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Balance, Game Design, and more on DbD

Austin
Austin Member Posts: 41
in General Discussions

Preface: I have played Dead by Daylight since 2016, over 4k Hours in total, sat through 75 pallet Blood Lodge, Double Pallet Jungle Gyms, and every terrible decision BHVR has made. (Does anyone else remember when BHVR added in animation queue'ing for Killer? Thanks BHVR! This quickly got reverted.) BHVR has made a lot of terrible decisions and I've heard a lot of rumors and I'm going to talk about a lot of this here. There may also be some slight bias here as I do like Killer more than Survivor. But both roles have been pretty bad recently.


Hey there to whoever reads this, if you care or don't care, thanks for stopping by. his is just going to be a long discussion about balance and game design and even more various topics on DbD. It's sat on me for a while, but I figured it'd be best to actually sit and discuss this with the release of patch 4.1.0 in DbD. This patch has brought in some really questionable balance decisions and game design decisions in general. 

I think the first thing I want to touch base on is Knock Out, a perk mostly used to try to give yourself an advantage but ends of failing since you go against groups in most occasions (because solo queue survivors are the epitome of how an actual rank 20 is somehow rank 1 just because they played the game for an entire week). This is a perk that was in an okay spot, not the greatest obviously, but then they "buffed" it. What BHVR calls a buff is usually in most cases an actual nerf. Since they changed it from being anytime a survivor is downed by any sort of attack to be on ONLY Mouse 1/Basic Attack hits, for whatever reason.d They also added for 15 seconds the survivor crawls 50% slower? Most survivors nowadays(since soloq is abysmal) don't even crawl to good places, or if they do crawl it's to the edge of the map so the Killer can't find them! Or away from a pallet, for whatever reason? And now the Survivor is also blinded for the time. This doesn't accomplish anything since survivors(who are grouped) can just be like, "Hey I'm over at x location". This isn't that good of a "buff" cause the blindness does nothing, the slow is pretty worthless, and now only basic attacks?

Aura Refactoring(Aura Changes): Behaviour? Do we test changes at all or what. It's horrid and I understand we want to fix some issues revolving around auras in general, but what in the world are these? On extreme distances, auras are extremely hard to see and it's a core mechanic on the game, so I don't know what to even say other than change it.

LeatherFace Changes: It isn't that hard to know that LF wasn't the best pick when compared to that of Hillbilly, Nurse, and obviously other killers. But I do feel these changes do put him in a more solid place to actually get him to be played more.

Hillbilly Changes: Base Kit Billy was perfectly fine and McLean preached it for a very long time he would've tried to keep them from changing his kit. Sadly he lost the battle with the overheat mechanic. It's not the worse and makes almost no downsides to really play with him. Only real people really really complaining are those "Crack" Billy mains who say playing as it takes a lot of skill when in reality it's just a pubstomp and doesn't deserve to be in the game.

Game Design: Going off of the topic of how McLean lost the battle and they were putting in the overheat mechanic, I've heard various things from many sources (and someone on reddit even said so which can be found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/comments/hzfu94/patch_notes_410_midchapter/fzjhdxx/

Basically what is happening is that the new game designers are trying to make things rather than let the people who actually breathed life into DbD make and balance the game. And it does seem these new game designers are making Killers which are yet again going ahead and giving the one sided playstyle of: Killers have fun and Survivors don't. I obviously don't agree with this as I believe the game should be fun for both sides. They don't seem to know how to actually try to balance it. And yes before there are comments or replies, I know it's asymmetrical, I know it's 4v1, and I know it will never truly be balanced. But I still think Behaviour should do a sweep over everything in the game (not with the new game designers personally, as it seems they would just make some more unfun mechanics) and actually make balance changes as a whole and convert things to be in a live-service aspect since that's what it seems they're striving for.

Management: I've heard things that their resources are all over the place and things are really tense? I don't really believe that, but I do feel there is mismanagement occurring as like I suggested there should be a big balance sweep across everything in the game. Being honest, I've said this and preached this a bunch across a median of channels, BHVR should form a different team to create the game from the ground up in order to have everything work better in general rather than having everything just run off of the same spaghetti code. Because what in the world could cause this:

https://twitter.com/rayoxium/status/1288195284112216065?s=20 

https://twitter.com/The_Farmer_John/status/1288259448356704258?s=20


https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/comments/hzp103/when_the_nea_is_toxic_so_you_gotta_shut_her_down/

https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/comments/hzp7o0/this_new_bubba_buff_is_a_bit_much/


Anyways, if you read this all. Feel free to ask me what I think of X thing or what I think BHVR should do. Should any dev read this(which they may or may not), it's not to be mean I'm really sorry if it does come off that way, but jesus the things I read I see a lot of praise and a lot of hate. Both are just earned purely because of how this game is functioning right now and it really sucks. Feel free to reach out to me anyone from BHVR.

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