Why are Dead by Daylight players so opposed to putting in ways for the survivors to fight back?
I am just wondering this because anytime anyone suggests anything being added to the game that allows the survivors to kill the killer or even just fight back (other than flashlights or pallets.) When asked, DBD players usually say "no because being able to kill the killer makes the killer less scary" or "no because that is unrealistic and the survivors can't fight back against killers," but like, in every horror movie ever, the survivors eventually fight back and confront the killer. That doesn't make the killer less scary, and it isn't even unrealistic. Plus, the Friday the 13th game has an option to fight back against and kill Jason, but that doesn't make him any less scary and he's still pretty unstoppable. Plus, being able to kill the killer would add variety into the game. Like, what if you were able to unlock a weapon during endgame, the same way a Hatch works, but it is a special weapon that you can confront the killer with, and once you take down the killer, you can sacrifice him to the Entity or something like that. Idk but either way, why are DBD players so against putting in a way to kill the killer? After all, getting revenge on the killer for killing your friends is the best part of any horror movie or the Friday the 13th game.
Answers
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It's just not a part of the game.
Maybe if they had added it within the first two years or so, but we're eight years in. The theme and core mechanics are established, for better or for worse.
To be honest, I think it's a little dumb when the Survivor role has too much power.
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It would change players goals from focusing on gens and escaping to attacking the killer. When killing Jason was the win con. People felt punished for playing him. VHS failed and TCM is failing because of this, playing Monster/Family is not fun playing against an experienced team. The horror movie concept is thrown out the window. Where as DBD has survivors who can escape where the killer can't and the killers can eliminate the opposing side where killers can't.
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Technically there was a game like that, Video Horror Society, aka VHS. Where the survivors would make weapons and actually fight back against the killer. As the basic gameplay, instead of doing generators, you wanted to hit damage and banish killer once with each different type of weapon. Those types being Burn, Purify (aka Holy), Shock, and Curse. Once they been banished four times, once for each type, the survivors win. It however, sadly got shut down. While not necessarily a fault of the gameplay, it was more they didn't generate enough income. Yet also because of encountering a series security issue that took them too long to fix which was really the final nail in the coffin.
Its not impossible for the developers to implement what you are suggesting, this but it would either be a perk (unlikely), or have to be its own separate game mode (more likely).0 -
Because it's a terrible experience for the killer player. Many asym games that have tried this have proved it.
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It does make the killers into a joke. Jason was scary in Friday until you got the sweater and then he would literally be running from you. It was very, very goofy. 6 camp counselors chasing down a 2 meter tall killer, only to smack him to his knees and hit the griddy on him seven times while he was being executed.
If you add the ability to kill killers in this game then all of the killers would have to be made SIGNIFICANTLY stronger. There were no hooks in Friday. If you got grabbed, you instantly died on the spot.
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Survivors already can bully the killers. You want MORE of that?
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Because it is an asymmetrical pvp game?
And non of the other asymmetrical games that had this concept of survivor being able to fight back survived?
In today's gaming society it is easier than ever to find the most optimal strategy, due to information exchange on social media and in many of these games the "numbers role" found ways to completely incapacitate the "power role".
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Survivors aren't supposed to defeat the Killer, they're supposed to escape. As already mentioned, if you wanted to add this to the game, Killers would need to be significantly stronger. In Friday the 13th, Jason could kill you pretty much as soon as he saw you; a grab was instant death if you didn't have an escape item and, failing that, basic attacks were quick and very hard to avoid. Even with that, being able to fight back and kill Jason wasn't particularly balanced, regardless of the hoops it required you to jump through.
You want to fight back and defeat the Killer, what you don't want is the required balancing.
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except VHS failed because the monster role was unrewarding and felt underpowered, add to that the "yes men" bubble the devs of that game have built and you have a perfect recipe for its failure.
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Because this is Dbd and not Friday the 13th. The whole game loop is running from the killer and trying to outlast them and escaping, not chase the killer, beat them up and win. Making it so Survivors can fight back will kill the game.
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"If it bleeds, we can kill it"
From a thematic point of view, something you can defeat, that you can kill, immediately becomes less scary than before. There's a sense of security in that something is mortal and can be removed. If you've ever played any of the Deadspace games, the Ubermorph is always something tense that you have to navigate around, because it just keeps following you and doesn't stop. That is until you hit a certain point. And upon further playthroughs it becomes a blitz to reach that point. Kinda like what it would become in DBD were it an option, the only win is to kill the Killer and to min-max reaching this goal.
If you play killer to the point that you're against good survivors, you also know the game can be constantly demanding even to reach a few kills, whereas survivor has periodic downtime and split responsibility. As a Survivor, getting moried by the Killer also can feel thematic, and you can even use the excuse that others are to blame for you getting killed. Though tossing in a mechanic where the thematic script is flipped because the killer did so poorly is going to cause more burnout than before, especially if it's something that's quite literally in their face, ala performing a Mori on the Killer.
And in terms of toxicity, I don't like Killers slugging people out of spite (and hope that gets addressed at some point), and I have no doubt that Survivors would likely end up doing the same kind of hitting with their "Killer mechanic" too.
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It would be fun to have a separate game mode that copy-pasted the gameplay from TCM tbh.
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So play those games...
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Because it would lead to 4 people bullying 1 to death, frequently and repeatedly, at the expense of the rest of the game. That's what killed other asymmetrical PvP games, I'm pretty sure it's one reason why BHVR's previous game Deathgarden died, and they aren't going to repeat that mistake again.
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Yup!!! I was gonna remark on this as well, and then read your post. This did not work out well for poor Jason Voorhees at all, and he ended up getting bullied more often than not. I'm happy to see it remain a non-factor in DBD.
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Lets not forget Predator hunting grounds
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Every game heralded as a "DBD Killer" that has had the ability to do so has perished horrifically, with the exception of F13th which has more active players than TCSM and only perished due to licencing issues. I don't want it because I've seen what it does to other games, and as much as I complain about dbd I don't want it to go
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Unless it's for Predator, I don't think Survivors should be able to properly fight killers, it's just not in the spirit of the game.
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What I find funny is that people who claim that game X or game Y is the DBD Killer, are often those who even complain about the limited ways of fighting back Survivors have in DBD. Whether it is DS, Pallet Saves or Flashlight Saves, those get complained about and the same people then claim that a game will be DBD Killer, where Survivors actually have ways to fight back.
I cannot really imagine that someone who has a problem with DS having fun in a game where Survivors can actually fight back.
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On the same note though. Those games also normally have to Amp the killer up to make them more threatening. The biggest example being f13th. Where jason could just walk through most obstacles if he was enraged. And if he grabbed you he could just straight up kill you. If Survivors hate tombstone because they get caught out of position and die against myers. Imagine facing a killer who can do that basekit anytime he finds you. The only difference being he can be interrupted. And if you died you just went next in that game to. Jason didn't care for putting Survivors on a thing to give them multiple chances lol. Hell tcm is the middle ground but yet if a Bubba slambs on you. You die. That's it lol.
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like all the other already said every game that had sucha mechanic is no more so why would we want it in dbd and we actually have a lore reason for it.
correct me if im wrong but im pretty sure a survivor cant just fight back. the entity makes it so they cant just pick up a sharp piece of metal and fight back. would be absoluty stupid otherwise since we have strong guys like david and lets not start with all the resident evil character
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I'm gonna be honest, I just don't want to worry about survivors trying to kill me like in VHS as excampel.
For me it's enough if I have a more or less stressful match as survivor because the killer tries to kill me, I just don't want the second roll also to be that stressful, it's enough that I somehow have to preassure everyone or I'll loose. Of course that's tweakable, but I just like it more like it is.
Well this is personal taste in the end I suppose
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It wouldn't make sense to the lore, the entity carefully restricts how much power each character has and must keep it balanced in order for the trails to work, giving a survivor a working shotgun would give them to much confidence and mess up the way it feeds of emotion, same reason vecna has the mark to restrict his power so he doesn't instantly decimate all the survivors and give the entity time to feed.
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The only way that could work is if you distributed more to the killer as well, with the idea I just think it would take longer to balance than the life cycle this game has left they'd be better off putting that in a DBD2 which more than likely won't happen due to the amount of licensing and time already put into this game, I guess maybe play TCM? That's about the only similar game that isn't totally dead yet.
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Because it's entirely different game. Not slight different - entirely different.
I would agree with some gameplay changes, but to fit with dbd theme.
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Evolve stage two died* not because monster could be killed, but because Devs do not care enough to make the game to earn for itself. VHS had different issues, but not that monster could be killed.
* - it did not die fully. There is huge playerbase that still plays this game.
Post edited by Archael on0 -
yeah... bout that...
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VHS was exactly what would happen to games like this. You have to give monsters abilities to counter weapons which they did, so you had to use those abilities for every single hit which were on 30 second cooldowns because if it was shorter it would be too strong
That led to passive gameplay in which the monster hid from the teens, got 1 hit using their abilities and went straight back to hiding as without abilities they were dead weight and could only snowball if the teens messed up multiple times.
As for F13th they needed to add a rage mode for Jason if the counselor’s decided to make the entire game about stunlocking him. That should tell you all you need to know
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i love predator hunting grounds and it's really fun but the problem with that game is that it is way too easy to kill pred. i would like it better if the pred was near unstoppable and the fireteam had to set traps and ambushes to lure the pred into instead of just pressing the shoot button until pred dies. Otherwise, really great game tho!
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Well its not only not been part of the game for 8 years but it doesn't really fit with the whole overall theme and lore of the game. Not every game has to have mechanics to fight back. And well lore wise being able to fight back just doesn't mesh with it since the idea is to drain survivors of their emotions and hopes of escape. So at most resistance to the killer (aka vaulting, looping, running away, pallets, escaping, ds, endurance) as a means of prolonged resistance but inevitably well survivor deaths throughout the trials to feed the entity. Being able to "win" by fighting back just isn't in the cards.
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As someone who was in the closed beta and continued playing VHS until it shut down Monster was a miserable, unforgiving experience since Teens could fight back.
Another issue was that the higher tier Monster players would rave about the 'balance' and they were correct in stating that with enough Monster play Monster could be a strong role.
The problem with that statement is that it took the average player hundreds of games to reach that point and, in the meantime, the Monster player was severely bullied and stomped on to the point that over 99% of all new Monster players quit before reaching that point. Imagine a Lights Out scenario where only the Killer has the negative effects but still has a Terror radius (but not a red stain), amplify the Killer's movement sounds by roughly 300%, and make it so if you don't spot a hiding Teen they can blast you into oblivion. That's what normal VHS gameplay was like.
However, VHS was just balancing around the top end players (where it was well balanced) for 90% of its lifespan and ignored that if almost nobody would play long enough to get to that skill level on one side the game's queues would just lengthen and lengthen until the game died. The 4 would just torment the 1 in the majority of the games and it was distinctly not fun.
So no, allowing survivors to fight back would be a horrible idea. Every game that has had it has died because it's a terrible idea.
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Deathgarden, another BHVR game, suffered from this in their first release.
Having an asym game where one side fights the killer is possible, but making it so they can escape or fight is too difficult. It creates balance issues, especially in a game with solos vs teams. It causes the soloq to potentially split their strategies, while the team can come into the game with a clear strategy and focused on that from the start.
Creating multiple possible wins means that people will soon optimize the best course. TCM suffered from this, where the game starts off silly and fun, but it doesn't take long before people have mapped out the ideal routes to take.
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Well, im far from being an expert, but heres my two cents.
Being a killer is playing a time management simulator. Time is on the essence, waste a little bit and generators fly.
If on top of having to chase a survivor for 20-30 seconds to hook them, you will have to fight them for another extra 30 seconds till you "beat" them and can hook them, most games would have 3-4 gens completed by the time you get a hook.
then two survivors come to the rescue. One fight you off for a few secodns while the other unhook.
Victory would be impossible.
Time is strict and tight as it is as a killer, you simple cannot put another time sink for the killers without slowing gens significantly. Its just not viable.
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I wouldn't say i'm opposed to it, but in general this is actually something that makes DBD unique in the genre. Other games usually have ways for the "survivor" (whatever they call them) to fight or even kill the "killer". In dbd, the only recourse survivors have is to run.
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In the movie, a person dies with a single blow, but in DBD, a person can recover unharmed even if a hook pierces the chest. Does this conform to a horror movie? This is very fair considering that the cost of not dying in one hit is that the person loses the means to attack.
After all, this game is just a sideshow for the Entity. It's all about what she (that's what I call her) thinks.
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You have 5 gens to do that's your objective introducing a way to kill the killer would just have everyone ignore gens try and kill the killer and then get stomped into the dirt
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For one thing…as much as I hate me as a survivor can be removed out of a match in 2min. I dont like killing someone then they spawn back. With the ability to kill the killer.
I was choosing between The last year and DBD, I picked DBD because of this. A death has more meaningful.
Home sweet home also gives survivors ability to kill killers when they finish all the ritual, it becomes a total bully simulator
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Entity is most likely "them" - Devs, players, content creators, whole community are "The Entity"
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Some recent killers have brought with them innate means of "fighting back" to an extent, and I think it is a completely worthwhile gameplay dynamic. Obviously it is, anything that promotes interactiveness and proactive gameplay is welcome game design. That doesn't mean you should be able to kill the killer or stun-lock them or something silly like that, but means of engaging the killer offensively in smaller ways are good, healthy and we should long have gotten more of them. Might sound funny, but I had even hoped that survivors would be able to wield guns against Nemesis, who would be stronger or faster than other killers but slowed down or otherwise kept in check by these weapons.
Alas, with the devs having removed unique flashlight interactions (when flashlights are already among the very few means of "fighting back"), it doesn't seem to be on their agenda. Well, at least they are buffing saboboxes.
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The problem is that bhvr is just not very good in balancing thoses ways to fight back.
Xenos turrets are no threat to a good xeno player while singularitys emps often feel like you are not allowed to use the cams at all.
In the end there where plety of games that did what op askes for and they all withered away and thats probably a sign
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Perhaps so. I do think turrets don't do enough (although a little tip for the unaware: you need to place at least two turrets within close proximity such that both fire while one is being destroyed, this will actually give you a chance to pull Xeno out of power). I don't think EMPs are nearly as debilitating to Singularity as it is often made out to, at all. Good Singularity players are oppressively strong (not even only in pubs, in tournament settings too). It's just that Singularity is not easy to play.
I also think most of the flashlight burn mechanics were perfectly fine. It really was only Wraith that it was too punishing against, and they could have simply reduced the lightburn stun time on him, and/or given him add-ons against lightburn again. Many more killers could have had unique lightburn mechanics too. Now they're all gone.
Whether more means of fighting back would ultimately be bad for the game's popularity. Well, I'd also say "perhaps so". I do think survivors fighting back can be a frustrating experience even regardless of how "balanced" it is or not, simply because it makes the already fairly stressful killer experience more so (for the average player anyway), and unfortunately means of "fighting back" also often breed "toxicity". The average player will already find it fairly frustrating just getting pallet stunned, even though that is not much more than a minor nuisance. Flashlight saves, sabo saves, all of these things can be a source of great frustration for killer players, getting intercepted in their basic gameplay loop and the parts of this loop that should give them some time to unwind and relax just going through the motions.
Of course, on the flipside they can be really fun, funny and engaging on the survivor side, but yeah, maybe part of DbD's success has also been how relatively untouchable the killer is. But there are degrees to this, and again, the flashlight burn mechanic for one thing had existed for years without killing the game. I for one would take the risk of implementing more of this type of gameplay, and I think the devs' route of tying this innately to certain killers is not the worst of ways to go about it. Like I said, I would have wished for Nemesis to be much more of a menace that has to be kept in check with weapons. That could have been great fun.
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Adding a way to fight back and slowing the killers would mandatorily have to go hand in hand with slowing down gens, because if survivors can slow down the killer even further, but killer cannot slow the survivors back, the survivors would stomp.
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Playing killer already feels miserable sometimes against coordinate swf
Imagine playing trapper and on top of your traps being useless, your hooks being sabo'd, your down getting denied by ftp+BU or BP+flashlight, you'd have to deal with survivor hitting you with a stick
Nah man, it didnt work on any other games because killers players just quit. Its not really entertaining to be the punching ball then being mocked after the game.
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If you're designing a 4 v1 game, you have to make it so the 4 can't just bully the 1, and DBD is already not great at that. Unless it was extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming to kill the killer, I can't see how that would result in balanced matches.
Although, now that we're thinking about it… I kind of wonder what would happen if there were some kind of ritual you could do where you sacrificed the other survivors in order to kill the killer, but probably that would just result in BM too.
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Active fighting back the killer is a bad idea.
Lot of people already said why.
But ability to kill the killer is not as bad. Or rather banish it.
This would require some gameplay changes, some of them would not be as bad for the game.
Leave core loop mostly intact, only differences are:
1. Survs cannot be killed during trial, hooks keeps them for X seconds and if noone saves them, they are removed from the hook by the Entity and put in random place at least 40m away from killer with endurance, with no pools of blood and lower noices untill performing conspicuous action. This process can repeat potentially indefinitely. (Mories makes surv becoming a ghost that can do nothing except moving but with no collision for Y seconds, with no ability to be saved).
2. Game have timer (gen speed should be balanced as long as all perks). If survs will not repair gens and turn switches before time runs out, they are sacrificed. If they do, then killer is consumed by the Entity.
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Because nobody wants to play a scary, powerful killer just to get bullied and demasculated. The funniest thing is you using Friday The 13th as the example for your argument. A well-coordinated/bully team in Friday would make this game's look like choir boys. They would make the Jason player cry with how little he could do to stop them from beating him. It's why people play 2 different Jasons, and that's it, when there's 8 playable. It's the same as this game, where you have to pick the meta killer just to play.
It's so bad, to the point where some people don't even want any more licensed killers in the game, because they don't want them to be made bullyable as well. Look no further than Myers, Freddy, and Nemesis. And those are just the most egregious examples. Really, if you look at any character except Nurse, Blight, and maybe Spirit, they're all bullyable. S tier is the standard for viability in this game; if you're below that, you're not gonna beat a good team of survivors trying to win.
Survivors have too much momentum from doing nothing special, just from an efficiency standpoint. It's to where they can screw around with Head-On/flashlight save builds, and when it seems like they're actually starting to lose, they just start to play serious and do all the gens anyway. They're BORED doing their easy objective and escaping every time, so they invent other things to do with all that spare time, chiefly bullying the killer. The solution is not to give them more stuff to do other than their objective, like hurting and killing the killer. The solution is to make their objective harder to do. Gen time increase, slowdown for SWF, killer buffs for shorter chases, bring gen defence back, weaker tiles. Any combination of these, or even just 1 of them, would be great.
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It has never turned out well for any other game. Friday, Predator, Evil Dead, Last Year, Texas Chainsaw. It just leads to group bullying, intentional or not. Texas Chainsaw, I can still stomach to play as the killers, just because I haven't played the game enough. Friday and Evil Dead, I can play as the killer, and actually like to, but I always get my hopes up just to be bully material. And Predator, same thing, because I played 1 session as killer and was already fed up with it. Nobody wants to play the power role, the 1 in the 1v4 or whatnot, to be a weak punching bag.
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It was so funny to watch VHS drop, have hype for about a week, and then slowly die, all because of this one thing that I knew was gonna kill it. From the very first gameplay I saw of it, what was the biggest thing I took from it? "Doesn't look fun. Looks like the killer's getting stunned over and over." It's the exact same thing with DBD, but it's just subtle enough to where people don't perceive it that way.
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What made what happened worse in my opinion is that the devs were told by play testers that if you can't keep at least 15% preferably 20% of the people in queue as Monsters then the game will die due to ever increasing queue times and that with the skill floor to be effective as a Teen being so much lower than that of Monster almost nobody is going to stick with Monster long enough to get to the point it is effective.
The devs could have easily seen it as every beta key wave had the exact same pattern. Keys were issued, queues were good for a week or so and then the game became a lobby simulator because so few people wanted to play Monster. This happened every single time.
I thought the game had tons of potential but it was all wasted since a very vocal segment of the playerbase couldn't accept that both sides need to have fun.
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