You know a weird game that Dead By Daylight could learn a few lessons from? Granny.

I'm assuming people with kids of the right age know exactly what this game is, and everyone else has no idea. I don't know if it's a standalone thing or not, but on Roblox there's a whole sub-genre of games that are just ideas from other games. So in this class we have multiple games, Granny/Piggy/Kitty/Spider/Ronald, etc. They're all kind of like Dead By Daylight clones... sort of.

I play these with my 6 year old daughter on occasion, and find them fairly enjoyable for little free copyright-violating games (a lot of them use copyrighted assets, Piggy uses Peppa Pig characters, like I said, it's WEIRD) but they also have some cool ideas.

Rather than having to repair generators, survivors have to find semi-randomly placed keys or other key items to unlock doors to get more key items to unlock doors. Some keys open branching areas with multiple objectives, some change how you might loop the killer in one area, and some actually let you fight back a bit, kind of like the flashlight in DBD but just... a gun that stops the killer for a few seconds.

The reason I find it fun is because it's never about holding a single button for a long time, you're always moving across the map, exploring new areas.

Now, I'm not coming here to say that DBD should redesign the entire game because some bizarre free Roblox clones had some good ideas, but I do think there are design lessons in these games that could make DBD just plain more interesting. Obviously people have been asking for more objectives in DBD for a while now. I've seen the idea of having to retrieve parts before you can repair the generator brought up, and I think that's a particularly good idea, because varied gameplay and really feeling different "phases" of the game (rather than early game immediately followed by endgame, with midgame often being so short it might as well not exist) really help keep things fresh, and having more reasons to explore more of the map (and thus being more likely to run into the killer, resulting in more chases) would bring back some of that excitement.

As it stands, you just kind of make a beeline for generators, hope the guy up there can loop long enough, and repeat. Or you get slaughtered quickly.

I don't think any of this is groundbreaking ideas, but I wanted to draw attention to these games in particular because they're not just concepts -- they exist, you can try them out. They're not gonna pull any DBD player away, they're very simple and filled with kids who are AFK half the time or running on Dollar Store phones at 2FPS (and, hilariously, if your FPS is low, you move slowly for everyone else) but I think it gives a glimpse, just a tiny one, into what DBD could grow into one day, and well beyond.