What happened to the "pallet budget" on reworked maps? (reworking loops with pallets)
During the third year anniversary livestream, the level design team described how map reworks were going to adjust pallet loops to make them more equitable by making them smaller, but more numerous. However, after springwood was reworked with this in mind... it seems that idea was abandoned, because none of the loops on any of the new maps seem smaller. If anything they seem larger, and more numerous.
The video begins at the conversation referenced above:
I worry this interview below is giving me an answer...?
"It's kind of chaotic right now but we're embracing that now. We used to rebel against it and fight back and try to balance everything and make sure that everything works perfectly with everything else and at some point - i think the switch happened probably two years ago or something - we just looked at it and went there's so many characters now. There's so many killers, so many survivors, so many perks that there is no human way [to balance]. Like, maybe some google super ai thing could make sense of it all but for mere humans like us it's just... it's... it's a beautiful waltz of chaos and you have to enjoy it for what it is... and just jump in and get surprised, and get, you know, sort of get lost in the chaos."
Comments
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Nothing happen the dev cant respect what they say they were supose to remove infinite but instead they put a breakable wall like that its the killer who need to remove it
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Oof. That second interview... that's not what I wanted to hear regarding the state of balance. Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. To some extent, yes, it's inevitable, and universal balance becomes a harder thing to achieve with every new kind of power, perk and interaction they add - but I would hate to see future map design dictated by a sort of shrug and a 'well, ranged killers, Nemesis, and Pyramid Head can handle this, and anti-loop perks exist for everyone else, so this is okay' regarding extremely powerful loops. Especially not when the last map we got was RCPD, and that... yeah. Uh. It's a lot.
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Yeah, it makes the future of this game seemingly bleak. I hope they choose to go a difference direction.
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More future updates designed to further tip the balance in favour of survivors. Can't say I'm surprised.
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To be fair "The Realm Beyond" is graphical Reworks. It was already a surprise that Ormond received Balance Changes (which is basically, more Pallets, but more unsafe Loops).
In general, as long as Bloodlust exists, shorter Loops but more of them will not work out, to achieve this, Bloodlust needs to go away.
Personally, I would prefer Maps with a small amount of safe Pallets and a huge amount of unsafe Pallets with Bloodlust gone. However, I doubt that this will happen anytime soon. If it will ever happen, because we know from the last experiment that Killers want to keep their Bloodlust and most Survivors are not able to play unsafe Pallets. And as long as those things dont change, I doubt that anything will happen, since they balance for the majority of players, and those are not great at the game.
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You can't trust anything BHVR says to be honest. They say one thing and then do the exact opposite. When they reworked the maps they not only loaded them with pallets they made sure as many of them as possible were safe and able to be looped infinitely forcing the killer to break the pallet. It's just one more reason why killer is by no means the power role in this game. Survivors run the show. Full stop.
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Cote's not someone you want to listen to if you want honesty or integrity, save moments of lucidity where he says stuff like "play a different game"
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It's sad because there's a lot of games that are more graphically and mechanically intense, that have wayyyy more characters and items, and they get balanced just fine for the most part. It's lazyness. Like I get that you may not have the know how to do these things, but there's other people that do. Either learn it or get someone who knows how to do it.
Instead, you tried, had a little bit of trouble and just gave up and said whatever happens, happens. Instead of balancing the game their just like, "Too hard. Let's focus on releasing chapters that make us money and break the game further."
It's laziness and zero care for the actual game itself.
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Exactly this. Maps are swarming with pallets now.
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Pallets should be like 25 meters apart and randomly generated, because they keep saying that the pallets are random but Survivors seem to know where they are 100% of the time. Since they are so close together
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This philosophy informed the rework for Mt. Ormond. Previously, that was the 2nd most favorable map for survivors (just under Haddonfield). They reworked it with lots of pallets, but nearly none of them are safe to keep looping after the pallet's been thrown. So, you have to keep moving and it makes chases more dynamic instead of a perpetual loop. Now, Ormond is a LOT more balanced (though it still sucks super hard for any stealth killers).
Contrast this with the reworked Meat Plant. The loops are as long or longer than before, there's a TON more pallets than before, many of the pallets are in 'must break' locations (god pallets), and a ton of added garbage has been put up to block LoS for ranged killers. It's horrible and completely abandoned the old plan.
They REALLY need to get back to the Ormond route. If you've thrown the pallet, that loop should be EXTREMELY dangerous to stick around at. And you should NEVER NEVER NEVER have 2 vaults right next to each other.
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I do not like that second video commentary. Not at all. Sure it's borderline impossible to balance the game completely, killers like Trapper will never be as strong as Nurse, and you can't balance the game around Trapper because then anything above him becomes stupidly overpowered. But there are some changes that the community has asked for a long time, but the devs take so long to do balance changes. Like, there's no way to justify why it took 5 years to make Trapper carry 2 traps as basekit, or 3 years to make Spirit fun to play against.
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So they want to embrace the chaos but at the same time they nerfed Deathslinger into the ground
Okay
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"embrace the chaos" What chaos? This is a solved game at the upper ranks consisting of W into space and playing super safe while the team hold M1 so hard it busts out the other side of their mouse and through the table...
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That’s not surprising to hear.
Meanwhile, far more complex games like League of Legends, DoTa2, Overwatch, Paladins, Siege, Counter Strike, Valorant, etc etc, have a significantly higher standard of balance.
let’s be honest, DBD has a couple handful of perks to balance around as the majority of them are essentially useless.
Killers are simple, mechanically speaking. They don’t have each a bunch of different abilities, nor do they behave in fundamentally different ways at the core of it all. The same generic framework, with mostly one ability each. Same with survivors albeit with even less to consider.
DBD is a pretty simple game from a design and balance standpoint.
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Exactly, laziness.
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Unfortunattely, I think you're right. A little bit later, or possibly earlier, in that same interview Cote criticizes "The King", "Paulie" and other players when he says "you guys invest too much time into the game". He trying to explain why he thinks some things become problematic, and he suggests (my interpretation) that playing the game too much leads to learning too much about the game, and allows you to take advantage of the developers' design flaws. This stuff makes me so frustrated to hear, because it's just pointing the finger.
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"Look, it's not our fault the game we made for your entertainment was fun. Don't enjoy it too much, or you'll end up realizing it's not just imperfect, but a heavily flawed piece of software cobbled together with superglue and gaffer's tape."
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The same thing that happened to fixing Hexes, fixing nurses bugs, fixing pallet vacuums, or not engaging in NFT scams. Theres no legally binding contract to bind them to the truth or any promises, they can lie, fib, raise false hope as much as they want. With the only consequence being lowered player faith.
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The only reason bloodlust exists is to make up for the terrible RNG map generation and map tiles. If they removed it, they'd have to also chuck half the map tiles in the trash because they'd end up as infinites.
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Yeah, and I hate to say it, but they got me on the sunk cost fallacy. Maybe that's why the grind exists?
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In the anniversary event stream I posted, they were announcing that all map reworks moving forward would have a pallet budget, with reworked loop strength. So, I'm not sure why you're saying "to be fair." This was stated well before "the realm beyond" reworks were announced. From what was said during that the anniversary event, all of the maps were implied to be slated for this "pallet budgeting", because it was around the time freddy and springwood were reworked. Springwood was basically the concept for future map design.
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Yes, but "The Realm Beyond" was announced afterwards as an purely graphical Update. In the 4th Anniversary Stream. And there were not many Maps after the initial rework of Springwood, only Hawkins (which has bad Pallets), Dead Dawg (which also has quite bad Pallets), Sanctum of Wrath (half of them are safe, other half unsafe) and Midwich (mostly unsafe Pallets). So if we dont look at the maps which should have been reworked just for graphical purpose, until RPD (which is a special case), they released Maps with mainly unsafe Pallets.
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I'm still seeing tons of pallets per area on every map.
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And its now arguably the worst map in game for killer im glad they stopped that idea
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And all of those maps (except Sanctum) and pretty hated.
Also, there's no excuse for adding the god window back to Groaning Storehouse. None.
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Pallets are a nightmare now for killers. Every map has so many, chases go on forvever while gens pop pop pop.
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The economy is crashing, the pallet inflation is real.
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Yeah, but I still don't understand how my original post is not "fair" - I mean, what does the realm beyond have to do with this? It was a graphical update announced
twoone years+(?) after the pallet budget changes were announced. The realm beyond changes likely had no bearing on level design beyond the aesthetics, like rendering of assets. Meaning that the level redesigns were likely already complete by the time the realm beyond was announced. Meaning they migrated away from they said before they announced realm beyond.0 -
Because Springwood sucks and shouldn't be used as an example for future maps.
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Springwood was the first concept for future maps. Even in springwood, there are still stupid strong pallet loops. The whole point of the post s to acknowledge that they haven't budgeted pallets in the ways they said they would.
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True. Ormond is actually a good example that was mentioned in another comment. Springwood might've worked with their idea if they nerfed the four buildings on that map lol
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Man, those buildings are the worst. It feels like haddonfield. Granted, Springwood can be fun with Hag, because people always jump out of those windows, and most people don't use balanced landing.
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As someone who plays a ton of survivor Bloodlust going away is gonna cause a disaster. Good survivors plays around the bloodlust mechanic and you can just Hold W the entire map since they have a harder time catching up not to mention the slow killers like Huntress is going to get a kick on the chin for this.
For shorter loops I think Hawkins had a lot of good ones actually. By dropping a pallet and the killer not destroying it you can make long walls to loop around with and not a lot of survivor get that idea and just think it's an unsafe pallet. It helps that there's also a ton of pallets in there so you could be creative in loops if you want to
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There's probably a higher chance of winning the lottery than there is of BHVR keeping their promises.
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