Beginner’s mistakes can be quite funny – especially in the horror game Dead by Daylight. However, they also show what the game simply fails to do.
Dead by Daylight is essentially a rather simple “killer versus survivors” game, but the nuances are not so easily apparent. It takes several hundred hours of gameplay to familiarize oneself with all the mechanics and slowly but surely gain a feel for the game.
But many can still remember their first hours and all the numerous mistakes they made. Just because the game offers a possibility doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the smartest thing to do. In the Dead by Daylight subreddit, over 8,200 players upvoted a post where SarahnatorX admits that they initially thought they could see better in the dark with the flashlight.
This confession prompted numerous other Reddit users to reveal their own noob mistakes and share what they did wrong back then.
For example, tr3sempanadas admits that he desperately searched for the “plants near the campfire” mentioned in the description of the perk “Botany Knowledge” during matches. In reality, the perk simply improves healing speed, and the mention of herbs is just “fluff” to justify the perk – they never existed.
Another misunderstanding that many likely experienced is the “Exposed” effect. The name led many survivors at first to believe that the killer had a kind of “wall hack” and could see the survivors across the entire map, which led to panicked escapes.
In fact, the Exposed effect simply means that you go down in one hit as a survivor – it does not provide the killer with any additional information.
Like melcancholy-sloth, many other players probably feel the same (502 upvotes), as he writes:
“The Doctor confused me so much as a newbie. I still remember running wildly across the map because I heard the Doctor’s terror radius and was trying to escape from him. I was so confused because I never knew exactly where he was – I just knew he was behind me because of the terror radius.”
The catch is: with the Doctor, you hear the terror radius even when he is not nearby due to his madness ability. For newcomers, this is quite confusing.
Furthermore, the teachable perks apparently cause understanding problems, as emotionalspongy writes:
“I feel like an idiot for admitting this, but I thought if a teammate has a perk that has been unlocked as ‘teachable’, it means that I don’t have to choose the perk, and I still have it.”
Teachable perks do not do anything of the sort. They only indicate that a character’s perk can now also be found in the blood webs of other characters. What teammates take for perks is completely irrelevant to your own progress.
The killer perk “Insidious” also caused some amusing moments, as YeeetMaster2 admits:
“I thought the ‘Undetectable’ status from the perk Insidious means that survivors cannot see you, so I always stood right next to the hook.”
A mistake that many probably made. Misleading as the perk seems at first, it simply means that survivors cannot hear the terror radius and cannot see the killer’s red shimmer (his direct line of sight).
Dead by Daylight teaches its players very little
As funny as the stories are to read, they show primarily one thing: Dead by Daylight is not good at teaching players the mechanics of the game. While there has been a tutorial for several years, it only conveys the basics moderately well. With numerous killers, well over 100 perks and abilities, it is also little wonder that learning the game proves so strenuous.
Nevertheless, this clearly indicates that Dead by Daylight should better convey at least the basics in order not to lose too many players within the first hours of gameplay – possibly forever.
Many players only become enlightened when they watch streamers play the game or when they exchange ideas with other players after a match, who then give them tips and tricks – or are angrily reacting to the “trolling” which actually turned out to be simply beginner’s mistakes.
What do you think of these approaches? Amusing to read about them in hindsight? Or is it completely incomprehensible to you how one can make such mistakes?
Right now, you can earn many skins in Dead by Daylight – because it’s the Lunar New Year event.
