The major changes to Dead by Daylight are being stopped and cancelled. No wonder, because the community has been up in arms.
Just a few days ago, the developers of Dead by Daylight announced that they wanted to make significant changes to the game. These changes would have forever changed how killers have to play the game. But after even professionals struggled to achieve success with the changes and the community voiced their concerns in the forums, the response was: No, we won’t do it this way. All the changes are not coming.
What was the problem? Limiting the entire incident to “one problem” is not that easy. In summary, it can be said that the changes would have primarily come at the expense of the killers. What sounded like good methods in theory to address issues like “tunneling” and “slugging” was so one-sided that killers completely lost their enjoyment.
Even absolute professional players suddenly found it difficult to kill more than just a single survivor by the end of the round.
This is mainly because survivors would have received a “free pass” with the new mechanics. The system stipulated that the killer would be punished if they attacked and hung the same survivor multiple times in a row.
The resulting problem: This means that a survivor who was last hung could basically do whatever they wanted. They could sit at a generator without being disturbed because they know: If the killer attacks me, they will be punished and all other survivors will become stronger.
At the same time, it was such that freshly rescued survivors became “immune” for 30 seconds, as long as they do not repair a generator. This means they have no collision and are invulnerable. With a little addition: They can still “block” hits. Survivors could therefore just walk alongside the killer for 30 seconds and protect their friends.
Correspondingly, there was a huge outcry in the community, making it clear: If it comes to this, killers will have no fun in the game at all, and even survivors would quickly get bored if killers posed no danger anymore.
Some even renamed the game not “Dead by Daylight” but rather “Slightly Unpleasant by Daylight”.
Even professionals could no longer win in Dead by Daylight
Complexity was too confusing: Another point is that Dead by Daylight is basically a rather intuitive game. The killer wants to kill the survivors, the survivors want to repair generators and escape. This is simple and easy to understand. However, the changes aimed to introduce many additional rules that especially killers had to adhere to. Additional rules that added massive complexity to the game, which was particularly difficult for new players to grasp.
It no longer felt like you were playing a powerful, frightening killer, but rather just trying to desperately achieve something around the complex rules of the game.
This is what the developers say: In an update, the developers announced at the beginning of the weekend that they would not implement the changes for now:
We have heard you loud and clear that the current implementation of the systems to reduce slugging and tunneling, which we tested this week, is too punishing for killers.
For the launch of the Sinister Grace chapter, we will not introduce these changes and the perk adjustments, to consider some modifications based on your feedback. We will test these features again on an upcoming test server and only release them when we believe they are ready.
It is clear that the developers want to tackle tunneling and slugging because it is a real problem. However, the solution they tried was not only too complicated but also so restrictive for killers that it would have significantly damaged the game as a whole. It is good that they are listening to the overwhelming majority of the community and are backtracking.
Almost as disgusting as the planned changes is the next killer – they are not for the faint of heart.
