Even after 5 years, Dead by Daylight still has so many issues that Cortyn is pulling their hair out. Something needs to be complained about.
With the return of Mecker-Mittwoch, I take the opportunity to rant a bit about the game, with which I have a rather ambivalent relationship. After all, I have a long-standing love-hate relationship with the horror game Dead by Daylight.
I believe that I am quite lenient when it comes to bugs and errors. While my fellow players in WoW tend to get upset and complain about small details after the release of an addon, I remain quite relaxed. This was generally true for Dead by Daylight for a long time.
But there is no game that has developed such a embarrassing tradition when it comes to the density and impact of errors in patches.
With absolutely – and I mean that literally – every major patch, bugs come into the game that are simply unbearable. Bugs that affect the game in such a way that the enjoyment of the game is massively hindered, unfair situations arise, or mechanics simply do not work at all.
The different bug epochs of Dead by Daylight
That Dead by Daylight is in a certain way “special” is something I also notice repeatedly when talking about the game with my friends. In other games, when reminiscing, people talk about major releases: a raid in World of Warcraft, a new hero in Overwatch, or a new, cool DLC.
With Dead by Daylight, it’s different. There, we associate different epochs of the game not with new highlights, but with the bugs and errors that existed at a certain time. Examples include:
- “Do you remember when Trapper could place their traps on the ground and you couldn’t see or disarm them?”
- “Do you remember the time when destroyed pallets had no gravity and flew hundreds of meters into the sky, so you could immediately see where the killer was?”
- “Do you remember the time when you could continue repairing generators, even while you were already fleeing from the killer?”
- “Do you remember when you could spawn right next to burning cursed totems and disarm them before the killer even arrived?”
- “Do you remember when we sometimes started a game with 2 killers and only 3 survivors?”
- “Wasn’t that around the time when killers could sometimes start without their power and Michi could pick up the chainsaw from Hillbilly?”
- “Do you remember when survivors could fly through the map and lock the killer in lockers?”
Okay, the last one was made up. But the fact that you had to think for a moment about whether that really happened shows just how serious the problem is with Dead by Daylight.
That these bug periods have become so ingrained in my memory is pretty sad. With Dead by Daylight, I only think in intervals where I know what is currently bugged and not functioning.
This is quite unfortunate for a game that I genuinely enjoy at its core and has given me hundreds of hours of fun – even if half of my playtime has surely been marred by bugs.
Trickster brought new bugs
Unfortunately, the newest “All-Kill” chapter is no exception. It has only been out for a day, but what annoying bugs I have discovered so far is massively bothersome to me.
Currently, there are a lot of graphic errors related to the new killer Trickster. For instance, if you click on the shop to check out his outfits, you’ll see images like these:
Pretty good job so far from r/deadbydaylight
For a killer who focuses more than anyone on style and good looks, it’s just damn embarrassing when he fills the screen in a torn T-pose. All of the coolness vanished with a click.
However, worse are the bugs that actually affect gameplay. In my first rounds with the Trickster, I was already surprised that I was hitting with the throwing knives surprisingly rarely.
Well, I thought, maybe it’s due to latency or I’m just really aiming poorly. However, after about 5 matches, I still had problems consistently hitting survivors with the knives, so I checked the forum to see whether it was my personal inability or a problem many players were experiencing.
You can guess what I found.
In the subreddit, I immediately found a post that showed the hitboxes of the knives in relation to the survivors. The Trickster can simply throw his knives straight through survivors in a continuous fire without hitting them.
Anyone aiming for the head – something that has been practiced for years in shooters – will simply throw through the survivors when they are crouched or working on the generator. See for yourself:
I Hope The Trickster Gets A Buff from r/deadbydaylight
I believe I should slowly transition to playing Dead by Daylight only in fixed intervals. The first four weeks after the release of a major chapter should be avoided – unless you’re up for “Dead by Buglight”.
After 4-6 weeks, the mid-chapter patch usually comes, which resolves balancing issues and rectifies major design errors. After that, you wait another 2 weeks for the bugs that were brought in the bug fix patch to be sorted out again.
Now there is a period of 4 weeks where everything – as far as possible in Dead by Daylight – works as intended. The golden time to play.
At least until the next chapter comes and the whole theater starts again.
I really have no problem with occasional bugs. I understand that games have growing pains and that they can’t always be avoided in today’s development.
But when a game gets new growing pains nearly 5 years after its release, even though it should already be mature, it bothers me. But you probably could read that in the last lines.
What is your relationship with Dead by Daylight? Do you have a problem with the bugs too? Or don’t you mind because it’s kind of funny in a way each time?
In the last Mecker-Mittwoch, I ranted about a very special kind of WoW players…
