After just 3 days, Dead by Daylight discards the interface that had been worked on for many weeks. This causes joy – but also mockery.
No matter how you turn it, the latest patch of Dead by Daylight has ruined more than any other update before. Not only are there numerous bugs and gameplay issues, but the new interface also receives a lot of criticism. Now the developers have quickly backtracked and are working on a better version that is supposed to go live in just a few days. On one hand, this is good – on the other hand, it leads to even more criticism.
What is the problem? The new interface in Dead by Daylight has primarily three issues that the community keeps pointing out. These are:
- The interface is overloaded. Too many, too large icons cover too much of the screen, making it hard to see enough of the game environment, which greatly affects gameplay as both killer and survivor.
- The interface elements are far apart. Instead of finding all information in one place, all info is spread across the screen. The generators to be repaired are at the top, the status of the survivors is on the left, and the currently earned points are on the right. One has to constantly scan across the screen.
- The individual elements don’t match each other visually. Dead by Daylight actually has a “chalk” look. However, a colored image of the character is used for the character display images. This does not fit well.
What will change? On Twitter, a “Work in Progress” picture of the revision was shown after just a few hours. This gives fans a bit of hope, as a number of adjustments have already been made there. These are:
- The status display of the survivors is further down.
- The number of available hook actions is further down.
- Displays for generators, gates, and trapdoor have moved from the top to the bottom.
- There is no longer any text for generators, gates, and trapdoor.
- Skill checks now have their own interface scaling.
This is still a “Work in Progress” image, but some of the biggest points of criticism are already being addressed.
Mockery and scorn despite the right decision: Although many players welcome the changes, there is still a lot of criticism and mockery for the developers. This is mainly because it was said beforehand that the interface would not be changed significantly since “months of work” had gone into it and that a lot of thought had been put into it. The fact that these weeks of work can now be heavily changed after just 3 days causes many players to doubt how much work was really done.
Corresponding compilations of the “biggest DbD fails” are making the rounds, mocking what the developers supposedly consider “months of work”:
months of work.mp4 from r/deadbydaylight
Poor patch reputation remains: Even though Dead by Daylight has become more popular and successful in recent years, the patch policy has changed little. After every major update, there are problems and bugs that make the game nearly unplayable in the first few days. This leads to a major meme wave in the subreddit and the official forum every approximately 6 weeks.
For years, the voices have grown louder that the developer behind Dead by Daylight, Behaviour, should take more time for patches or build an update just for optimizations. However, so far there is no sign of this, and the developers stick to their current strategy.
Player numbers stable despite patch: All the negativity and criticism doesn’t seem to have harmed Dead by Daylight – at least currently. A look at the current player numbers on Steam Charts shows a slight upward trend in the last few days, which is why Dead by Daylight is also today (as of 1:30 PM) ranked 21st among the most played games on Steam.
However, many reviews have been negative in the last few days. Especially right after the patch’s release, there were many negative reviews and only a few positive ones. Even though the overall rating is still at “Very Positive” at 82%, the recently submitted ratings are “Mixed” at only 65%.
How do you like the change to the interface? Is it good now? Or just a step in the right direction?
