I love this game, and I'm sad to see it in this state.

AGM

This is an open letter to the dev team and corporate leadership.

I'm not trying to be mean, but I'm not going to mince words here, and I hope you take this as the constructive criticism it is intended to be, despite it being so negative.

The Walking Dead Chapter, and subsequent developer communication, has been, to put it lightly, an embarrassing fiasco.

This game is a product that I have paid for, and I expect it to work. You could have delayed this patch to fix things. You should have delayed it. But you didn't and now you're getting the pushback you deserve. The sheer number of bugs, the lack of polish, and the incompetence displayed by this company upon the release of this chapter, as well as the subsequent communications from community management are baffling.

Your social media team and community managers can't even be trusted to provide accurate information anymore.

"Does the walking dead chapter come with a new map?"

• BHVR: "No, just an easter egg tile if you play as a Walking Dead character in a certain realm."
• BHVR: "Wait, no, you don't need to play as them for the tile to appear."
• BHVR: "Just kidding, it actually is a new map!"

"Why haven't you kill switched Streetwise yet?"

• BHVR: "This doesn't meet the criteria of 'game breaking'."
• Also BHVR: Kill switched a Skull Merchant add-on that allowed her to infinitely increase her vaulting and break action speeds.
• Also BHVR: Kill switched Nemesis for an inferior level of "broken-ness". (Context: His special attack wasn't being counted as having performed any attack, allowing him to abuse Play With Your Food.)
• Also BHVR: "We never kill switched Merciless Storm because it wasn't game breaking." (Context: At one point, hitting each Merciless Storm skill check considerably reduced the amount of progress on that generator for each skill check hit, potentially forever. Shortly after, it had another bug where failing a Merciless Storm skill check caused generators to lose a gigantic chunk of generator progress. And yes, Merciless Storm was indeed kill switched at some point during this saga.)

I hope you can see why I don't trust developers' communications anymore. The mouth pieces for this game don't even know basic facts like whether Merciless Storm had been kill switched… It only took a simple google search to self fact check before communicating this, but you guys couldn't even be bothered to do that.

Moving on to the actual in-game side of things…

Your team in charge of quality assurance dropped the ball into the mantle of the Earth.

• Chases not starting (that you had to put out a hot fix for)
• Not being able to make a party as survivor (even if you are playing alone)
• Gideon Meat Plant causing a ridiculous number of bugs. That is, before you kill switched it, as you should have, because it broke the game.
• You can hear a director in one of Michonne's voice lines. Great take, btw.
• Streetwise is game breaking.
• Blood Rush + Sprint Burst is game breaking.
• Last Stand breaks survivors' hit boxes while vaulting.
• Fog vials break Singularity's power
• Houndmaster and Twins are still barely functional.
• Dramaturgy can give items with retired add-ons
• And much more that apparently "nobody is talking about" according to one community manager. These never should have made it to live in the first place.

Many of these issues were even brought up during the PTB. In the most charitable interpretation, the devs just didn't have enough time to fix them. In the least, they just didn't care to fix them, either due to laziness or lack of technical expertise.

Even the team in charge of balance changes to old content failed spectacularly with their changes to Clown that nobody asked for, while ignoring the elephant-sized Ghoul in the room. (Though, they at least listened in regards to changes to Knight and kept the QoL additions, so credit where it's due.)

The team in charge of new content couldn't get it right either, considering how Michonne's voice lines turned out, how Rick sometimes screams directly in your ears despite being nowhere near you, how one perk unintentionally essentially gives invincibility frames while vaulting, and another perk has such obvious, ridiculous synergy that a killer can't even go through their attack cooldown and vault a window to try to pick up a survivor before the survivor can pick themselves up. The map genuinely looks like it was just supposed to be a test map for the easter egg tile, thrown together at the last minute. And as funny as some people may find it, who saw the girder on the loading screen and thought "Job well done."?

The FNAF chapter wasn't perfect, but compared to this… it was a dream. Do you really think that The Walking Dead license holders are happy with this? After seeing how disrespectfully you treated the IP, I can't help but think that they're fine with this bottom of the barrel level of quality and tone deafness regarding consumer dissatisfaction, which, as someone unfamiliar with the IP, makes me want to avoid The Walking Dead. If I were a license holder of a horror IP, the way you treated this chapter would absolutely have me second guessing any collaboration with BHVR.

Take a minute to remember why y'all have jobs working on this game to begin with: because we players love this game enough to pay for stuff you make and the service you provide. And you've made some really great stuff over the years! I genuinely thank you for helping me have a ton of fun and make some amazing memories!

But right now… it feels like nobody working on this game realizes or even cares just how bad the state of the game is in. Even friends relatively new to DBD can see that this release feels so sloppy that it's obvious to them that you need more time for quality assurance and game health between major releases.

I can't in good conscience spend money on this game when you insist on shipping updates that are this broken. I genuinely wish you all the best in your attempts to fix the game.

DarKStaR350z

The loading screen is baffling to me. Like did no one even load into a single game before sending the update live, or did they see it and just think oh well this is fine just send it live as is. I mean after all there are worse bugs they sent live right.