For Dead by Daylight, a major change is coming. The horror game will soon have its own servers. We reveal what this means.
The colleagues from Polygon spoke in an interview with the Game Director of Dead by Daylight, Mathieu Cote. The conversation primarily focused on the new killer Legion, but in the end, Cote shared an important piece of information that players have been waiting for years: Dead by Daylight will have dedicated servers.
What are dedicated servers? Dedicated servers are provided directly by Behaviour, the developer and publisher of Dead by Daylight. This means that matches are no longer hosted “locally” by individual players, but all players can rely on reliable servers.
The killer is currently the host: So far, games in Dead by Daylight have taken place over a “peer-to-peer” connection, meaning players were directly connected to each other. The respective killer was the host of the game. This meant that latency and thus the smooth gameplay flow were heavily dependent on the killer’s internet connection. If the killer had a poor connection, it resulted in severe lags and the match became virtually unplayable.
“Lag-switching” has been criticized for a long time: Some players have used the peer-to-peer connection as a form of “hack”. If the killer simply pulled out the LAN cable from the PC, he could roam through the game world for a few seconds, injuring survivors and taking them down while the survivors were stuck in a long lag. Then, he plugged the LAN cable back into the PC and could sacrifice the corresponding survivor. This allowed killers to gain an unfair advantage.
The community is excited but with some doubts: The player base of Dead by Daylight is very pleased with this announcement. Dedicated servers should fundamentally improve the gaming experience for all players. However, players hope that there will still be the option to host matches themselves. Because only then could Dead by Daylight still be played if the game “dies” in a few years and wouldn’t depend on official servers – as it was the case with Evolve.
Do you think it’s good that Dead by Daylight will soon have official servers? Or should the system be left as it currently is?
