A Cry For Help
I love this game. I play this game competitively (loser alert, I know) BECAUSE I ENJOY THIS GAME at its base. It is fun when the game isn't this screwed up. It is an addicting experience, you want to get better, play better, escape as survivor, kill as killer. I've met some great people on this game, I've had tons of fun with my newer friends on this game.
Which is why it's so hard, but also so easy, to make this post in the current moment. This game is in one of the sorriest states it has probably been ever. There are bugs from the START of you trying to get into a game. Sometimes you can't join parties for a good few minutes at a time, and sometimes you can't even start your own party. There are bugs in the OFFERING SCREEN. IT IS QUITE POSSIBLY THE EASIEST THING IN THIS GAME NOT TO HAVE BUGS IN? There is a large steel girder just in the offering screen, from the new main menu screen. How? This wasn't in ptb, so something happened from ptb to release. THIS HAPPENS 100% OF THE TIME. THEY DIDN'T EVEN PLAY A SINGLE GAME FOR QA OF THIS RELEASE.
The new survivors Rick, Michonne, and (Outfit for Rick) Daryl all have voice lines. Andrew Lincoln (Rick) and Norman Reedus (Daryl) have voice lines. The other 90% of voices or noises are not Andrew Lincoln or Norman Reedus. It is immediately jarring to hear them in a voice line talking to each other (cool and unique feature they added) and then they scream or grunt or moan and it is so obviously not them. They didn't even get Michonne's VA to do her lines. in one of Michonne's voice lines you can hear the director say it was a good take (very hard to hear truth be told, but it's there.)
They added a new "map" (You can not call these 2 "new" tiles a whole new map. These tiles are in the game currently, they added nothing new or unique for the Walking Dead map) The filter for the map is also so dark yellow it makes it so hard to see anything at all.
Bad Segue into this next point-Developer Clarity, Communication, whatever it needs to be called and addressed. This new map was on the PTB ( They release the patch 3 weeks in advanced for testing, but this time around they didn't even listen to player feedback at all?) This new map WAS NOT a map they planned to release, but instead, was a placeholder for those Walking Dead tiles. There was a rumor that they would just spawn on any other map IF AND ONLY IF there was a character from the new chapter. (Rick, Michonne, Daryl) They never confirmed this on the PTB. They then went ahead and dropped this placeholder map as a WHOLE MAP. The rumor carried over to the map. They never confirmed or denied this rumor. Why? This is something you, as a game developer and/or social media representative should instantly tell people who play this game. The rumor is not true, you can play this map with whomever you want. The weekend before this chapter dropped, they turned off the dc penalty they had in place (ever increasing timers you would have to wait if you dc'd for any reason, internet problems, purposely dcing, etc. They did not give you a penalty if the server just shits out. (Happens a lot more than you would like to.)) Behaviour Interactive DID NOT tell people this, anywhere. I learned about it from a leaker on Twitter. Would it surprise you to know that almost every single game I played that weekend had people dcing in it, and only when you played with friends it probably wouldn't happen, but killers would also DC en masse if their game was going poorly!! This is the first time in a long time I've had so many ruined matches or the game would just end. Behaviour was probably testing something for turning off the dc penalty, but why would you not tell your general player base you were doing this for a weekend??
No flame or hate towards these next 6 people, but some time this past week (July 22nd) Behaviour paid 6 people to sit on a reddit AMA for the whole day. Almost all (I will not make broad assumptions, just from what I saw) of the questions they answered were answered with "soon" "we can't talk about that right now" or some other dumb company jargon to avoid actually answering the question. Why are you guys doing a reddit ama if you can't tell us things that are more important than outfit collections we actually ask you guys about. They discuss bugs in the game, saying "they're intended" and when people get in an uproar about it they later say "it's not intended and we're working on it" This has happened more times than I care to even count. They have communication issues on a reddit AMA. They have communication issues everywhere else possible. It is insane. Why are the people who are supposed to be our connection to this company and all that's going on it with their game, events, etc. either left in the dark or purposely omitting things that WE SHOULD KNOW.
Side Tangent-Their general philosophy on skill. I play 90% survivor and 10% killer. I like to play killer and I like to imagine I'm decently good at it, just want to clarify that I do not intend to be biased at all with this next section. I do not understand why they continue to make this game easier for both sides at the same time. They buff problematic perks on one side, they nerf bad (but useful situationally) perks on the other. They buff problematic perks on the other side, they buff killers to the point of frustration, they remove all skill expression from that killer. They buff survivor INSANELY to the point that as long as you're not completely terrible at the game that you and your team will get a tie at the very worst against 90-95% of the killers. Killers get frustrated and play the overly buffed or strong killers because they want to win as well.
Enter the Tokyo Ghoul chapter and Ken Kaneki. Small tweaks and this killer would be great to go against. He has a high skill ceiling and the chases you have against him are nailbiting and adrenaline filled. His skill floor is under Hell itself. His problematic add-ons are legitimately disgusting and (mostly) easy to acquire, and you almost always get this killer on a map with about 5 pallets. This killer is so strong that they legitimately added a cooldown to his power when you break a pallet with him. The cooldown doesn't work if he had used his power to get to you, and then breaks the pallet, so instead of 8 seconds, it's like 4 or 5? This killer is plagued with bugs. This one is useful to the killer, the other ones are mostly not. In fact, a majority of them hinder you from ever WANTING to perform at a higher skill ceiling. Cut offs are impossible 99% of the time, so mostly everyone plays in a boring way and tries to cheese you with enraged vaults. It's low risk, high reward gameplay that doesn't teach the killer how to get better at the killer at all. He has another bug people have dubbed "The Kidnap Tech" I won't go into specifics, but the killer locks you in place if you move away from a pallet or window while he vaults the pallet or window, stopping right behind you only to instantly m1 and down you with no input from the survivor. This is the bug they said was intended on reddit and stepped back once people got upset enough. This bug alone is so antithetical to the way you should play against this killer that it should have been removed the second people started abusing it.
In fact there are bugs across all killers in this game, ranging from years long to just this patch. A good majority of them legitimately ruin many games for the killer. You would be pressed to find one killer that doesn't have a large amount of glitches ranging from goofy to gamebreaking. Most of these bugs have been hit with "A fix will come soon" when asked when they would be fixed. Currently, there are 774 pages of bug reportings on the forums. 774. While I am making this post I saw 2 new bugs I've never seen before in a friend's game.
Fog Vials. Oh man, where do I even begin. This item has been crafted, tested, and researched for about a year now. They were introduced in Dead by Daylight's 2024 Halloween event, as a void crystal. It would obscure about one small tile but if you were in it, it was still easy to see people through them. They came with a bug where sometimes you just weren't able to get into a chase as a killer. This severely hindered the weaker side of killers (about 70%ish? I would say) who were not able to ever gain bloodlust and the entity blocker would not block windows, essentially creating infinites on killers again. People complained about this issue through the entire event. The PTB started, we have our fog vials, and I am just beyond confused about how they made them worse, accessibility and gameplay wise. They are no longer a one time use, they are on a 70-60 second cooldown (the average time for chases is a minute+ on both high and low mmr last time they showed us) with an addon that can take off 5 seconds. They have add-ons that make them expand wider, they have an add-on that obscures the fog even more. The base fog vial cloud size is legitimately about the size of killer shack. They distorted noise heavily, if not cut it off all together. It conceals scratch marks (about 50% of the time, even though it says all scratch marks), it conceals auras for both killer and survivor, if a teammate goes down in a fog cloud and you're trying to go for a save, you might not even know where they're at unless you're on comms. The iridescent add on is a legitimate nightmare for a lot of people who may be hard of hearing or seeing (I haven't had this issue yet, but there are people out there who will.) A lot of people are using this wrong if they want the full value out of it. You use it as early as hell, or to conceal a chase that you can't really track because of high walls and other things, and you will probably lose the chase around 90% of the time. Speaking of losing chase, sometimes you wouldn't even get chase!! The bug was back in the ptb, full swing baby. We release the vials to live. Do you think the bug went anywhere? All they did was nerf the iri very very slightly by decreasing the size of the cloud by 25% and the lifetime of the cloud by 50%. How was this vetted twice before this was an actual item in the live servers and we made the item worse to face and fixed none of the bugs? The chase bug was patched in a hotfix, 9 months or so after we called it out for them.
THIS CHAPTER HAS COOL THINGS. I know I have been exceedingly negative about all of this stuff. The conversations The Walking Dead characters have are cool as hell and I would love to see more of that. The main menu screen looks great, and the (slightly loud) theme song is fun to hear. Having presets for outfits and more presets for classes is such an excellent idea. They switched their battle pass to be more like fortnite's. It is more casual friendly and has some fun quests. This chapter they added what would be like kickstarter quests on fortnite: easy tutorial-ish challenges that teach newer players how to do mechanics that are in the game. This is where the positivity ends on this chapter. We just had the biggest influx of players we have ever had because of the Five Night's at Freddy's chapter. Why was this not introduced to the largest group of gamers that have probably never played an asym before? The tutorial still is hardly anything close to enough for a large majority of players to actually learn the things they need to know to play this game.
Behaviour is either listening to too many people at once, or nobody at all. Changes that nobody sensible and passionate about this game would ask for. Bugs, problem areas, things that should be killswitched are allowed to be in this game for an unacceptable amount of time. They retired Fog Whisperers, now they have whatever they have now but it's still people that play this game for a living, who (for the most part) know what is good and what is bad for this game. Do you guys need more people to do that for you? Do you not outsource these patches and builds for them to play and tell you what you could do better, what needs to be removed, et cetera? Seeing the steel girder in the offering screen, it seems you guys don't even do it in your own company.
In a question about seeing MMR on the reddit AMA, one of the employees stated "Fun is the number one driving force in this game." Where is the fun for the average (or below average) person who decides to play this game because someone like me asks them to? You release bugged and problematic content that most casual players will never want to learn against or it will take them too long to learn because THIS IS supposed to be a goofy, fun game. Survivors (in swfs and even out of) can now abuse 2 out of 3 of michonne's perks that also come with bugs that make them incredibly frustrating to face. Killers react, and in turn play problematic things that the average survivor will have no idea how to counter because the tutorial system is a floundering, fish out of water nothing burger.
I was very very excited to buy Daryl. I love Norman Reedus. I love Death Stranding, and it is cool as ######### to get to play him. I have money sitting in my steam wallet scratching to get this outfit. I will not buy it. This level of half-assery is very disrespectful. It's disrespectful towards AMC, it's disrespectful towards the people who keep your company alive. What if other horror licenses see this disgusting, unpolished chapter you throw in our laps and cut deals with Behaviour, avoid putting a beloved horror icon in this game entirely?
This ineptitude is pathetic at best and malicious at worst. Things can not continue the way that they are.
-A superfan who wants the best for this game because I love it.