http://dbd.game/killswitch
DBD NEEDS a tutorial overhaul
So I was playing Skull Merchant earlier and I had this conversation in end-game
The conversation was very lovely, This player just wanted to know why I was so fast and I explained to them that SM's power Hinders them and gives me Haste after they get scanned 3 times, they took this information in, expressed their thanks, and then we moved on.
But this conversation sat in my mind for a while, for one main reason, the only reason it happened was because they had no idea how SM works. Now, granted, that's not a uncommon thing, SM has like 6 people actually playing her at any time and plenty of the community to this day still thinks she can hold 3 gens for a hour despite that playstyle being dead and buried for 2 years, but it did raise a question to me, how differently would this conversation have gone, and how differently would they have played, if they knew how the power worked? In fact, how many players both new and old alike just have no idea how some parts of some powers work?
Dead By Daylight has famously never been easy to get into due t o how much stuff players are expected to learn, and that problem has only ever become worse with every new Killer and every new mechanic added. You have to learn how 40 different Killers work, you have to learn how Perks work and the various interactions they have, you have to learn how the maps are laid out, what the best ways to loop are, etc etc etc.
And you want to know how much of this the game's official tutorial teaches you? Precisely god-damn nothing.
DBD's in-game tutorial teaches you how vaults work, how to heal, how to do the objective, and how to play against Trapper, that is it. It doesn't teach you how to play against Wraith, or Hillbilly, or Plague, or Legion, or anyone else, this is THE biggest reason why so many people get discouraged from playing and why newbies are as bad at DBD as they are, the game's learning process is essentially "Here are the basics, figure out everything else by yourself", and while that can be fun in games like Warframe that are mostly singleplayer, a multiplayer game where your performance can affect the rest of your team NEEDs a robust and actually useful tutorial to teach newbies what to do.
I'm not asking for some grand multi hour long tutorial that shows people each individual Tech and quirk of every Killer's power, what I am asking is for something that's actually useful, hell if you don't want to bother doing that then just link various Community resources like the wiki or YT Guides to a little drop-down menu, give new players something to teach them how Killers work so that they don't have to learn via Trial by Fire and hinder their team, or, even better, add Killer Bots to Custom Matches, they existed in 2v8, I know that they are something you can do BHVR, port them over to Customs and add one for the rest of the roster.
You want new players drawn in by licenses to stay in the game and spend money on cosmetics BHVR? Give them a helping hand and show them how the game works, instead of showing them the bare essentials and throwing them to the wolves.
G'night
Comments
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The best way to understand a killer is to play them. Making a custom match with bots is the easiest way to do that. Imo BHVR should add a separate custom match lobby from the current one. In that lobby you have access to every original killer and any licensed killer that you've purchased. That way you can practice and learn a killers power without the need to buy them.
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DBD also needs its killers to be balanced better. There's currently no reason to play against Nurse, Blight, and Ghoul. They're fundamentally overpowered and unhealthy. Every other killer has some level of counterplay, but these three are notorious for being pointless to try against if the player knows what they're doing and wants to win. Why the developers continue to look the other way while Ghoul gets more disconnects and salt than I've seen with Skull Merchant, and Blight continues to dominate with one thousand plus victories in a row, I'll never know.
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The community tends to minimise just how difficult survivor can be to learn. It's not just 'oh you sit on a gen and learn to loop tiles, easy.' There's literally 39 killers with different powers/items, add ons, etc, that you need at least some basic knowledge of in order to adequately counter and stand a chance. The tutorial is woefully outdated.
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Well said, my friend, I agree.
And I might add that this new player experience got increasingly harder as the years went by, because there were many more killers / add-ons / perks and even maps to learn.
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Personally, I find survivor to be even more difficult to pick up than killer.
Because, as killer, you at least have Wraith and Huntress, that work in a really simple way and are easy to understand, and in Wraith's case easy to master.
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I agree with this sentiment completely.
Many things are hard to understand from the get-go, so a more up-to-date tutorial and a direct access to the wiki in-game would be great to teach newbies what to do, as well as practice rounds for every killer.
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The problem is it cant be a proper tutorial cause the game is updated every 3 months.
The tutorial we have costs way too much to maintain and does not give good enough education on the issues.
An ingame world minigame is just not feasible in the long term.I suggest video lessons; made by the the actual game designers, pointing out how a user is managing playing the game.
Why because having someone who knows whats going on telling you and why one should do what is much better than trying to do a session of self-discovery which may or may not have the results we are looking for.The problem is, all tutorial that BHVR has done are done as an immersive experience themselves, the narrator is speaking in highly poetic language, there is blaring music and the content is too basic to matter at higher levels of play, we need better video lessons. Desperately and one on playing and playing against each Killer.
I think the real problem is that BHVR realizes the game is too big for proper tutorials to be feasible so its easier to ignore this problem or let youtubers fix it.
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I don't think they could craft a DBD tutorial that's much better than current at onboarding it wouldn't hurt to expand it a little bit though. Community created content is just much better at explaining the intricacies of the game.
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I've been suggesting this for a while as well. With the growing killer roster, the old blanket statement of "Just play the killers to understand their counterplay" isn't going to cut it anymore. Every new chapter should come with a tutorial for the new perks as well as killer power explanation WITH counterplay examples as well as map walkthrough with possible gen/totem spawns
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The answer should never be "go YouTube or Twitch it". But what makes it difficult for DBD is the huge amount of killer powers, perks, add-ons, and especially game sense needed to know, and it's ever increasing too.
The new player experience has always been rancid, no matter which role they start out on.
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