http://dbd.game/killswitch
What I've learned from DBD style games/Theory Crafting the perfect asymmetrical horror game
Disclaimer: This is a long opinionated rant formatted like a technical analysis. Treat it accordingly. Also this is an analysis of the genre as a whole rather than just DBD in particular. The "perfect asymmetrical game" I'm eventually concluding is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is Dead By Daylight.
I've played quite a bit of Dead By Daylight, and have also played a few similar games, specifically Deathgarden: Bloodhunt, Identity V and Hide or Die.
I've always felt like none of these games properly nailed the core concept behind the style of gamplay, with Deathgarden: Bloodhunt coming the closest. So here's an analysis on what works and what doesn't from the Survivor PoV and the Killer PoV in terms of game design:
Survivor
The first and most important thing is with the ideal type of objective. Specifically, I mean whatever it is you are doing when the Killer isn't chasing you or occupying you indirectly in some way.
In my experience, the most enjoyable of these objectives involve moving around the map. Collecting Lanterns in the moonrise event, finding totems, moving between blood collection points in deathgarden, collecting gas cans in Hide or Die ect. While more static objectives can get boring. Gens, Ciphers in Identity V, Waiting in the circle of gens in Hide or Die ect.
Last year also has a lot of dynamic objectives, where most of what you are doing is transporting objects from point A to point B. This ends up meaning that most of the objective time is spend by travel time rather than by preforming channels, which should ideally never be longer than 20 seconds and the shorter you can make them the better.
I've felt that Deathgarden nailed this aspect the best, with lots of traversal involved in the objective, no channel takes longer than 5 seconds and plenty to do while you are delivering blood, the main objective, such as destroying drones, marking objects (more on that), and using your vambrace to assist in chases ect.
Next is chase dynamics. I'll have more details below but Survivor's toolsets should be based primarily around burst movement while the Killers is more around stable movement.
Dead By Daylight tries to accomplish this with Windows and Pallets, and how they create selective walls that Survivors but not Killers can pass through. However pretty much every game in this genre besides DBD and Identity V instead uses some kind of stamina system. You get to move at top speed where you are faster than the Killer for a limited time, and then the Killer can very quickly catch back up to you and down you.
Exhaustion perks are a decent example of this in DBD. However, this brings me to something else. Chases should never be long. Regardless of who wins their chase, they should win it quickly. For Survivors that means they use their burst of speed to break line of sight and get back into hiding. For Killers that means downing the Survivor.
In Dead By Daylight, Last Year and Identity V this is not the case. For DBD and Identity V your goal in the chase is to stall the Killer for as long as possible. Regardless of how balanced this is, that style of gameplay is inevitably extremely frustrating to play against, and inevitably removes any sense of fear from the game. It additionally means you rarely exit a chase alive unless the Killer deliberately leaves you for whatever reason. Sure it happens occasionally, but it's far less common than the alternative. For Last Year you can straight up Kill the Killer. Which is so far removed that I'm not even going to really get into it. For now lets just say that it makes Last Year a fundamentally different kind of game.
This is why I so often feel like Scratchmarks are a terrible mechanic. They are the reason why it's so hard to go from "I'm being chased" to "I'm hiding". This is also why Drones in Deathgarden are so contentious.
In Deathgarden and Hide or Die this is not the case. The Killer can and will get you and will get you fast if the chase lasts any reasonable amount of time, the Survivor's only chance is to immediately get out of there and go back into hiding ASAP. This is especially the case in Deathgarden due to it's low time to kill, too low even. The Survivor has a chance to escape in the first place because they are initially even faster than the Killer is, using stamina to create distance temporarily much like you do with Windows in DBD, only wherever.
Third, there is what happens to Survivors that get caught. This is actually where I think Hide or Die did it the best. Downing a Survivor in that game instantly puts them in a coffin where they must be rescued, and if rescued both the rescuer and the rescued Survivor go invisible and intangible for a brief moment. Camping simply isn't an issue since it's extremely risky if the Survivor manages to get past you.
The system isn't perfect but it does at least address some parts that both DBD/Identity V and Deathgarden mess up on.
Dead By Daylight/Identity V both have the downing process act as a time sink for the Killer. It's not enough to just down them, they must then be manually hooked.
Meanwhile, Deathgarden has the opposite problem of making recycling pretty much meaningless for the Survivors and consume no time whatsoever.
Hide or Die's system of instant coffins and easy but manual escapes means downs create pressure unlike in deathgarden, aren't a chore unlike DBD and doesn't encourage toxic behavior on the Killers part.
However, there is still the issue of how being the player in time out is simply not fun or engaging. Obviously it's necessary for Dead By Daylight in particular. But there are ways to create pressure that don't necessarily involve a forced time out.
For example, going back to the objective thing, what if being downed required you to do some secondary objective first prior to getting back to the primary objective instead of just doing nothing for awhile. Just spit-balling here, but the point is that ideally there'd be a middle ground used.
There's also the idea that failure should have relatively lasting consequences in addition to the immediate consequences. For example, in dead by daylight once you are unhooked, you also need to be healed rather than being able to just go right back into the action. And in Hide or Die your max health decreases with each coffin. This is a weakness of Deathgarden due to how quickly you can heal up damage between chases and how being downed just results in you re-spawning with no meaningful downside beyond needing to recollect your bolts which takes like a second.
The ultimate result is that as the game goes on, it becomes harder and harder to make progress towards your objective, creating an invisible timer until escape becomes impossible.
Finally, there is teamplay. This can go hand in hand with the consequences of failure. But long story short, Teamplay should not be able to negate the consequences of being downed. That is to say, you have Hiding -> Chase -> Downed -> Recovery -> Hiding.... and so on as the gameplay loop. Allies interfering with the Hiding, Chase or Recovery portion of that loop is mostly fine, however the Downed part, the time between the down and the hook in DBD terms, being interfered with is just asking for problems to pop up. DBD has examples of this with flashlights and sabo squads and Deathgarden had a problem with this in the form of "revive squads".
In general, regardless of how balanced it is, interfering with the Killer's interactions with a downed Survivor will end up feeling like bullying and won't ultimately improve the game.
Now, as for those other 3 stages we have potential. The recovery stage is obvious since Dead By Daylight does this well for the most part, with you needing allies to unhook you and heal you. The healing portion in particular being an objective that requires a lot of movement and searching rather than just channeling, which as established is a good thing. Unhooking other Survivors is also a satisfying process regardless of all the various issues surrounding it.
Similarly freeing Survivors from cages in hide or die is a similarly satisfying experience just with less issues surrounding it, however hide or die has no team based recovery process for wounded Survivors, so it's weaker in that sense.
It's clear that having Survivors help each other recover post-failure is satisfying and healthy so long as the Killer is able to secure that failure in the first place
Deathgarden has no recovery phase in general, but shows the potential in teamplay with the chase and hiding process, with other Survivors being able to lay down smokes screens, heal allies from a distance, apply positive status effects such as shields and speed boosts ect. All of this carries risk since the Killer can see you and in Deathgarden he has a ranged weapon.
The amount of teamplay Deathgarden has in chases is probably too much. But it shows the general idea behind it as valid beyond bodyblocking in DBD.
Since the hiding phase is just a lull period to contrast moments of excitement in the game, teamplay here is unnecessary beyond as recovery I mentioned earlier. More on that in a second. However, one thing that is very important that DBD does poorly that pretty much every other equivalent does much better is communication. Allies should share information, so having all Survivors see each others aura's at all times is a must at the very least.
Killer
Unlike with Survivors that have the whole 4 phase dynamic I mentioned, the Killer will end up spending the vast majority of the game doing one of 2 things. Either chasing or searching for a Survivor to chase. The chasing portion being the more interesting of the 2.
So thus there are 2 important tools the Killers need to have:
A - Anti-immersion Tracking tools
and
B - Out of chase movement speed
Now, that out of chase speed doesn't strictly HAVE to be disallowed outside of said chase, however it's very important that the Killer is able to quickly get from one end of the map to the other. The lack of this in the Killers basekit is one of the reasons why gen speeds are such a problem in DBD, and are why blood delivery speed isn't so much of a problem in Deathgarden despite blood delivery being faster than gens.
Going hand in hand with that is tracking. Killers need to be able to find Survivors in order to start chases. Once a chase has started all bets are off however. They need to be able to find a Survivor, but the Survivor doesn't need to stay found.
In Deathgarden this is done by a combination of Drones existing, and blood delivery being telegraphed. If Survivors do the objective then they are revealed at that moment allowing the Killer to start a chase. This is done to a lesser extent in DBD with the noises generators make, and how you can use gen kicking to mark gens as untouched if you come back later and see sparks. Scratchmarks can also help with this as much as I dislike their use in chases.
Ultimately though, something along the lines of whispers is required to find the Survivors that are NOT doing the objective. Deathgarden uses Drones for these, however their precision among other things makes them extremely annoying to deal with from a Survivor PoV. Hide or Die meanwhile uses dark sight, the same thing it uses for out of chase mobility, to handle this problem. In Dead By Daylight this is handled by perk and power effects such as Whispers, Spies from the Shadows and powers like the Doctors and Legions.
These types of abilities ensure action is continuously being kick-started in one way or another.
Next, once a Survivor is found there is the chase. The exact dynamics depend on the specifics of the Killer kit of course, but ultimately you are after Survivors who as mentioned above are ideally trying to be as unpredictable as possible in order to lose you. That means your goal as Killer is to ensure that doesn't work by out-predicting them thus not losing track of them.
Additionally this means trying to cut them off in whatever way you can. While this isn't so important in Deathgarden, this is the cornerstone of chases in DBD/Identity V and Hide or Die, and we all know the kinds of mindgames Killers have to do in chases to make the Survivors mess up and run where the Killer can easily follower. That particular aspect of DBD's chase is good. In Hide or Die it could use some work, however the mechanics to enable it are all there too.
Ultimately though, the biggest problem with chases in DBD that Hide or Die and Deathgarden fix in their games is the consiquences of messing up as the Killer. In DBD you get a super long chase, which just prolongs the failure while taunting the player with potential success in front of them. Meanwhile in Hide or Die and Deathgarden, failure typically means losing the Survivor and starting again from step 1. This still doesn't feel great of course, nor does it need to, but it's a lot less frustrating and doesn't make you feel like you are being taunted and want to bash your face into the keyboard.
To this end, a Killer should have far more in chase mobility than a Survivor (baring those limited burst movement options I already mentioned in the Survivor section) allowing them to catch up quickly, at the cost of limited tracking options making it easy to lose the Survivor if you aren't careful.
The end result is that chases are quick and decisive. Combine that with the tracking tools you DO have being specialized for starting chases in the first place and with moving quickly between chases means you end up bouncing around between all of the Survivors continuously and quickly, with the Survivors constantly cycling between Hiding and Chases with Recovery mixed in if the Killer succeeds.
As mentioned above downing Survivors shouldn't cause a time crunch for the Killer. That means whatever the consequence of downing a Survivor is, should just happen on down with no further interference on the Killers part. That consequence shouldn't immediately just be death, although eventually it would be, but the downing phase really doesn't need to be anything in particular beyond a dying animation.
You may have noticed that I didn't bring up game stall beyond in the form of pressure from the Survivors recovery stage, and that's because if you've done all of this right and balanced it properly then you won't need much built in stall.
If the objective is Dynamic then Survivors won't mind preforming it for an extended period of time, so the base objective time doesn't need to be super short, but even then it can afford to be short because the Killer will be constantly bouncing between players. Stall is necessary for balance in DBD but that's a consequence of the games flaws moreso than anything. Hide or DIe and Deathgarden don't need much for stall due to lacking those particular issues.
general
There is one thing Dead By Daylight has over the other games I've mentioned here, something it does so much better that it's probably a big reason why it's the most popular game in the sub-genre by far. And that is the games customization.
Dead By Daylight has high power perks and lots of variety and synergy. Say what you want about recent perk design, but they've nailed the fundamental system completely.
Something to note about perks is that they:
A - Have a clear moment of power
B - Enable a new play-style or abilty
C - Act as a synergy piece to round out a build
D - A combination of the above
or
E - Be completely #########
Comparing most Dead By Daylight perks to Hide or die perks or Deathgarden perks makes it clear how much better DBD's perks are.
For example here are all of Inked's perks in Deathgarden:
- Staying Alive - Increased time before Bleedout when Downed
- Cling Wrap - Increased Wall Cling time
- Damage dodger - Take less damage while evading
- Deliver Master - While actively delivering and within 1 second of delivering Blood, you and all others within 15m take less damage
- Keep Hanging On - Take less damage while Climbing
- Resting - Increased Stamina regeneration while stopped and Crouching
Notice how they are all just status boosts besides Deliver Master.
Meanwhile if you look at Stranger Things, a Chapter that people have cited as having very underwhelming perks. Every single one of the perks added a unique ability or effect of some kind. Strong or not, they were unique and had some kind of flashy moment where it would DO something.
Perks give you powers in Dead by Daylight and Enable playstyles, not just enhancing them. This is a BIG part of what gives Dead by Daylight so much replay value. Messing around with new interesting builds is one of the reasons this game has succeeded as well as it did.
The fact that Addons don't tend to be like this is why they are often cited as boring. If they aren't bringing something unique to the table then there really is no point most of the time.
Take this perk that I got by literally taking a perk at random: Hangmans trick. The perk has 2 effects, both of which have a clear function of when they are supposed to help you and neither of them are enhancements on basekit abilities.
That's not to say that perks that enhance basekit abilities don't exist. Botany Knowledge and Brutal Strength come to mind. But they are in the minority and their versatility and easy of use often causes them to create synergies with other more interesting perks such as how Botany interacts with Self Care.
As for powers, they serve the same purpose. However while DBD did a great job with the perk system and with the kind of Killer powers they make (again, balance aside) they completely neglected Survivor powers. While it would be far too late to try implementing them now, games like Identity V and Deathgarden prove that the core premise is sound and has the same effect it does with Killer powers.
So What does the ideal ASYMMETRICAL horror game look like?
Since I'm not currently trying to design a DBD style game, I can only give so much detail. However I will at least TRY to paint a rough picture:
So first things first. Objectives.
Survivors should be attempting to bring a set of objects from point A to point B, where there are several point A's and several point B's such that the Killer needs to patrol between them.
The Survivors could have a limited inventory to carry items, including the objective items but also things like medkits ect. Items aren't finite but have to be manually collected.
In a Chase Survivors can Dash around a few times, but have to start walking to regain Dash's. Killers meanwhile move much faster than Survivors, say imagine them being 125% MS typically and the Survivors don't have a pallet equivalent but do have Window equivalents. The maps are mazelike similar to DBD's indoor maps to allow for constant LoS jukes and creative routing.
The Killer wouldn't have access to scratchmarks and thus would need to primarily rely on sound to track the Survivors directly and use Prediction to get more precise while LoS is broken.
Being downed results in the Survivor losing all of their items, permanently reducing their inventory size and requiring them to be healed before they can pick up items again. Healing would require an item such as the medkit, thus the recovery process would involve finding a different Survivor, having THAT Survivor find a medkit and then use it on the incapacitated (but not immobilized) Survivor.
An incapacitated Survivor could go briefly invisible for a time (like 5 seconds) so the Killer can't just follow them everywhere.
That means Survivors that have been downed are less effective at doing the objective in an interesting way giving weight to failure without necessarily preventing them from doing anything, even if they can only move.
If this happens too many times then the Survivor instead just dies.
The Killer would have a basekit whispers effect and a speedboost while no Survivors are nearby, not counting incapacitated Survivors that the Killer can't interact with.
Both Killers and Survivors would have special abilities to augment their play-style. With Survivor powein rs generally acting as essentially "soulbound" items that aren't lost or consumed with unique effects like marking the Killers location, creating temporary walls, granting a temporary speed boost, ect ect ect lots of potential ideas, see Identity V for a lot of examples of what these kinds of powers could look like.
Killer powers of course would be like in Dead By Daylight only rebalanced with everything I've said so far mind.
Once enough of the objective objects have been delivered the exit opens and the Survivors can leave.
Survivors win if enough of the Survivors escape
Killer wins if he Kills enough of the Survivors to make that impossible, or if he incapacitates all Survivors simultaneously.
If one of these conditions are met the game immediately ends and scores are tallied.
Each player can equip 4 Main perks, 3 secondary perks and 2 power augments. Main perks are the payoff perks and playstyle enablers. Think Surge, PGTW, We'll Make it or Head On for examples in DBD. Secondary perks would be the Synergy perks such as Surveillance, Nemesis, Botony or Blood Pact. Not necessarily weaker, but they wouldn't have to stand on their own merits alone. And power augments are just addons since otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have something alter specific powers in particular.
I'm putting more slots than DBD and categorizing them simply because categorized slots makes it not feel bad to use the more boring perks and because if the synergy perks are counted separately then you can run more of the interesting payoff perks at the same time for exponentially more choices to make.
These perks should be high power and be a big part of what abilities each player has and how they play much like powers.
All of these would probably end up being my ideal DBD style game.
Now as for you guys, anything here you disagree with? Anything to add with regards to my theory crafted "perfect DBD system"?
Comments
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Populous is the perfect asymmetrical horror game.
TREMBLE, FOOLISH MORTALS, BEFORE MY DIVINE MIGHT! *Deletes all the land on the map*
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Well #########. Why'd I even bother making this thread when the answer was so simple all along!
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