I play a lot of Dead by Daylight. Like, a lot of Dead by Daylight. I play so much that I wrote a build randomizer in Decker (though I haven’t updated it in several chapters).
It’s an odd game. Depending on who you’re playing with or against, it can either be an extremely chill, zen game that you just breeze through or it can be a brutal slaughter that’s being dragged out far longer than anyone wants it to be. It kind of follows the almost roguelite gameplay of games like Hunt: Showdown, but also is a lot more forgiving. It’s a mishmash of different elements that just happens to work and be fairly addictive. It’s the perfect level of intensity to not require my full attention, allowing me to actually relax while I’m playing it, but still get the challenge and variety of playing against live opponents.
However, the one thing it’s not is dynamic. I play survivor almost exclusively and, in about 90% of my matches, I can tell by the second hook who’s going to “win.” From there, it’s just a question of whether I’m going to be one of the players who survives in that match.
A big part of this comes down to the way that the game handles perks. You essentially have to choose a build that will counter the biggest possible concerns you could have about your the opposing side’s build(s). You have to commit, in advance, to playing a specific way. If you chose wrong, there is no counterplay and you can’t see the opposing side’s build(s) in advance. As a result, there are a lot of scenarios in which perks are just useless unless your opponent(s) just happen to choose a specific perk.
This is as much a game design issue as any, but the primary reason that this is an issue in the first place is that perks aren’t just buffs, either situational or not. Whereas Hunt’s perks are things like “see arrows in dark vision” or “reduce fall damage by 50%,” many of Dead by Daylight’s perks are abilities, usually abilities that are triggered in specific ways and have significant cooldowns. This is a significant difference in design philosophy from games that employ a similar system and its effects on gameplay are non-trivial.
The game’s solution to that problem was intended to be hexes, but the problem is that they only added a dynamic element for killers. Survivors don’t necessarily get a buff from destroying hexes and some hexes are deliberately designed around making things harder for survivors when they go out of their way to take them out. Boons helped a bit, but, especially with nerfs like being unable to self-heal in the Circle of Healing boon, they haven’t withstood the test of time and I now rarely see anyone running any of the boons.
The other thing that I don’t think I’ve ever considered Dead by Daylight to be is an even experience. Survivors occupy a weird space where they’re glorified skins. Sure, you unlock perks for other survivors by prestiging them, but, once you do, that’s it. If you never played that survivor again, all you’d be missing out on is that survivor’s particular aesthetic(s). Killers, on the other hand, have unique kits that they can utilize to hunt down survivors and they still get four perks.
A weird side-effect of this is that, for a while, the best way to become a better player was to simply learn how to play without perks. As I said above, I made a build randomizer for the game and, for a time, my partner and I randomized our builds every single game, but I essentially just treated them as bonuses, rather than basing my playstyle around them. Despite this, my partner and I still made it to red ranks within a week or two every month. This has become less viable as more characters and perks get added and it’s harder to figure out exactly how certain effects are being triggered before it’s too late, as well as seeming like rank progression has been rebalanced and it now takes longer to climb (it’s possible I missed patch notes about this), but the point remains. The two sides the game offers are uneven and the game is successful in spite of that, not because of it.
Combined, these two issues with the game’s design make it far less competitive than it aspires to be. While this isn’t necessarily a big deal under ideal conditions, when you end up with killers who abuse easy kill tactics or even continue to camp despite the more recent anti-camping measures (which honestly do not do enough to keep killers from simply camping and tunneling)
There have been a few other attempts at the asymmetrical game format like this and some of them, like The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, have even been, in my opinion, more successful in terms of core gameplay, but arguably less successful in terms of “figuring out how to keep people playing them.” These, however, make substantial changes in terms of how many people are playing on each side or even the overall playstyle.
Dead by Daylight itself has even made some interesting changes via the 2v8 and Lights Out modes, with the 2v8 mode allowing you to choose between three different builds and the Lights Out mode getting rid of builds and scratch marks entirely, but the downside of these modes is that, while they are far more competitive and I thoroughly enjoyed the Lights Out mode as a vision of Dead by Daylight that could remain evergreen if it were to stick around, they are actually less dynamic than the core mode.
As a result, I’ve recently been thinking about how to make the Dead by Daylight formula more dynamic and, more importantly, introduce more chances for counterplay and I think I’ve found a way to do it, inspired a bit by MOBAs.
The core of it is that you would start each round without perks. If every single survivor dies, there are a total of 12 times that someone is hooked. There are five gens, with the last one triggering the endgame.
The way I think that it should work is as follows:
- For every completed gen (except the final one, which triggers the endgame), the killer gets a perk.
- For every two hooks, each survivor can individually choose a perk.
Each of these would be for a total of four perks, meaning that only the first four gens and the first eight hooks would count.
Now, I can already hear people saying that that’s backwards, but my line of thought is this: every gen that gets completed without two hooks occurring means that the killer is behind. Every two hooks that occur without a gen being completed means the survivors are behind. If there are about two hooks for every gen, this means that they’re about even and will unlock perks at the same rate. The mentality behind designing it like this is to provide the opposite experience afforded by most MOBAs: anti-snowballing. In MOBAs, doing something like this would be counter-intuitive. What are you supposed to do, give your in-lane opponent(s) XP for every creep you kill? But Dead by Daylight is different. There are specific milestones that count against the opposing side’s victory in an asymmetrical way. It can be done this way and still feel intuitive and fun.
My reasoning for these numbers is a bit deeper than that, though. Ultimately, with five gens to 12 hooks, it doesn’t line up perfectly. It would outwardly seem that survivors are getting all of their perks a significant ways before killers would get theirs. But I chose that number for a reason, which is that all survivors can be alive after eight hooks, meaning that, if every survivor is hooked twice, they will still be able to unlock all perks before any of them die. I feel that this is an important balancing decision, especially in terms of “fun.”
Unfortunately, however, this would not be as simple as just changing the way perks are unlocked. Basically every one of them would have to be rebalanced for this new format. There are also other decisions to be made. Should each survivor be given a unique passive to make them more than just glorified skins? Should upgrade points be a thing? Should each hook in between the two hooks offer an upgrade point? Should each gen that reaches 50% or 75% in between completed gens offer an upgrade point?
At some point, I want to explore designing this, perhaps as a game for Facepunch’s s&box. But it probably won’t be soon.