BREAKABLE WALLS—HOW TO IMPLEMENT SOONER

PyroGL

Repost from the General Forums

After the announcement of breakable walls being added to DBD, I’ve had mixed feelings about them as a fairly equal survivor/killer player. Obviously, any existing map that adds a breakable wall will be a straight killer buff, unless a larger map rework is done at the same time. Given that map reworks take a lot of time and resources, it seems reasonable to expect the implementation of breakable walls into much requested areas of the game to be a very slow process. That being said, I think there may be a way to add them in that is hopefully not so killer sided, but also ultimately addresses some of the egregiously “exploited” or “safe” areas on certain maps.

The Issue-- For starters, I think that breakable walls, as they exist on the PTB are very boring and killer-favored.  In essence, they are a pre-thrown pallet that always spawns, and that survivors cannot use as a vault. This basically means that Killers can (and will) break these walls long before a survivor even gets to that area, making previously safe areas completely unsafe. This kind of interaction happens all the time in DBD with regular pallets, but only after survivor players choose to throw pallets (i.e use the finite resources of the map). With breakable walls, this interaction may not occur and is completely at the killer’s discretion, denying survivors of a resource without them even getting the chance to take advantage of it. Additionally, as another, minor side issue, there does not seem to be any good visual indication of what walls are breakable.

So to address these issues, here is the basic idea:

1)     Breakable walls are added on select tiles that are deemed appropriate (think the infamous Ironworks window).

2)     At the start of the trial, the wall is not able to be broken.

3)     The wall is tied to trigger as breakable once a survivor has vaulted a window on that tile a certain number of times (1 or 2 at most probably) while in a chase.

4)     The Entity assists the killer by weakening the wall, with an audible cracking sound, and a red aura of where the break is located. 

5)     The killer has 20-30 seconds to break the wall, thus permanently making the tile “unsafe”. The visual indication of this timer could be as simple as a pulsing of the red aura getting faster and faster until ultimately disappearing altogether.

6)     If the timer expires, the killer will need to chase another survivor through the tile again to retrigger the Entity’s assistance.

The goal of this idea would be to allow survivors to still use the safety of existing tiles, but turn it into a resource that can be used up. Current methods to address “infinites” such as bloodlust, 3 vault limit on windows, and bamboozle have proved not to be very effective, or at least take far too long to capitalize on. I am thinking that this idea could be used temporarily until larger scale map reworks are done, but should hopefully be simple enough to implement so breakable walls could make their debut a lot sooner.  

I’d be interested to hear if this sounds fair to both killer and survivor players, and how challenging it would be to add to the game.

EDIT-- As an aside, after listing to OhTofu's latest podcast, I found that we both equated breakable walls to a "pre-thrown pallet"; I promise I didn't steal his interpretation.

Milo

This looks good. The only thing i can't understand it the time limit on point 5).