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DBD Could Be Great, But...

Waffleyumboy
Waffleyumboy Member Posts: 7,318
in General Discussions

I decided to create a thread about the pros and cons of dbd, and maybe start a discussion on what issues are most important and ways to go about fixing them.

Pros:

  • Diverse cast of survivors and perks to choose from
  • Multiple unique and interesting killers and powers
  • Horror tropes and icons represented
  • Intense gameplay with a distinctly suspenseful tone
  • Lots of cosmetic options for customization
  • Interactive and involved development team
  • Fun party game with friends

Now we get into the downsides of dbd, I decided to put 5 problems from each side here. I’ll start with survivor.

Repetitive Gameplay

Dead by Daylight is notorious for being extremely casual and boring for survivors. Most of the game is spent holding m1 on generators with a couple skill checks to keep you alert. The skill checks aren’t challenging at all and require little focus and you need not pay attention to your surroundings because the Terror Radius will notify you of the Killer’s approach. Overall, finishing the objective is a grindy hassle with little thought required to perform. To fix this, the best approach would be to reduce gen times, perhaps to 60 seconds, and to add a second objective that is more engaging, interactive, and strategic. Some examples might be flipping power switches as generators are powered, searching for fuses to put into fuse boxes, or refueling generators with gas cans.

Helplessness

Survivors spend a lot of time in a helpless state and this is the Killer’s way of applying pressure. So basically, if the Killer is playing better then the survivors are having less fun. Survivors remain trapped while hooked or downed and often can do nothing about it. There are few ways to address this problem and it is likely to remain a feature of the game. To the credit of the developers, they have done a good job of reducing this time spent in a helpless state as much as possible while still allowing the Killer to apply pressure. A good fix would be to reduce the power of strategies that leave individual survivors helpless like camping and tunneling, perhaps through a camping indicator if the killer stays by the hook for 15 seconds or allowing survivors brief invulnerability after being unhooked(3 seconds tops) that isn’t active after all generators have been powered.

Lack of Variety

There are only so many unique synergies and strategies with the perks and items survivors have, and other than that everything is the same. The play styles do not even differ much between most of these strategies. Each survivor is the exact same in capabilities despite their different canonical capabilities. This leads right into our next point btw. To fix this just give survivors unique perk variations, items, or add ons in their bloodwebs that create new synergies and unique play styles and that should do the trick.

Misrepresentation

The killers you face as a survivor don’t feel like they do in the movies. The Demogorgon is supposed to be an unstoppable monster but it is stunned by pallets the same as any other killer and has an over reliance on add ons to make good use of his portals for map pressure and his Shred is weak enough to need add ons but there are no add ons that improve its shred nor will you have room to use them in tangent with portal add ons. Overall, facing Demogorgon isn’t a unique experience because of how weak its shred and portals are. Never mind that his perks don’t synergize well with him and most are pretty weak. Meyers is supposed to be a creepy killer who will appear and kill you at any moment but without perks he is a noisy killer at his most powerful state. This is unnecessary and is a misrepresentation of the character. Overall, the most iconic killers all feel the same even though they are supposed to be the most unique and lethal. To fix this just buff individual killers to be on par with the likes of Nurse and Spirit basekit.

Solo Queue

Solo queue is famously known as a much worse experience than swf. In swf, you can trust your teammates to work on the objective and try to help everyone escape. In solo queue, your teammates will often farm you or leave you to die. They also are unreliable at completing objectives and waste time hiding around the map. There is also a lack of information that swf on comms has, which means solos facing killers prepared to face swf don’t stand a chance.


Now we move on to killers. There are a couple more mechanical things amiss here.

Game Balance

Survivors have the advantage because of the resources given on most maps, against a majority of killers. The obvious fix is to buff individual killers and fix maps.

Helplessness

While it’s nice that survivors usually have a slim chance of making it out of any bad situation, it can make Killers feel helpless when against survivors who use these chances to eliminate the Killer’s pressure throughout the trial. The best fix would be to punish survivors for their mistakes more, maybe 5% reduced gen speed each time you are hooked. This means that killers who apply good pressure early can convert it into trial-long pressure no matter what the survivors do. This also discourages tunneling because it’s more efficient to make survivors live with their penalty than it is to hunt them down and chase them again. It would also be nice to reduce the synergy between different second chance opportunities survivors have like Unbreakable and Decisive Strike, perhaps by reducing your dying recovery speed while Decisive Strike is active.

Toxicity

The community is toxic for both sides, but survivors can group up on killers to bully them. I don’t know how this could be fixed.

Misrepresentation

Playing as the Cannibal should feel like a senseless savage capable of cutting down survivors with ease but he has the worst chase tool in the game and spends most of his time hanging out in the basement with hooked survivors. Most killers feel poorly designed, like Legion who has no chase tools at all and a weird style of play involving inflicting Deep Wounds on multiple survivors instead of downing them and applying real pressure. This can be fixed with individual killer tweaks and reworks.

Repetitive Gameplay and Difficulty

Playing Killer often feels like chase after chase, and what’s worse is that each chase is just walking around map structures waiting to catch up to the survivors. Playing Killer is extremely stressful and difficult because you are responsible for managing the entire map and survivor team and you have no assistance whatsoever. These can be fixed by making more unique loops and map structures that are engaging and unique, such as an apartment building fire escape where you must predict which drops the survivor will take, treacherous mountain terrain with varying heights where you can climb on rocks or take ski lifts, or even just an elaborate mansion with a unique maze-like layout allowing you to loop between two rooms or hallways and pieces of furniture with different stories and an elevator or stairs and unique tiles such as a loop with doorways as LOS blockers or with bookshelves you can interact with to make them slide out of your way. As for the difficulty, a second objective will give you more time and different things to do and overall make playing Killer less stressful.


There’s everything major I thought of. Feel free to discuss anything I missed or solutions to the problems I pointed out. If you want to discuss my ideas as well, that would be awesome.

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