2025, The Darkest Year of DbD

SoGo

Prologue: A Buggy Prelude

On the 28th of November 2024, we recieved the Doomed Course chapter. The name is quite fitting, as this chapter was seemingly doomed from the start.
The new killer, The Houndmaster, quickly joined The Twins and The Knight as the candidate for the buggiest killer ever. Her power is clunky, always bugged, somehow, and to top it off, her power design left something to be desired...
At the very least, we still got one of the best maps, and some niche, but good perks.

Chapter 1: The Screaming Terror

On the 2nd of April 2025, the Tokyo Ghoul chapter, containing only Ken Kaneki as the killer, released. The reception of this chapter was bottom of the barrel, unfortunately. The Ghoul's power was (and still is) very easy to use, with several big upsides that this power just handed to you.
There was the auto-aim, the kidnap tech, or the easy-to-maintain Enraged mode, or his two infamous add-ons - Yamori's Mask and Red-Headed Centipede, all of these paired with his frankly insane mobility have created the very first easy S Tier.
And to finish with also some negatives on the killer side, Kaneki just so happened to recieve the most earscreeching lobby "lines", screaming out of the depths of his soul every 20 seconds. Of course, you could fix this with the Legendary skin - Rize Kamishiro, but is it really good practice to spend 15$ to not hear constant screams?

Chapter 2: Pointless "Inovation"

The very next update, that arrived on the 6th of May, was the Steady Pulse chapter. Now, personally, the chapter itself was good, if overshadowed. Orela and her perks are nice additions, and we got back the sort of teasers that have made All Things Wicked great.
So.... what went wrong? The thing that went wrong were the new inovations to the ritual system, the rift and the rarities.
In hindsight, both the rift and the new quests were fine, just kind of generic. What really pissed off me and many others were the rarity changes.
WHY was the yellow rarity removed amd replaced with the blue? Why was green moved down a tier? Why did we axe the Event rarity? (BTW there were at least 5 bugs caused by this)
The answer givem to us: "To fit in with the rest of the industry and to help the new players" lost all merit by now. Becoming more generic is never a good thing, and the new players already left, so what was the point with making this game more fortnite-like? None, as far as I can tell. All in all, the rarity changes were completely unnecessary and should be reverted.

Chapter 3: Welcome FNAF, Goodbye QOL

The June (FNAF) chapter was the first sign that the QOL Initiative was failing.
The chapter itself? Great, Springtrap has a nice beginner friendly power, not too strong, so both sides have fun, and a new map full of easter eggs. The perks are a bit of a downer, especially Haywire, which proved how some ideas are just not that good in practice.
But like the last one, the center stage of „what just happened“ is once again given to the QOL part of the update. Now, credit where credit is due, the gamma changes and the auto-spending both are amazing.
On the other side, the two new systems that were supposed to ward away unsavory strategies fell flat HARD. The Go-Next detection is a program that should have never seen the light of day due to how broken it is at times. And the crows changes..... Honestly I don't get how no one expected that a feature that does 3 different things would be impossible to balance.
And as a finish, Pinhead's license was revoked. Unfortunate, but the license did change hands, and there is not really anything BHVR could do.

Chapter 4: The Walking Break

The amount of stuff that went wrong with the Walking Dead chapter is mad, and by this point going into the details would take ages, so here is a list:
- The Chandler Riggs stream
- THE BUGS
- The yellowed shoebox that is Fallen Refuge (keep in mind, this was never meant to be a full map, just a new tile for the Withered Isle maps)
- Conviction and Last Stand
- The Clown changes
- The Bugs AGAIN
- Fog Vials' entire existence
- A new wave of bad iri add-ons
- Odd changes to the Bloodsense Map
- Franklin's and Streetwise were changed for no good reason
- and more

Chapter 5: The Krasue, The Criers and The Shape

As the end of the year slowly approached, we recieved our final chapter of the year, Sinister Grace.
But before that, we first have to adress the previous update... 9.2.0. This was the last of the QOL centric updates so far, and ended horribly. This update was supposed to introduce the anti-tunnel and anti-slug measures. However, the majority opinion on them was that they were a bit too heavyhanded and that they heavily impacted normal games. Fair enough.
So, BHVR decided to postpone them until the next patch, reintroducing them in a much less heavyhanded iteration. Unfortunately, this iteration had an opposite problem, that being how ineffective it became when put into practice. And, I want to clarify here, I get that these are very difficult to execute perfectly...
But did they really have to entirely axe all of these changes, adding only 5 extra seconds to the post-unhook bonuses? Additionally, this decision shows just how much BHVR has changed - now, with a loud violent outburst, the worst parts of the community can force BHVR to seemingly do anything the whiners want. How did we even get here?
Of course, these were not the only new features. We also recieved a new killer - The Krasue, and a power rework to The Shape. And would you look at that, it's all dashslop. The Krasue has not one, but 2 dashes, a scamper (which was accordingly nerfed), and a much easier to land Unknown-esque projectile. Oh dear.
Meanwhile, Myers got a Pig dash on steroids that cuts through pallets, and 101 audio ques that warn survivors that he is stalking................ Is this supposed to be better? Because I don't see it.
Overall, this chapter only solidified this year as a failure. But hang on, there's more.....

Epilogue: Myers left :(
And just before Christmas, BHVR dropped the bad news: The Halloween License will be removed. What an ending.
To be clear, this is not the fault of BHVR. If anyone is to blame, it's the creators of the upcomming Halloween game.

So, what is the point of this whole essay?
Well, for one, I wanted to show everyone just how many times did BHVR fumble the bag this year, to remind those who have forgotten. On top of that, I would like BHVR to learn from this year. The year 10 is slowly approaching, and it would be great if this one actually went without a disaster every two weeks. And lastly, I would very much appreciate some actual QOL - bug fixes, accesibilty options, better settings and button mapping, ect.

Edit: end of March 2026 - It did not get better.