News | 6.4.0 Post-PTB Changes
The Public Test Build (PTB) has come and gone, and you’ve left us with plenty of feedback to review. The team has been hard at work addressing your suggestions and concerns, and we have a handful of changes in store for the Chapter’s release next week.
Adjustments to The Knight
Guards have a few mechanics in place to ensure that they work smoothly. For instance, the guard will phase through obstacles to reach the location where they spotted a Survivor. This prevents situations where the guard might spot a Survivor on the other side of a fence, for example, and waste the majority of their time running around it.
From a Survivors perspective, there are also measures in place to prevent a guard from instantly appearing next to you and attacking before you have a chance to react. While a guard on their own can push you away from objectives, they aren’t intended to reliably hit Survivors without the Killer working with them in tandem.
During the PTB, we found the timing on some of these mechanics to be longer than necessary, making guards difficult to use in a chase or granting the Survivors too much of a head start. With that said, we have made the following changes for the Chapter’s release:
- Guards will now appear after 1.5 seconds (down from 2 seconds)
- The time it takes for a guard to travel to the location the Survivor was detected has been reduced to 2.5 seconds (down from 3 seconds)
- A guard’s detection radius will now grow to full size after 1 second (down from 1.5 seconds)
Though they may sound subtle, these tweaks combined will make guards feel much more responsive without making them unfair to play against. Guards will now activate sooner and detect Survivors more consistently.
Next, when a guard begins their chase, they leave behind a banner which the Survivor can pick up to make the guard disappear. The banner takes a few seconds to activate so they Survivor can’t immediately pick it up. During the PTB, we found the timing to be a little short, making it possible to pick up the banner after running around a small loop once or twice. For the release, we are increasing the time it takes for the banner to become active:
- The Carnifex’s banner now activates after 10 seconds (up from 8 seconds)
- The Jailer and The Assassin’s banner now activates after 5 seconds (up from 2 seconds)
On the subject of chases, The Knight has also gained the ability to pre-emptively cancel a guard’s patrol by using his Basic Attack on them. This will cause the cooldown to begin immediately rather than waiting for the patrol to expire.
Lastly, we’ve made some adjustments to various add-ons. Here’s a list of changes you can expect when the update drops:
- Map of the Realm: Now increases guard’s vision by 4 meters (down from 6)
- Flint and Steel: Effects now only apply to unbroken dropped pallets.
- Healing Poultice: Effects now apply to Survivors within a 24m radius (was outside a 32m radius)
- Knight’s Contract: Increased range to 12m (up from 8m)
We hope the adjustments above will make The Knight’s debut a smooth as possible, but we’ll continue to monitor his performance over time once the Chapter releases.
Hex: Face the Darkness
After reviewing feedback from the PTB, we found that Hex: Face the Darkness was a little confusing and difficult to get use out of. To make its effects clearer and more consistent, we have given this perk a small rework in time for the release.
First, affected Survivors will now scream every 25 seconds. This make the perk more consistent than the previously random intervals of 20 to 40 seconds.
Second, Survivors will no longer see the aura of the Cursed Survivor, making it harder to deactivate the perk.
Third, we’ve simplified the perk’s description to make it clearer. The line specifying that the perk is disabled permanently if the Hex Totem is cleansed has been removed since this is standard for any Hex perk.
We’ll keep an eye on the performance of this and the other new perks once the update releases!
The Shattered Square
During the PTB, one of the most common pieces of feedback we receive was regarding the fog colour of the new map, The Shattered Square. Being a bright red, it could be difficult to track scratch marks and pools of blood through the fog, especially for some of our colourblind players. For the live release, we have toned down the red fog to address these concerns.
Additionally, we’ve adjusted the pallet and hook textures on this map to improve their visibility.
Flashlights
We recently announced a buffer system for Flashlights which would “queue” a stun for a short time during the Killer’s pickup animation. This change is intended to make Flashlight less picky while still requiring some knowledge of how to use them, and to compensate for the inability to adjust your timing with the recently added cooldown.
Unfortunately, this buffer stopped working correctly just before the Public Test Build went live, causing blinds at any point in the pickup animation to stun the Killer. This was not intended, and we have fixed this issue for the release. Only blinds that take place during the buffer will queue their stun.
In the meantime, we’ve carried out additional tests internally to refine the timing. Since the buffer takes place on the server- not the Survivor’s client- latency can make the buffer feel much shorter than intended. Therefore, we have increased the buffer to 0.4 seconds (up from 0.25 seconds). This will account for latency and make it feel much closer to the originally intended length.
We’ll be keeping an extra close eye on this mechanic once it goes live. The goal is not to make flashlight saves significantly more common, but rather to make the timing a little more forgiving.
All of the changes mentioned in this post will be ready for the Chapter’s release next Tuesday, November 22nd. As always, we’ll continue to keep an eye on the new content and review things down the line to see if any further adjustments are needed.
Until next time…
The Dead by Daylight team