Survivor Problem: The Theme vs. The Gameplay
I recently came to my epiphany about how DBD worked, and that is that survivors are NOT a team. They are 4 players who individually trying to survive, but also rely on each other. This is reflected in the bloodpoints reward system, the grading system and the store page itself.
I've maintained for a while that MMR is working as expected in line with what the community asked for (Prioritise queue times over accurate matchmaking hurts me every time... what did we think would happen?).
Hens did this video on MMR yesterday and he nailed it, and highlighted the same thing. Survivors are NOT a team as far as MMR is concerned. I recommend watching the whole thing, but 1:48 and 5:10 stand out for the point.
This is the disparity I think a lot of people have, made worse by the existence of SWF where suddenly the survivors actually are a team, and this creates a disparity in how the game plays out.
So now we have a Theme problem...
Games can create crazy and fantastic scenarios that puts a player in a world they'd never have experienced in real life. The world is a horror setting, one where you are tasked with the goal to escape. From the Steam page:
Real People, Real Fear - The procedural levels and real human reactions to pure horror makes each game session an unexpected scenario. You will never be able to tell how it’s going to turn out.
The theme of Dead by Daylight is a horror one... one where everyone is trying to escape, and in those scenarios, you can never truly trust someone else to save you, you have to save yourself.
True to life, if you're a hero, and sacrifice yourself to save 3 other people... your reward is that you lose... in real life, you'd be dead... this is the horror theme of the game.
I personally like the theme a lot, and would lament its loss... the acquisition of Michael Myers kickstarted this game into the Juggernaut it became, and thematically Myers is one of the most accurate adaptions of any killer in the game... with that in mind...
Sacrifice Theme for Gameplay?
It is undeniable that another reason DBD has taken off is the mechanics are rewarding and fun. The skill ceiling is very high, and the DBD Iceberg is rich and rewarding to crack.
To resolve a lot of the ills of the community, particularly regarding skill expression, the gameplay of DBD needs to be altered to make it a true 4vs1. The survivors need to be changed so they actually ARE a team and are rewarded for working together and being skillful.
The problem is without the theme... this basically makes DBD a glorified game of virtual tag. People talk all the time about how killers aren't scary anymore... and they're right... Myers once again demonstrates this, as despite being one of the best thematic killers, is also one of the weakest killers in the game in terms of skill expression, relying on exploiting a particular insanely overpowered add-on.
How do you maintain fear of the killer, if you completely remove the theme and focus entirely on skill expression? Following after the killer to mess with them, slapping killers with pallets, blinding with flashlights, being aggressive and looping them for 3 generators makes them look weak, and kinda funny... not the horrifying monsters they are supposed to be. These aggressive high skill play styles absolutely dent the theme... but still at least is offset by the fact the hero is punished.
So you can't please everyone
Some players love the theme... some players love the skill expression.
For the theme side, people don't want the killer to play super efficiently, with tunneling, camping and cheap strats to bulldoze a win. People want the killer to follow the theme and try to chase, hook and inflict as much "pain" as possible before sacrificing survivors. This doesn't work if Survivors are a team not interested in their own survival, but embracing the theme comes with the cost of having rats survive often.
At the same time people want it to be a skill game, where they gets chances to outplay and make impressive moves. If everyone is doing this, hunting/baiting the killer, pulling them without fear and being willing to die for the team, as that is still a survivor win, then you force killer into playing for kills, so you kill the rats but at the expense of actively punishing a more thematic killer playstyle more than it already is.
We all know that highly organised SWFs give killers a really hard time... and I suppose the question is, do we all genuinely want to be forced towards that style of play?
Comments
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Reading this makes perfect sense to me. Nailed it dude :)
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I don't know, I think compared to other games, DbD has a fairly low skill ceiling, mechanically it's pretty simple, and I feel like perks and killer powers aren't complicated to explain or understand. The most difficult thing is learning tiles, but even that isn't too hard to get after some time
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An interesting point of view, I would argue a game that requires over 1000 hours just to no longer be considered a newb, and a game where even a tiny inefficiency in positioning and movement can cost 10s of seconds for either side to be quite a significant skill ceiling.
It feels like Chess to me, something you can get the idea of and progress quickly, learn a few key moves and openings/playstyles and artificially climb with that particular strategy, before then hitting a wall where suddenly your strategy doesn't really work anymore. You then have to start expanding to learn new strategies, where you take an initial dip as you learn, and then constantly rubber band up and down and keep learming and tryimg new things...
Eventually you get to point where you have seen majority of combinations and strategies in play, and have a pretty solid idea of everything... and that's when you get REALLY good... but you'll never truly master everything, there will always be something someone can pull to surprise you and catch you off guard.
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Hard disagree
Things like learning to fly properly in Rocket League or knowing the frame data of every fighting game character so you know what moves beat theirs or which moves are safe/unsafe on block or memorizing attack patterns in a From Soft game, etc. All require more skill than running in a circle and pressing a button at the right time
Post edited by Rebecca1InTheChamber on2 -
I’d actually hard disagree with this. It took me like 3 hours to beat Melania, the hardest boss in Elden Ring with the most intricate mechanics, it took me probably another 5-10 hours to flawless her.
It takes an average dbd player hundreds and thousands of hours to even optimize pathing, let alone the many intricacies with chase.
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When holding shift+w and running forward is still one of the strongest things you can do as a survivor, the skill ceiling is shallow
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Sure but I think you'd agree that there's much more to being good at survivor than simply holding forward. I'd argue you have it backwards, the skill floor is low but the skill ceiling is rather high when you account for all the micro and macro management, intricacies of pathing, chaining tiles together effectively, knowing the counters to 30+ killers, etc.
You know when playing killer who the good survivors and bad survivors are, and sometimes you find the great ones that literally feel almost impossible to catch. It takes thousands and thousands of hours to get to that point, that's not a low skill ceiling.
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High level survivor gameplay isn't just shift+Wing though, if you only know that and doing gens that might get you into mid MMR but a good killer will punish that hard, assuming they're not playing a basic m1 killer, which is it's own issue.
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I maintain that the issue with survivor gameplay isn't necessarily the focus on the theme, it's the *how* and the *method* that they're using to express the asymmetry.
If you arrive at a 60% kill rate organically, that's fine. And by that, I mean that survivors feel like their personal performance actually impacts the outcome of matches. I currently feel like that's currently far from the case.
The entire gameplay loop currently revolves around the weak link in a trial. In lieu of organic balance, it seems like they intentionally include a relatively weak player in every trial to tip the game in the killer's favor. If that player is found early, the game is over in my experience.
That leads to a feeling of contrived outcomes. The outcome would be the same if I didn't actively participate in the trial. The outcome would be the same if I played really well. That's not healthy. You get to show your boss you hit the balance target for the year, but at what cost? It's a PVP video game. You can't lose sight of that.
You have to reward players for being good at the game on some level. There's a sense of climb in other PVP games that is completely absent in DbD. I'm clawing for hatch every other trial just the same as I was 4000 hours ago. The gameplay hasn't *changed* as I've improved.
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Theme is the only thing that keeps this game interesting.
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Personally I want the theme to win out no matter what changes it brings.
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Theme is the USP of the game, what helps it beat out other asymmetrical elimination games, without the theme you wouldn't have anything to balance to begin with.
I think TC is right, but it's not the whole picture, and it's not considering the whole picture form the killer point of view either. Yes theme is a factor in establishing a lower-than-even win rate for survivors. The other factor is that this is an asymmetrical game.
Survivor and Killer win conditions do not correlate. A win for a survivor is to escape the trial, and to be sacrificed is to lose, it's a binary system, so it seems like 50/50 should be "fair". However the killer has a modular win condition with 5 outcomes, 0K, 1K, 2K, 3K and 4K. This is where 'theme' kinda blurs the lines a little too. It's widely considered that a 3K or 4K is a win for the killer, while 0-2K's are 'not wins'. This can't translate into a 50/50 benchmark, you have 2 win outcomes and 3 lose outcomes. This means that the ideal average isn't a 50% kill rate or a 2K game, it's halfway between a 2K and a 3K game, because a 3K is a win and a 2K is a loss. Halfway between a 2K and a 3K is 62.5%.
Some try to claim that a 2K is a draw, but that's not accurate. A draw is when neither side wins or loses, and yet 2 survivors have most definitely won in a 2K scenario. Much like how it doesn't 'feel nice' to be sacrificed even when some of your team mates escape, it doesn't 'feel nice' to only achieve half of your objective, its not a positive outcome. It doesn't feel good for a survivor game to end after 2.5 gens, it doesn't feel good to have half the survivors escape. And all of these arguments all boil down to what 'feels good' in the end.
And that's the problem. Survivors only feel like they're winning if they're escaping more than 50% of the time. Killers only feel like they're winning if they're killing more than 62.5% of the time. There's a 12.5% overlap where neither side is in a good place. That's just a fundamental property of an asymmetrical game that pits 4 v 1.
This is why survivor mains think the game is in a bad state, and why killer mains also think they're in a bad state, the average kill rate is above the threshold for a happy survivor, and below the threshold for a happy killer. It's actually in the ideal place, between 50% and 62.5%, but the ideal place means, on average, everyone loses more often than they win.
The real problem is player attitudes. People believe that they should be winning more often than not, which is not only not possible in a symmetrical PVP where you would expect 50% and not more, but considering the overlap described above, is even less likely in an asymmetrical PVP of this format. You need to approach the game like a survival horror, or a cat and mouse game (depending on which side you're playing), you shouldn't expect to survivor the majority of the time, surviving should be an ordeal. Similarly, you shouldn't expect to kill the majority of the survivors the majority of the time, sometimes you will only get one or two kills and the rest will escape. You need to expect to die more often than not, and you need to expect to not secure all the kills you want.
And that's where this marries up with theme. You're not only playing a game with the theme of a survival horror where the odds are against you, you're also playing an asymmetrical game where mechanically the odds are against you.
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It's a sound and well-developed argument.
Unfortunately, there's not a way to really rebalance the core game. SWFs have been a good idea in bringing more to the game, allowing players to play with friends and increasing the growth of the game in general. This came with the negative side-effect that the thematic horror elements were reduces, stripping the game of some of its identity.
The new modes the game brings in is a way to bring back horror. Lights Out was a great start, and within this mode lies the key of bringing horror back. A mode could be made specifically for Solo players only, but remove any perks or offerings so there's an incentive to play the main game (as an example).
I still believe DBD is in a good position, with millions of gamers still playing it, and I feel new game modes is absolutely the direction they should go to improve the health, theme and gameplay of DBD.
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100% agree. Succinctly written.
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I think theme should take priority, but it has to be done properly.
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