The Elegant Solution to Tunneling
Welcome to Dead By Daylight. A game so perfectly designed at its core that it became the sole survivor in its own Genre of Asymmetrical Horror games. A game so successful that even the developers themselves could not replicate its success with later releases of newer games. A game that even the developers didn't believe in and thought it would just be a one time release type of game, instead of a permanent live service game .A game so precious that if it hadn't been for beHaviours early gamble with this game, we would've likely never seen something like it in gaming.
But how did we get here? Maybe, you thought I was being sarcastic in the beginning, but I'm really not. Dead by Daylight is a combination of accidentally Genius ideas that came together so perfectly.
The devil is in the details, the red killer glow, the fast and slow vaults, the pallets, the scratchmarks, the lunge attacks, the randomly oriented tiles, the skillchecks. All of these mechanics have helped create the perfect setting for a chase based asymmetrical horror game in ways it's hard to imagine.
The pallets and loops are just the right length to allow for mindgames, combined with the red killer glow, and the fact that the killer has to lunge to commit to a direction, allowing a survivor who vaults to get enough time to get away, where they wouldn't have if the killer didn't lunge. How the 3rd person camera for survivor allows for safespotting and the first camera perspective for killers allows for midngames. Ideas such as "Double Backing", "respecting pallets", "Faking pallets" and more. It would be hard to truly understand just how perfectly all these mechanics fit together, and it would've been even more difficult to invent this from scratch, but from what we can understand, DBD secretly has the most genius core game design for a chase based Asymmetrical horror that could've ever been created.
The flaws
Needles to say, aside from the luckiest fluke in game design history, there have been a select few cases where the game design miracle hasn't blown over. Not for the lack of perfection from the other mechanics, but from different mechanics entirely; hooking stages & generator speeds. Causing issues like camping and tunneling, that have long been infamous among the DBD community. Although a valid strategy for killers, evidently an unfun strategy for survivors being tunnelled, which is why we should wish for the game to be balanced around not having to tunnel / proxy-camp.
Falling from grace
With a long history of DBD, the developers have tried to solve many of the problems, sometimes through perk and sometimes through adjusting the core game-design. From hatches, to end-game timers, to entity window blocking to the recent PTB changes regarding anti-tunneling with the 6 hook death rule.
I want to argue the case that in this pursuit, we have lost sight of that graceful gamedesign that sits at the core of DBD. Where newer fixes have been serving more as arbitrary and unintuitive bandaids, artificial stitches and losing it's original graceful elegance.
My goal here is to revive this pursuit, and target DBD's last remaining imperfections with the perfect gameplay design that made up the core of DBD.
New Anti-Tunnel
Let's start off by acknowledging that the current "kill a survivor before 6 hook stages = no more regression" is too clunky and arbitrary of a game-design that brings shame to the beauty that is DBD at it's core. Therefore we will discard all the current PTB changes and address the tunnel problem from a fresh perspective:
(Some of these changes will come as a surprise but I'll discuss just why after)
1. When a survivor on Deathhook is rescued by a survivor without hooking stages, 1 hooking stage transfers to the unhooking survivor (Shoulder the burden almost got it right, but with many great gameplay improvements, the devs often make the mistake of making it a perk instead of integrating it in the basegame, maybe to test it out safely first?)
2. Generators now take 120 charges
3. Survivors become better at repairing generators the longer they've repaired them for:
Formula:
(1 + MULTIPLIER * GENTIME) / GENCHARGES * GENTIME = % of a generator done
GENTIME: How long you've spent working on gens during this match in seconds (This is individual per survivor)
GENCHARGES: How many charges a generator has. Aka 120
MULTIPLIER: Decimal value by how much your gen speed increases per sec. For example 0.002
Let's put it to the test:
(1 + 0.002 * 90) / 120 * 90 = 0.885
This formula shows us working on a generator that takes 120 charges, for 90 seconds, aka the old generator time and shows us that instead of being able to finish a generator in 90 seconds like we used to, we'd only have 88.5% of a generator done, however, if we'd spent the time of 2 90 sec generators on a 120 second generator with this system we would have:
(1 + 0.002 * 180) / 120 * 180 = 2.04
Meaning we would've been able to finish 2 complete generators and it only gets better from here!
(1 + 0.002 * 270) / 120 * 270 = 3.465
If we spent the time of 3 90 seconds generators on gens on 120 second generators we would not have almost 3 and a half of a generator done!
This super simple mechanic of simply increasing your gen speed the more you've worked on gens solves so many problems magically:
1. It is now more attractive for killers to chase survivors who have been working on generators, as they are the ones that will progress the game the fastest, and previously chased survivors will be slower on progressing gens
2. Generator slowdown perks no longer snowballs the game as much on stronger killers, as even if a generator regresses, the extra repair speed on the survivor will make it easier to regain progress
3. This kills 3 genning completely! No more need for weird and artificial generator blocks that only seek to serve as bandaids for bad gamedesign.
4. Normally in DBD matches, the first chase is the most impactful, due to only 1 survivor being chased and nobody else being occupied with hooking. This can often lead to 2 generators popping even after just the single chase, which is really stressful for killers seeing nearly half of the game-objective already done. Where as this mechanics slows down the original generators from popping and makes it faster during later stages, creating for a more smooth objective completion transition
5. The game doesn't stop becoming playable after 1 survivor dies. With the increased generator speeds, survivors who have been doing gens will still stand a chance completing gens even in the end-game, as the speed automatically corrects for the dying survivors, addressing the long time issue the hatch originally tried to bandaid (Aka unplayable late-game after deaths)
Summary
With these simple gameplay changes of transferring hook stages and increasing generator speed based on time spent on gens, it becomes naturally in the killers favour to transition between survivors who have been doing generators. Tunneling people out will be harder, because 3 survivors will be able to transfer a hook stage with a deathhook survivor if they don't have one yet, which would organically create a minimum of 6 hooks before a first death of the survivors simply play right. Not only that but killers will have more time to play in a healthy way too, as they now have more time to switch between survivors and get more hook stages due to generators taking longer, as long as they target survivors who have been doing gens.
Unlike the current PTB, these 2 simple mechanics will be able to cure so many problems that a plethora of awkward unintuitive band-aid fixes have not been able to fix. It revives the lategame as a playable stage. It introduced new ways of expressing skill and creates the best of both worlds for both killer and survivor! More time for killers to kill, and more time for survivors to survive!
Thank you for listening 😘