Killing and doing gens. A discussion about arbitrary objectives.

ZaKzan

Why are perhaps the two most boring things to do in this game the stated objectives?

I think perhaps this is a fundamental issue in this game and is also a fundamental reason why the game is so hard to balance. If I'm playing killer and the survivors just basically give up or aren't any good, it's not very fun for me to kill them. If I'm playing survivor and the killer isn't very good and I just slam gens and escape, I didn't have much fun either.

This comes to the point I'm about to make. The fun that I have in this game, from a killer perspective, is chasing a survivor and outplaying them and catching them. The fun that I have as a survivor is running from the killer, hiding from them, and evading them at least to buy enough time for my team to power the gates. What if killing and doing gens were secondary objectives and the primary objective, the objective that rewards the most points and emblems / rank, was to win chases either as survivor or killer? The chase could be scored by time spent in the chase, the longer the chase the less points the killer gets and the more points the survivor gets. I think this would make it much easier to balance the game around and it would be much more fun to play.

The game's current objectives are essentially opposed to one another, which a lot of times leads to just one party getting all the action or fun. The solution I'm proposing is quite elegant in that both the killer and the survivor have roughly the same objective. There could still be gens / escapes and killing, but the focus of the game would be mostly on the chase. This would pressure survivors into learning the game and push those who want to play casually into lower ranks while also helping alleviate the massive amount of stress and anxiety killers have. It's also very hard, near impossible, to balance the current objectives since they are so different from one another.

One way I would propose to achieve this is to reduce map size, reduce generator distance, decrease generator speed, decrease safe pallets and tiles, and increase unsafe pallets and mindgame tiles. Things like flashlight saves or otherwise stunning the killer while they are picking up / carrying survivors could be rewarded with lots of rank and blood points. Perks on the survivor side could be tweaked to help fellow survivors with the chase, and perks on the killer side could be tweaked to keep the other survivors from helping. Survivor gameplay should be focused on bolstering other survivors in order to survive the trial while killer gameplay should be focused on keeping the survivors separated and thus weak.

This would be a massive undertaking and I doubt it's even possible, but I hope some of the ideas I shared resonate among the playerbase and the devs to hopefully get them thinking a little more outside the box and offer up new and creative ways to keep this game fresh for older players while also attracting newer players.