General Constructive Critique of 4.5.0
Animations
I like the fluidity of the new transitional animations (ex. turning on the heel, falling into the dying state)! I think that they add a nice touch of realism. However, I think that it's a bit jarring to see the survivors standing so upright because they don't feel very scared of the killer anymore. The new injured animations don't quite convey the "injured" look that the old injured animation did, with the limping. I'd go so far as to say that aside from the survivor holding a hand to their stomach, it looks a bit hard to distinguish from the usual running animation.
New crawling-into-Hatch animation is, ah... realistic, and a bit ridiculous. I like it.
The Nurse
Beautiful design. This is an all-around positive change from her old design, and it looks more like an outfit appropriate to the time period than a costume now. I'll always miss the classic Nurse design, but this is a welcome change! Props to the designers!
Status Effect Timers + Hook Timers
I'm not colorblind, but I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I can't see the timer well. I don't feel like red-on-red is a good color scheme to quickly convey important information at a glance; perhaps red on black would be a better fit?
The hook timer faces a similar visibility issue, albeit for different reasons. I feel like this could be fixed by having the timer shrink, like in the older UI.
New Skins
The Demogorgon skin is disgusting, and in a good way. It looks like mold draped over infection. I know that a number of people are disappointed that it doesn't look very exciting, which I understand. This isn't something that I have a very strong opinion on. Aesthetics aside, the textures are pretty gnarly!
The Nancy skin is 10/10. Not much to say, this one's just plain cute.
HUD
Despite the few weeks I've had to get used to this, I haven't warmed up to the new HUD. What benefit we can derive from the new UI (ex. hook counters for survivors, identifying who's playing which survivor) is swept away by poor implementation. Rather than having the information consolidated into one or two corners, information is now spread across the screen. Unfortunately, has been counterintuitive. Instead of giving a quick glance in one direction to derive a lot of essential info, players now have to split their attention across a multitude of places. Although the newly added "scratch" across an injured survivor's portrait is a positive change from just glowing red, it negates the addition of survivor portraits in the first place because both the scratch and the red glow heavily obscure the survivor.
Another concern that I share with a majority of the community is that the new HUD is a stylistic split from the grittiness we've come to know and love from Dead by Daylight. The old HUD possessed this style in its portraits of the survivors, which had the added bonus of clearly conveying information -- who was injured, who was healthy (albeit without being shown who's playing which survivor). The new HUD feels too clean and "cheap", like a mobile game. The negatives vastly outweigh the positives.
Misc.
Unfortunately, I don't feel that I've played enough of the new maps to give valid critique. That being said, I'm adoring the Clown's new bottle sloshing animation, Survivor chase music, sound effects! This has been a very good update for the Clown overall. I wasn't on board with Clown's new bottle effects at first, but I'm really liking them now!
Conclusions
We as players appreciate the hard work that goes into Dead by Daylight, but we're concerned that our feedback is being dismissed. There's been a shared community sentiment that it's almost like we're looked down on as not being knowledgeable enough to know what's actually good for us. There's been very little visible change since the PTB despite overwhelming player feedback. We feel like these things are being pushed through no matter what we say, and that the PTB is given to us as a finished preview, as opposed to a play test to see what needs to be changed before the live release -- this has been the case for a few patches now, particularly since the Twins were released onto live servers with more bugs than they had on the PTB. I can't imagine that it's easy to read through people bashing changes that you implemented, but our frustration is rooted in a deep love for this game that we want to see changed for the better.
We know the developers are capable of changing their minds and listening to player feedback; the recent Object of Obsession and Decisive Strike concepts are proof of that! But, we can't understand why we were ignored in regards to this update. There's been little to no response, especially regarding the HUD.
If any developers or mods read through my critique, may I ask why this HUD went through, despite player feedback?
Thank you for reading.