Upcoming Dead By Daylight changes will make or break the game

The Dead By Daylight community has always enjoyed a healthy debate about balance issues, bugs, and exploits, and it looks like Behaviour Interactive has finally taken player frustrations on board. Dead By Daylight is about to undergo a series of “quality of life” changes, but will they make any real difference?

Before we move on to the bigger and more controversial stuff, a few smaller changes promise to polish up player experiences. There will be extra perk loadout slots, which is great news. Map offerings will be secret and no longer guarantee the next realm but instead grant a 20 percent chance increase. Daily Rituals and Rift challenges will be streamlined to make the system less of a grind. Speaking of reducing the grind, at last we have a change coming to spending Bloodpoints. Now, players will be able to bulk spend Bloodpoints as they level up. There is nothing more dull than clicking the center button over and over, so anything that makes that process quicker is a blessing.

Behaviour’s promise of perk previews has left players confused. In the Phase One explanation, the team says they will “be allowing players to see their own Perk loadouts while in the lobby…” except we can already do that, so what does this mean? If all it means is we will be able to see the perks without having to select Loadout then it isn’t much of a change, or a particularly helpful one. What would be game-changing is to see your teammate’s perks, so you can change yours to compliment them.

Now, onto changes bound to cause some heated discussion between players. The Surrender feature promises to combat slugging, where the Killer leaves Survivors to bleed out on the ground. Although the Dead By Daylight team has repeatedly stated that slugging isn’t a huge problem in the game, many Survivor mains have disagreed vehemently. There are perks to combat slugging, such as Unbreakable, No Mither, and Boon: Exponential, but why waste a perk slot in case the Killer decides to slug?

Behaviour says that in cases of slugging, Survivors can vote to Surrender. They will keep their Bloodpoints and won’t receive a penalty. This sounds good in theory, but it won’t prevent slugging entirely. This new feature will just allow the game to move on faster.

Survivors all know that sometimes the Killer is not the only enemy. As a solo queue Survivor especially, games can be rough as you get abandoned by your teammates. Sometimes, as soon as they see a Killer they don’t like, Survivors will try to die quickly as a way to skip the DC penalty. Most of us would rather they would just quit, take the penalty, and leave us with a half-useless bot.

Behaviour has come up with a solution that, if it doesn’t work, will cause issues for players. The plan is to detect and combat any player trying to “go next’, including giving the player a DC penalty and removing a grade. How it will be able to tell the difference between someone doing it on purpose or just having terrible luck or being tunneled out of the game remains to be seen. Behaviour will “be keeping a close eye on the system to ensure its accuracy” so it seems like they don’t really know if it will work as intended either.

Finally, the team promises to penalize hiding Survivors or Killers body-blocking a player into a corner by improving the AFK crow detection. Now, the crows will appear sooner, alert the Killer instantly, and allow Survivors to bypass body-blocking. This seems balanced, but it will be interesting to see if players find a way to exploit this new feature—because you know we will try.