Dear BHVR, Your Killer Heights are WRONG!!!
I'm bad with intros, so this is all you're getting.
Killers are broken into three different height categories that determine the way they see the game: Tall, Average, and Short. In general, I think we all know what these mean, right? Well, today I am here with irrefutable evidence that everything you thought you knew about Killer heights has been a lie (or at least something interesting I’ve not seen a single person EVER bring up).
This whole journey started with me trying to put to rest the idea of Knight and Artist having an “Average” height despite clearly being taller. I initially measured all of the Killers' view over one of the RPD turbine things (where the helicopter crashed) on the PTB with Chucky (yeah I know, I wanted to make this post a while ago, it was actually his 3rd-person camera that inspired this), but I noticed a few… weird measurements that led me to the Live Build (with Chucky’s POV being taken during the Alan Wake PTB).
After spending some time trying to figure out something I could consistently access and somewhat accurately measure, I was led to Shelter Woods with one of the Skull Merchant’s dummies. Specifically:
Due to the humanoid body of this dummy, figuring out the heights was pretty logical. All I needed to do was get up to the dummy’s face and see where the camera aligned. To make sure there was minimal vertical camera movement, I disconnected my mouse, made sure my trackpad was off before loading into the match, and relied solely on my left and right arrow keys to turn. Following this experiment, I created five height categories for the Killer POVs, which are as follows:
Giant: These Killers towered over the dummy, with nearly a quarter of the screen still being empty space. And yes, this type of POV did exist, and no, it’s not the Killers you’re expecting.
Tall: These Killers were slightly above eye level with the dummy, with a little bit of empty space seen above it.
Average: These Killers were at eye level, with the dummy’s head being cut off at the top of the screen.
Short: These Killers were at the dummy’s shoulders, with the head being cut off at the nose.
Tiny: These Killers (well, Killer) barely saw the bottom of the dummy’s jaw.
Below are the screenshots of each of these heights and the Killers they are attached to (I know, probably not the best quality, I’m literally screenshotting a collection of screenshots from a Google Document since I can’t paste the image normally).
Now, I’m sure you probably noticed the glaring omission that is EVERY KILLER FROM TWINS ONWARD!!! And yes, I’m just as shocked at this turn of events, because while Ghost Face and Blight apparently being Giant was certainly a surprise (and one I had to double check myself on, for what it’s worth, Ghost Face’s Crouch camera is in the dummy’s crotch), the ultimate takeaway I had from this was almost all of these Killers having a higher, more zoomed out POV than the Tall Killers. Here is a lovely side-by-side of Twins and Trapper, two “Tall” Killers, and Ghost Face’s “Average” vs Artist’s “Average”.
As we can clearly see from this, the Killers from Twins onward have a completely different POV to those that came before. As such, I need to redefine the height definitions. For these Killers, I am redefining “Tall” to mean towering even above the old “Giant” category, “Average” to be a little bit below this, “Short” to be slightly above where “Tall” used to be, and “Tiny” to be slightly taller than Hag’s camera. These are incredibly iffy definitions, but it's either that or something stupid like "Colossal", "Gigantic", "Taller than tall", and "Not quite Tiny".
Based on these results, the ultimate conclusion I came to was… I needed more evidence (which is why this took forever, alongside some pretty bad social anxiety). Perhaps there was some weird fluke with Ghost Face & Blight and that dummy that led them to be so much taller. After all, their powers are both collision heavy. Perhaps the newer Killers have some sort of weird collision detection on this dummy specifically (that didn’t exist until Skull Merchant, but I digress). When playing these Killers, they don’t FEEL like they tower over everything… well, except for Knight and Artist. Despite my conclusion actually AGREEING with Knight’s “Average” classification, he always felt like a ”Tall” Killer, and I now have evidence that Artist, who feels the same, is in the same boat. I couldn’t tell if it was maybe a perspective thing, since they both tower over the other “Average” Killers, so maybe some weird placebo effect threw them in that category while it doesn’t with Wesker or Trickster.
So I proceeded to do absolutely nothing with this information. I wanted to use a Survivor as a measuring stick, but my friends were generally busy, and good luck getting a random to figure out what you're trying to do. And bots just run to the ends of the universe the second they see you. So I held this information to myself… until now.
A fun little thing happened recently. The Alan Wake PTB (yes, I know... this was supposed to be made during that week). With that came the POV slider, and a new determination to set things right. Since I couldn’t really get anyone to be a living measuring stick for me, I had to think of something that would be consistent across ALL maps. And then, I figured it out. LOCKERS!!!
Since I wanted to see if the FOV was fixed between updates to begin with anyway, I went back to Shelter Woods and said hello to the dummy at max FOV (which is actually where I got Chucky’s picture. The FOV slider has no effect on his 3rd-person camera). Below are the results of this, with each 2x2 square being the Killers in selection order (barring Knight, who is killswitched, and Chucky, who we already saw, I also decided against Crawler Xeno because I was on a time crunch to get the locker screenshot).
As one can infer, my previous results were not a fluke. The cameras were, in fact, very different for all Killers beyond Blight. One of my friends theorized that there was an update within the dev engine around Twins’ development, leading to the cameras being adjusted, but that’s all it is. A theory. This meant that, at least this dummy, had a weird relationship with these Killers. But lockers are consistent across all maps. Even though I used
the results SHOULD be consistent across all maps, since lockers are one of a few constants, alongside gens and pallets, both of which would be awkward to measure against. I’m not going to show ALL of the pictures, since I think I’ve made my point (and also because I chose the absolute WORST locker to snapshot due to the obscene darkness, so I had to brighten the images by 75%), but the evidence speaks for itself, using the little window slits as a measurement.
Now, what does any of this mean? The short answer is nothing. Obviously, no one else has really noticed this, or I feel I would have seen SOMEONE talk about it. As such, the strange perspective obviously doesn’t have a big effect on gameplay (or some sort of placebo effect takes place where we don’t notice it because we’re playing an “Average” Killer and don’t notice Ghost Face being taller than Trapper or Wesker being zoomed out compared to Legion).
But the fact remains that the heights, as stated in-game, are WRONG for quite a few Killers. Hillbilly, Hag, Doctor, Freddy, Pig, Spirit, Legion, Ghost Face, Blight, Twins, Cenobite, Artist, and Sadako all have improperly matching heights (at least based on MY classifications, most of them still kind of fit their stated heights, I was just being pedantic). And then we have the issue of perspective. Again, this whole thing started because I was CONVINCED the Knight and Artist were wrong because they are VISIBLY taller than any of the other “Average” Killers and felt as such.
But before I repeat myself more than I already have, I DO have a solution. One that will NEVER happen because it would probably require recoding the game from the ground up, as well as all sorts of balance and gameplay issues. But it would be to reset all of the cameras.
I would split cameras into five perspectives: Giant (where Nemesis, Artist, and Dredge currently stand), Tall, Average, Short (where Sadako and Crawling Xeno stand), and Tiny (any Killer who needs a 3rd-person camera). And there's no need to frantically pull out the measurement tools again, since I’ve already done this by measuring how tall each Killer is in the lobby (a very rough estimate, but it’s the best I can work with on my own).
Giant: Plague, Nemesis, Dredge (During the Alan Wake PTB, these three actually had the lobby zoom out to accommodate them).
Tall: Trapper, Wraith, Hillbilly, Nurse (due to her floating, she’s actually at roughly eye level with Hillbilly, and if he’s tall, so is she), Myers, Doctor, Huntress, Bubba, Clown, Demogorgon, Oni, Deathslinger, Pyramid Head (despite being technically taller than Nemesis, his “eye-level” would be somewhere lower on the pyramid, and besides, the PTB lobby camera didn’t zoom out), Twins, Pinhead, Artist, Knight (while he’s killswitched and I couldn’t measure him, he’s almost taller than Trapper)
Average: Freddy, Spirit, Legion, Ghost Face, Blight (due to his hunched posture, he’s at roughly eye level with Legion and Ghost Face), Trickster, Wesker, Skull Merchant, Singularity, Xenomorph (despite being fairly large, its “eyes” are fairly low and it’s hunched over, and yes, I measured the normal Xeno and not the Queen I used in the screenshots)
Short: Hag, Pig, Sadako
Tiny: Chucky
In the end, I thought these were just some interesting details that really don’t mean much for most people. It obviously has minimal effect on gameplay and I’m only making a fuss about it because I really dislike inconsistency. So I’ll leave this with one more fun little fact (since I'm equally bad with conclusions as I am with introductions).
Hillbilly’s camera is incredibly wonky. I get that his animation has him limping around, but does this REALLY need to be replicated in his POV? And in trying to get a screenshot for the locker, I ended up bouncing off it like I was Blight for some reason. No other Killer had that issue, just Billy.
Comments
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I really enjoyed reading this, and I would also like to add a fun fact, in the past the blight camera was ´´tiny´´ yes, the blight camera in the killer POV was located a little above his beautiful legs
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I think killer's height is not the same as their camera. You may need to have survivor's POV look at killers stand with the mannequin .
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Good read. If you hate inconsistency, DBD is not the game for you... xD The way they make this game couldn't be further from consistent. It's as if a different person wrote each line of code. I don't think I've ever played a game that was this popular with as many bugs/issues/inconsistencies as DBD has at any given point. At this stage its beyond laughable.
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It's not so much the heights are wrong but what you see and what the survivor sees are different.
As killer, the camera isn't at head height and is actually more towards the chest on most killers. Blight when he first released was a more noticeable example of this as his camera was more at his crotch.
You can take a friend in to see this when looking at the dummy. I'm betting most if not all cases they'll say your head is higher then where your camera is.
Boundary break did an episode on DBD showing this off as well sort of.
It because the camera difference that you also get weird shadows. Myers has a very noticeable and funny one.
So again, the height thing is more what the survivor sees and not so much the killer but I wouldn't be surprised if even on the survivor end there was some heights that were wrong.
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Ngl all these pictures are creepy. But interesting post !
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upvoting simply for the amount of work you've put for this oh my
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TBH I want more Giant Killers. I like Nemesis and Dredge for that reason. Being a hulking mass is just really fun. Especially when you run Oblivious or Undetectable perks, it is just a nice experience.
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Thoroughly enjoyed the read, I believe @C3Tooth is on to it though. My theory is that the camera is set on the killer at a location that feels right to play for that killer, with consideration of their actual height being secondary. The conclusion is flawed if the camera is not consistently placed in the same place on each killer.
E.g. Ghost Face has to crouch with his power, and still be able to stalk without things blocking him often, so I imagine his camera is set higher to reduce your stalk getting blocked by grass, etc.
What you need is a similarly impassioned soul to join you and snap the heights from the survivor perspective. It would be really interesting to see how far off the camera is relative to the actual height for each killer... Then the evidence can be truly irrefutable... 😁
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There would still be the issue of model-height and in-game height difference.
iirc Hag is average despite being small in-game and having the lowest PoV because she is crouched/bent and her actual model is bigger..
this does make the info of the killers height in their description very questionable though as it is kinda misleading..
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Suppose that is good a question to ask as any.
What exactly does 'height' refer to in this context? The characters actual height? Or their in game height?
To my mind this listing for each character is detailing gameplay related info (movement speed and terror radius). In game height is more useful to know as a gameplay mechanic here. If for example Xeno could only ever be in crawler mode, the height should be "short", as that is the height profile you woukd expect to be playing around in game.
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