Developer Update | March 2022
It’s everyone’s favourite time of the month, reading time. We’re back with another developer update, a series of posts where we go into detail on changes coming to Dead by Daylight. This time around, we’ve got a mix of balance changes and quality of life improvements. Without further ado, let’s get this show on the road.
Patching Optimization: Part 2
At the start of the year, we announced our plan to improve patch times. Coming in two parts, the first (smaller) change launched on Steam in January, compressing the game files and improving the patch times.
We’re about to launch the second part of these changes, which will have a much larger impact than the first and affect all platforms. How does it all work?
To put it simply, the game is broken into small chunks. When something in one of these chunks changes, the whole chunk must be updated. As the game has grown over the years, so have these chunks, causing downloads to get bigger and patch times to get longer.
Starting in this Mid-Chapter, we’ve completely restructured and rebalanced these chunks. This way, you won’t have to download or patch nearly as much unnecessary data when the game updates, making patch speeds up to 200% faster.
Please note that since we’re changing the file structure of the game, you will need to completely redownload the game with the 5.7.0 update. Afterwards, all future updates will be significantly faster than before. Opting in or out of the 5.7.0 Public Test Build (PTB) will also cause a large download.
Ghost Face Update
Starting things off, we have a few changes in store for Ghost Face. First, we are increasing the duration of Ghost Face’s mark to 60 seconds (up from 45). This change gives him a longer window to follow up and get a hit after successfully stalking a Survivor and makes outlasting the Exposed effect harder for Survivors.
Second, marked Survivors are no longer able to reveal Ghost Face. While other Survivors will still be able to reveal him, running off on your own now becomes riskier, as you’ll have no choice but to evade him while he’s Undetectable (unless you manage to get a lucky stun!)
Lastly, we noticed that many of Ghost Face’s add-on have gone largely unused with a few exceptions standing out well above the rest. We always want to see a wider variety of add-ons being used, so we’ve done a pass on the majority of Ghost Face’s add-ons to bring them up to a similar power level. Here’s a few examples of what you can expect:
Legion Update
All these years later, The Legion remain one of the more frequently used Killers, and it’s easy to see why: Sometimes, you just wanna’ go fast with a knife. That’s why these changes focus on making The Legion faster and knifier than ever before.
In all seriousness, the first of our changes is centered around chaining together hits. Being able to string together multiple hits on different Survivors is something that is core to The Legion’s design, so to help them do that, we’re giving them a stacking 0.2m/s speed boost for each Survivor they hit during Feral Frenzy. This will make it easier to close the gap as you switch targets. Additionally, a fifth hit will end your frenzy and put any Survivor into the dying state, adding a satisfying payoff for chaining together hits.
Next, we’ve lowered the post-Feral Frenzy fatigue duration to 3 seconds (down from 4 seconds). The fatigue is a crucial part of The Legion’s power, preventing them from cancelling their frenzy and immediately following up with a basic attack, circumventing the non-lethal aspect of their power. We found that lowering the duration to 3 seconds felt much better to play with, but also kept it feeling fair from a Survivor’s POV. To ensure that the fatigue doesn’t get out of hand, we’ve reworked any fatigue altering add-ons, since the two strongest ones were added to the base kit. We’ve also changed Feral Frenzy’s recharge to start as soon as it ends rather than after the fatigue, effectively reducing the power’s cooldown.
And last, add-ons: We’ve reviewed each of The Legion’s add-ons. Some will receive number tweaks while others will get entirely new effects. We want to shine a spotlight on the various Mixtape add-ons in particular. True to their name, these add-ons will also augment The Legion’s new music, and can even be mixed and matched to produce interesting results.
Hemorrhage Rework
Hemorrhage has long been one of the lesser desired Status Effects- for Killers, at least. Currently, Hemorrhage increases the frequency of blood pools, making it easier to track Survivors. This effect ends up not being very useful in most cases, as the Survivor will either be leaving scratch marks while sprinting or the blood pools will already be close together if they’re walking.
With that in mind, we’ve come up with a new version of Hemorrhage. Whenever you are not healing, Hemorrhage will cause your healing progress to regress at the rate of 7% per second. This new version rewards the Killer for interrupting a Survivor healing and has the potential to waste med-kit charges.
This change will affect all perks & add-ons that currently apply it.
Updated Difficulty Ratings
In the info tab for each Killer & Survivor, you’ll find a difficulty rating that tells you how easy or hard they are to play. These ratings are intended to help newer players decide which Killer to play first, and which they should consider holding for when they’re more comfortable with the game.
To make these ratings more useful, we’ve created new guidelines for how we rank them. We’ve reviewed each Killer and given them a 1-5 score (1 being the easiest) in the following categories:
- Mechanical Skill: How much precise control is required to use the Killer effectively? (Aiming, reaction time, and control)
- Strategic Skill: How much planning and strategy is required to use the Killer effective? (Timing, resource management, decision making)
- Uniqueness: How similar is this Killer to other Killers?
The scores are totaled up to determine the overall difficulty of the Killer. The Nurse, for example, requires a lot of mechanical skill, a good bit of strategy, and plays completely differently than other Killers, landing her safely in the new “Very Hard” difficulty.
To avoid confusion, we’ve removed difficulty ratings from Survivors. This is because all Survivors are functionally identical with only perks setting them apart. Since perks can be shared across Survivors and aren’t factored into difficulty for Killers, we made the decision to remove them entirely.
Haddonfield Update
It’s become a tradition for each dev update to be followed by “Haddonfield rework when?” Well this tradition is coming to an end, because we saved the best for last (yes, that was a perk pun).
The iconic Lampkin Lane appeared in The Entity’s realm over five years ago. But with all the visual improvements around the rest of the game, that familiar street is starting to show its age. Not for long, though, Haddonfield is next in line to get a visual update.
For those wondering, don’t worry, the map is getting some layout and gameplay changes too. Take a look:
With that, we’ve reached the end of this month’s developer update. All of the changes mentioned here will be available in the 5.7.0 update. Which change are you most looking forward to? We look forward to hearing what you think!
The Dead by Daylight team