5 Game Design Issues BHVR, and Community, Need to Decide

crogers271

Half way through the final month of these forums. Reading through people's retrospectives, thinking about BHVR's history, and my own experiences on the forum, I think there are five things that BHVR seems unable to make their mind up on, which perhaps stems from disagreements in the community, about the direction for the game to go. I think if BHVR had a firm stance on these things, it would make their design decisions clearer and game discussions much healthier.

I do not think one of them is high MMR vs mid MMR vs new players balancing. I think that question is a distraction, except the new players issue which BHVR seems to have made their decision on (which is, mostly, figure it out via playing).

What Level of Survivor Skill Expression is Desired? - As much as we get 'BHVR is hand holding survivors', I think a main cause of this is when survivors have skill expression, and they actually display it, that is also complained about.

A good example was how Off the Record was discussed/nerfed. A survivor gets unhooked and is not being tunneled, instead of getting on a gen they go and bodyblock the killer's chase.

I never understood why people found this so irritating. If the OTR survivor arrives too early (the chased survivor still had things to loop), it doesn't yield much (especially if they are vulnerable to the killer switching to them). If they arrive too late, or the killer gets around them, they've wasted a lot of time.

Now if they time it right, its possible this could be a big gain. But to me, this seems like exactly the type of skill expression we should want in a game. The survivors have to engage in a risk/reward mechanic that requires decision making, coordination, and timing (obviously, easier in a SWF, but that's going to be true for anything in the game).

The alternative to 'skill expression' elements is not just 'nothing' for survivors. Whatever sided you think BHVR might be, they are going to give at least something to the other side (or the game would very quickly die). And if you take away things like this, you're going to end up with more hand holdy type mechanics.

Do we Solve Issues with Perks or Basekit Changes - The game has gone through various 'do you have the right perk to solve this' gameplay. 3 genning Chess Merchant? Need potential energy. Facing camping Bubba? Reassurance for the 3E. Slugging, especially with old Knock Out? If you aren't in a SWF, hope for anti-slug. Full hexes with busted thrill? Counterforce. Tunneling? Well, that one is still with us.

These also all share the issue of being not just too strong, but usually boring

Now DbD will always be impacted on whether one side brings the right or wrong perks/killer/addons vs the other side, that's probably an inevitable part of the game design. But I'm talking about the true extremes. Chessmerchant is a good example. With potential energy? Survivors huge advantage. No potential energy? Chances were pretty low.

My opinion is that these extremes should be eliminated. For the most part, I thought that was the direction we were headed. Extreme 3 genning and facecamping where addressed, busted thrill didn't last too long, and knock out got changed. The finishing touch I thought would be anti-slug/anti-tunnel, but they went overboard on that and then dropped it.

But some people seem to enjoy the game of 'guess the meta'. I just hope BHVR reaches a decision on what they want the game to be so they can apply that to how they design/talk about perks.

One Sided Skill Elements - If a survivor can reliably hit hyperfocus, there's practically nothing the killer can do about it other than guess right on which survivor they chase first. The skill expression there is totally one sided. Not many survivors can pull it off reliably, but if they can, not sure what the killer is expected to do.

There's more examples like this, hyperfocus just stands out as the extreme.

And while some people seem to like this as long as it has some element of skill expression (reflexes), personally I find the non-interactive skill elements bad game design (to repeat what I said earlier, they are probably somewhat inevitable to this type of game, but if they are completely game deciding that's bad).

Killer Queue - Are we just going to live with it being longer generally and massive during 2v8? I guess we can, just saying that killers have the 'play while you wait' option and they can do that or just wait. Right now BHVR seems to have accepted its just a thing, if they wanted something different they'd have to make some pretty radical changes.

Game Change/Meta Shakeup (sigh, Scott Jund did a video yesterday mentioning some of this, I need to post faster) - Do we actually want it to happen? Not, what is your personal wish for the meta shakeup, but is a shakeup worth the risk even if you don't get your way?

I'm not talking about something like the 'perk meta shakeup', but something that actually alters the game. Probably the closest was the anti-tunnel/anti-slug which, despite absurdly being called Quality of Life, was a massive alteration to the game.

If they ever go through with something like that, the first couple weeks are going to be chaotic. There's no way they'll get the values right off the bat, or potentially even close, and adjustments will need to be made.

Personally, I think they should do more incremental changes, but what I really want, is for them to stop going big if they don't actually mean it. If they don't waste time on the things that are never going to happen, they would have more time for other game improvements and maybe getting us more game modes that could have some radical differences.

Also, I think it would help BHVR if we actually believed them on this. Looking back a little over a year I find it funny how many people were predicting they would back out of whatever changes they implemented, even before we knew what they were going to do.