pallets that the Killer hasn’t destroyed yet. What’s more, both Killers and Survivors also bring addons or items to the trial, which augment the Killer’s power in different ways, or allow Survivors to repair generators quickly and heal one another.
Remember way back when I mentioned the complexities of the game? Trying to keep track of all of that information must seem like an impossible task – and this is where things get very subjective very fast – but it’s not. The game has centered itself around Killers bringing one or two of the most powerful generator regression perks (such as Hex: Ruin, Pop Goes the Weasel, and Deadlock to name the most iconic), an information perk (the most prolific being Barbeque and Chili, which reveals the aura of all Survivors far away from a freshly hooked Survivor and gives a bonus to Bloodpoints, one of the three in-game currencies, when the match ends), and one or two personal preference perks. Survivors often run “second chance” perks such as Borrowed Time (soaks a hit to prevent an unhooked player from being downed immediately after being freed), Decisive Strike (completing a skill check frees a Survivor from being carried by the Killer after being downed off the hook), Unbreakable (allows a Survivor to recover from the dying state once per trial), and an exhaustion perk such as Dead Hard (when injured, press the ability button to dash forward while being immune to damage). Generally speaking, of the 204 available perks to Survivors and Killers, you’re likely to encounter less than half of that number.
There are a plethora of issues that plague the game: balance is all over the place, with some Killers being drastically underpowered given the current state of the (meta)game, perks that see little to no use because… they just aren’t valuable enough to bring, and of course, the constant back and forth discussion of whether the game is Killer sided or Survivor sided. The fact that the game is more or less entirely just playing matches to grind Bloodpoints to buy more things in the procedurally generated Bloodweb of each character, rolling the dice and hoping that you finally get perks or addons that you’ve been waiting for. Balancing 3 different currencies (Bloodpoints, the most common; Iridescent Shards, gained by leveling your player level up, which can be used to purchase Killers, Survivors, and perks at a STEEP cost, and Auric Cells, the microtransaction currency.) Most recently, BHVR implemented Skill Based Matchmaking (SBMM) much to the chagrin of the community. While on paper, personally I’m all for SBMM – if you’re good you get to play against better players, and if you’re not, then you’re not going to get stomped into the ground by a full group of Survivors blinding you with a flashlight while you try to learn the game. That being said, since there’s no in-game competitive ladder or leaderboard (there’s role ranks, but these simply indicate how much you play a specific role, and there is a competitive scene to the game complete with tournaments and all), so it didn’t make sense to sit in queue for 20 minutes on Survivor because there are no Killers in your skill range. BHVR recently decided to look back into their matchmaking, and also disabled seeing other players’ ranks in the post game screen because even though they said, multiple times, that rank is not an indicator of skill, Ash IV dregs like myself wouldn’t stop bitching about how we get paired against Red Rank I Survivors (or brag about how we took down 3 Red Ranks in Silver II).
This is where you, dear reader, chime in “Jesus Christ, that’s a lot of words, Andrew, and this is supposed to be a short-ish review of the game! And you just said that it sucks! Why do you play it, and why should I??”
Honestly even though the game has plenty of janky interactions, the most absolute barebones definition of balance I think I’ve ever seen – and I’ve played Melee for close to ten years now, a thriving community of people who WILL go into your twitch chat and throw bible verses at you after killing them, or for not playing by The Survivor Handbook of How to Have Fun as Killer, or like honestly just looking at them weird, it also has plenty of great members and fun interactions. There’s the legend of the Public Test Realm Clown (Killer queue times are outrageous on the test realm since everyone wants to try the new Killer… and our hero decides to play the Clown anyways). There’s the mandatory snoot booping when you find a Pig player. Immersed Survivors, crouching around the map fearing for their lives. And everyone remembers the first time they saw Michael Myers staring at them out of the corner of their eye while repairing a generator (or finding a Survivor and nabbing them right off the generator before they can realize what’s happening).
The game is fun as long as you remember that it’s just that: a game. The same can be said of any competitive game, but I think it applies especially so to Dead by Daylight. Maybe you load into a game and decide that this time, you’re going to spend the whole match in the Killer’s terror radius and not get caught. Maybe you decide that you want to play photographer Ghostface, marking Survivors and taking a screenshot every time you are successful. And maybe you want to go in and absolutely demolish a group using the most powerful tools at your disposal, or you want to bring your friends and absolutely speedrun the generators before the Killer has even seen your team. Some of the most fun I’ve had in this game has been deciding to go in with my own silly win conditions. Sure, it takes the edge off losing with no kills, but if I fulfill my goal, then I can walk away happy.
Dead by Daylight will be celebrating its sixth anniversary starting on June 7, 2022, bringing with it a community driven event, extra rewards, anniversary items to use in matches, a new Killer called the Dredge and a new Survivor named Haddie Kaur. It is available on most consoles (Xbox, PS, Switch, Steam, Epic, and Mobile), and the game supports cross-play, allowing console players to play with PC users and vice versa (except mobile which has its own little thing).
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