Feedback for UI & Animation

Honestly i actually like the UI and the Animations are the best to me and the music with the hillbilly is actually good i dont have any complaints with the update yall did amazing

There's little I need to say as it has already been said at length by practically every single human who plays this game. UI is terrible, animations are questionable, and Clown's changes seem underwhelming.

I'm less upset with the bad and confusing changes (I've just come to expect that from BHVR at this point) and more upset with the fact that the PTB's appear to be completely pointless beyond creating a false sense of dev/player collaboration.

Consistently, we are provided with Player Test Builds that are barely functional, and therefore our feedback is also mostly useless. It's like handing us a cup with no bottom and asking us to drink from it. It's insulting.

We've had builds where the Killer powers don't work (Ghost Face, Blight), builds with massive mechanical oversights that begs the question of whether or not the devs play their own game (The Twins), and never in these instances are the players afforded the opportunity to play a revised build that is actually functional. In many cases, a functional version doesn't even make it to the live version. PTB's should be about testing the minutia, the fine-tuning, not asking your players to identify the broken sh*t your own play-testers should have spotted on day one.

The saddest part is, even if the DBD devs were just hopelessly inept at what they do, they could still save themselves by simply honoring what the PTB is for: PLAYER FEEDBACK.

Not only are they not listening to the feedback, they are outright ignoring it. Changes requested by the community en masse are routinely ignored, while changes nobody asked for are regularly implemented. Sometimes they listen, but usually only to roll back some bad change they made in the first place. Comments like the one recently made by not_Queen about how the UI now cannot be changed back (which is total bullsh*t btw) despite a resoundingly negative response from the community, also indicates that BHVR just kind of just makes whatever decisions they want without actually waiting to hear from us.

So again, the point of the PTB is what, exactly?

Fingers crossed for a DbD competitor with some actual staying power that gives BHVR a run for their money. We'll see how quickly they change their business model when there's actual competition.

The ui is too spread out. Playing killer especially i have to look in EVERY corner of my screen for the info I need. Where before it was all nice in tidy in one general area. I like the ambition, however at least put the new stuff in the same configuration. At least as an option. And the animations are sooooooo bad the old ones were so much better the new ones are quite creepy and unsettling actually. And as killer its much more difficult to tell the difference between injured and healthy survivors. And the last thing but NOT least the super strange and unfair hits happening, I've noticed them on both sides. More noticeable on survivor. As killer I have been noticing me sometimes getting hits i should have NEVER gotten even with lag. Thank you for reading this 🙂

I've spent three years playing this game, where looking at the bottom-left would give me all the information I needed. This update in no way addresses the fact that I, and many others, are already accustomed to looking there, and now all we have in its place is the killer power/survivor item. Instead everyone is now forced to memorize where every bit of information is, which means darting your eyes all over the screen. I don't think I'll ever break the habit of glancing to the bottom-left because, again, three years we've spent building this habit. If you had kept the most important info there, such as generator progress or survivor states, it wouldn't have been too bad. But now I don't even bother checking because of how much it demands you look away from the center of the screen, which is suicide in this game.

In short, please make the bottom-left portion have the most important information, not what killer you're playing as.

Please listen to players. You received a ton of feedback during the PTB about the UI and only changed the injured status indication. I don't find the slash reliable and also moving the placement of survivors to the upper left corner is horrible and not something I think I would get used to. The focus is the bottom left.

As for the animations I don't get why they were changed to standing up completely straight. There's a killer around, don't they want to be slightly slouched as before? Injured animations feels too stiff and awkward. Dying state however is a great improvement.

Feedback for the new UI / HUD:

• There are too many unnecessary information given by the new UI. It is absolutely unimportant how many total hooks i had as a killer. Instead it would be more interesting to see how many times each survivor was hooked.
• The placement of the UI elements is completely confusing, unintuitive and asymmetrical. There are way too many different spots to look at. The old UI did this way better because there was only one place to look at (maybe two if you want to see perk cooldowns).
• Adding the character portraits takes away the immersive feeling and the effects shown look very cheap and unclear. Furthermore the hook and mending timers are way too small and hard to see.
• The whole UI seems more drawn to the center of the screen which i really dislike. It limits my FOV for actual ingame events happening.

Feedback for the new movement:

• Most of the new animations look extremely unnatural and cheap. Standing survivors look like meerkats looking for predators. The walking animation seems like the steps are not fitting the actual distance a survivor makes (asynchronous).
• The transitions between different movement animations are clunky and bizarre. For example survivors who are crawling and turning around look like their Spines are completely broken.
• The new camera position for survivors negatively affects my gameplay. It feels like i can't move the camera as freely as before and sometimes i am so close to my survivor it is hard to look around. Even when i am hooked it is difficult to look around what my teammates are doing because 80% of my screen is blocked by my survivor and the entitiy/ hook.
• Compared to the old movement aniomations the new ones look worse in every aspect.

As a DBD veteran with more than 4000 hours playtime i am extremely disappointed in the devs because these changes and the decision behind them to not listen to the community at all after getting so much negative feedback for the PTB makes me feel like they don't care about us and the health of the game.

HUD

For mofe dumb that it sounds, it hurts physically. I played two matches and got headache, slight dizziness and my eyes hurt. I was rather tired when starting to play, which probably made the effect stronger; but I'll still minimize by dbd playtime untill the hotfix comes.

Gameplay-wise it seems significantly more complicated to keep track of what's going on on the map, cause hud is spread across the whole screen. As a minor stand-alone point, deep wound status effect is much harder to notice than before.

Animations

It does look okay; a bit awkward, but previous one didn't look quite realistic either. I have a neutral attitude towards this update.

Moonwalking feels a bit clumpsy, but that's about it.

Alright im gonna give a short, but constructive respons about this new update. I will not talk about the perks, mainly i'd to talk about new animations, the ui, and the overall graphics update and how i feel about all of this. The new animations feel too janky and unrealistic, especially the injured ones, like who the hell leans over so much while holding their hand on their torso, the other hand is not even doing anything lmao. Also the stand up animations, they're clearly shouting "woo killer, i'm not even trying to hide here come to meee"

I personally think the ui isn't all that great, it's not as easily accesible as the older version, who cares if you can scale it up or down, you'd have to squint your eyes to read anything, and that takes time. Scaling it up would cover up too much and make it even worse. Now the graphics, the graphics are one of the most important factors in the game for me, i loved how simple and eary they used to be, now they don't fit the theme of this game as much and it seems like they're trying to pack and make it look as filled as possible. I prefered dried out colors, and how everything was emptier and not packed in one spot. Ofcourse, i would rather not send any hate towards Dead By Daylight's developer team, i actually like how they're trying to test out new things, good job team.

Killers should be given the same hook count widget as Survivors.

The dev's comment of "the concern we have is this would encourage tunneling a bit too much" seems completely illogical to me considering if a killer is going to tunnel they'll still do exactly what they do now and go back to the hook as soon as the survivor is unhooked and only chase them with no need for the counter.

I'm not one to post comments about updates normally and let the Devs do their thing because most of the time its minor but I would like to share my thoughts and try to be part of the solution in this community. I only have 1250+ hours so not much compared to some people who have played this game but I feel I have a good grasp of how this game works and is played. Also, for people reading I would like to say that I play both killer and survivor normally so this isn't a biased opinion on one side or another.

First the UI... short but sweet. Its too spread out. I do appreciate the small changes such as the character portraits and the hook counts. Also the skill checks seem much more smooth.

The locomotion... whew. Ok lets go killer side first because I do have more hours as survivor. As a killer with this new movement. It is so much easier to hit survivors with killers such as Billy and Huntress for example; the jukes are almost non-existent. Its too easy and not satisfying playing killers like that with high skill ceilings such as them. So of course killer mains I can understand if you hate playing survivor and you like the new movements. As a survivor though, I don't like it. First of all I feel in my opinion there was no reason to chance the movement. It was satisfying and fluid. Now its clunky and feels like you're a robot or made of wood or something. There isn't creative movement, no fluidity. The injured animation.... just no. We just want to have our creative flow back to 180 and 360, its fun and its satisfying when it works, please don't take that away from us. The one animation I like is the new crawl inside the hatch, its nice and makes sense.

I know this won't happen but to get my point across on the movement. I would 200% rather have you bring back old Undying just to have old movement back.

This isn't like the normal patches with people rage about perk changes and fixes. They are just perks, don't use them. This is much different. This is the actual gameplay regardless of perks or items/addons. This effects every single lobby that you join.

Thanks for reading.

I don’t like the HUD but I feel like I can get used to it. The biggest problem is the movement. I can no longer 360 and it is very hard to dodge huntress hatchets. Please revert the animations and survivor movements.

Not sure how to feel about this. It looks more in place than the new UI does, but it has some problems too.

To me, this UI looks a bit too cluttered. There's so much information in one place, it's hard to find what you need. And not necessarily because the placement is random or anything, but rather because there are so many different icons and bars with different level of detail there. The old icons worked because they were simple and easy to read.

I suppose it's better than the new UI because it's not all over the place, but this one is... almost ALL at one place.

ALSO:

Pointed out some more issues with the new UI in this post in case you wanna read it.

Negative review -- Highly disappointed

I understand you guys spent all this time and money into developing the new UI but it's not good for the game. Everything is scattered all over the screen so gathering any form of information is extremely difficult not to mention focus on. It's not easy to track, the placement of things before was good, and with all things considered, I think having the ability to move the HUD to how we prefer it would be a good option, keep the new style icons but have things placed where they were before.

Compared to the original HUB this update is not intuitive nor helpful to new players; In all honestly it only makes me not want to play the game which really sucks because I've been super hyped about it with my friends this past month or two

If the developers are reading this I really hope you listen to the community.

Please keep up the hard work; you are appreciated.

New UI - The new UI seems to have only be made to make the game look "better", but it goes against what the player base needs. Revert to the old UI, and if you want to have it so you can see what survivor each person is playing, use the adept achievement icons, as they fit the artstyle of the game.

New Survivor Locomotive Animations - These are really bad. The movement is something players actually don't want updated, as many hardcore players are continuing to play this game just to master all of the unique options you have with the movement. (360ing, moonwalking, variations of moonwalking such as aaron teching, etc.)

Hitboxes - I am very confused how hitboxes were changed but survivor hitboxes seem to have become bigger. Please also revert this, as I have seen many clips of killers clearly not hitting survivors and the swing still connecting.

I'd be more okay with this change if we could change the size pf the different widgets because holy moly they are hard to see!

There was literally nothing wrong with the old UI/placements. This is worse in just about every way.

DbD gameplay takes place in the middle and top corners of the screen. Very rarely does it take place in the bottom corners. You've shifted UI elements to where they block gameplay. Consider Nurse when she bobs her head during the fatigue animation. Nurse players watch the top corners of the screen to track survivors. You're needlessly obscuring sight with UI elements.

The hook timer is hard to read. High level DbD play requires hook state management down to seconds.

The gen counter is at the top of the screen for some reason and again, difficult to read.

I have 3000 hours in this game. Why are you telling me to repair gens, stop survivors from escaping, etc.? Stop cluttering my screen.

Buff/debuff timers are difficult to read

Scoring events are often key bits of information. For some reason these are tucked in the top right corner. Like knowing when someone entered struggle state is huge for a killer. You have a difficult to decipher hook timer and obscure placement on scoring events. Why?

Everything is so spread out and difficult to read. I feel like I need 4 eyes.

We've been using hook counter overlays in tournaments for years. They fit perfectly with the old UI elements.

Again, I can't stress this enough, NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH THE OLD UI ELEMENTS/PLACEMENTS.

Stop being stubborn about this. Please.

Most people would want to see this changed. We understand the work that went into it but, consider asking the community next time about these things before allocating resources and time into useless projects. Have a dedicated team from the community be a part of yours just for communication under NDA's so that we can at least tell you guys when somthing is BAD and NOT WANTED by majority of your player base.

Aside from that, The movement is ok, although standing and the injured running animations look quite bad. Clown should have his own reload key, pressing Ctrl once and having it sometimes not switch is a bit frustration, when the game decides I want to switch instead of reload.

I felt compelled to create an account just to voice some of my concerns going forward both with these changes and BHVR's actions up until this point.

I feel it necessary to question what exactly the point of the PTB is? All of the concerns being heard were voiced previously during the PTB. The community has been ranting for a long while now that these changes will cause problems if implemented. The fact that as a community our concerns were essentially ignored has convinced me that the PTB is little more than a method of building hype around upcoming changes to motivate people to either return to the game to check out the new content or to purchase the game when new killers are shown off. So if I can be brutally honest for a moment I think the purpose of the PTB has become deceptive as clearly our criticisms amount to very little beyond adding a slash icon over injured survivor's portraits. Thanks I guess?

Now, to the changes. As far as the locomotion with survivors is concerned and their animations as someone who plays probably 60% Killer and 40& Survivor I find the animations unintentionally humorous. What was once a fearful, tense run animation has now become what appears to be a jaunty jog without a care in the world. Instead of warily hunched over looking around nervously survivors now stand super upright with confidence while unmoving. The other animations I can live with but, the standing, walking, and running animations look very..silly for lack of a better word as if the meme of Survivors being the threatening monsters and killers being the weak victims has actually become a reality. The Survivors don't look like they are in life and death situations anymore. It's just all around a bizarre change tonally. I can't speak to the ability to juke with the new animations as I'm only an adequate survivor at best but, I've certainly heard DOZENS accounts from other people whom have experienced the weirdness and especially hit detection keeps coming up as a massive problem.

I've seen some of the videos thus far of Survivors getting hit almost 3-4 feet away from the Killer in truly bizarre cases of bad hit detection. Hit detection has always been kind of off in DBD for one reason or another but, it definitely feels like the issue has been compounded post patch.

As a survivor the UI update is all but, irrelevant to me though I like many others do not like the new exhaustion bar colors as it makes it very difficult to see. Still admittedly I don't particularly need the UI as Survivor mostly though the hook counter is appreciated.

As a Killer however the new UI is..nauseating and I don't mean that as a snarky remark. I mean it literally makes me dizzy and sick trying to pay attention to four corners of the screen like that while also searching around for survivors. Splitting everything up into the four sides of the screen legitimately makes playing killer more difficult right now. Even an option to just..rearrange the UI to be more palatable would be tremendous. If I could just move everything back into a location similar to the prior UI that would help mitigate some of the nausea.

Overall it is unfortunate these issues have overshadowed the Clown rework that while far from perfect I do enjoy the reload speed increase.

Honestly BHVR had made some small strides in actually communicating with us recently ( The transparency around DS and OOO I very much appreciated) but, there is still a lot of work to do on that front. It appears that they take criticism as some kind of attack on their person when in reality most ( certainly not all ) criticism is done out of love for what they have made. I love DBD, it's one of my favorite games but, I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and pretend the game is in a 'good' state right now because it is not. This mid chapter patch is proof that there needs to be some difficult conversations had and individuals at BHVR need to realize that the fans are not the enemy.

To summarize what I think people want:

UI:

• Change the layout to the old layout. The new mechanics and small animations are fine, it's the layout that is the problem. The vital information was neatly in one area, and that is what so many want back.
• Change the 3D portraits to the stylized adept ones
• Give us the 'how often has this survivor been hooked' feature on killer side as well.
• Make the hook-progress/mend-time bar bigger.
• Change the Doc's insanity animation back to the smoother static of the old UI.
• (Basically bring back the stylized things, they looked neat!)
• Please remove the hook counter in killer side until it has a purpose ingame. Some speculated it's meant to help with getting adept on killer, but as right now Adept still requires much more than just X hooks it's currently superfluous

Animations:

• The new load-in animations are lifeless. While some say it fits with the idea of 'the entity sucking people's souls out' it's maybe a little too soulless and stiff.
• It'd be totally fine if the load-in animations would fit with the character's personalities. E.g. David is probably more like to stand proud than dwight (unless dwight finally snapped, but that's a different chapter)
• The animation for injured running looks more like they are hurrying to get the bus or similar, not as if they are running for their life while trying to keep their vital organs inside their body.
• The nodding looks like... You know when you have like a microphone arm thing or a showerhead that has set positions and you crack it from one position to the other? The nodding now looks like that. (and it's too fast)

I think that summarizes things? Did I miss something?

No, it's not mine. It's fan made stuff, since PTB. It has been posted many times already.

Red on red, what were you guys thinking? I can't even see my exhaustion timer go down. Please at least revert the status effect timers.

It's simply too spread out and distracting. The only thing I would have changed from the old layout was moving the item/power + add-ons to the right side, as it is part of your loadout along with perks. This keeps everything related together and in one area.

Otherwise, the visual redesign of the portraits/UI is great. It's just the layout that's the issue, in my opinion.

Just to give some background info about me, I’m a console player on PS4 and have no vision issues etc.

UI and HUD

I do like it in the sense that it feels more modernised and updated. But it has many issues. The obvious one is layout- it was great with the way it was before. Neat, concise and you can get all the information you need in one glance. With this new layout, it’s made it much more harder as the information is all over the screen.

Second biggest issue for me, is the scale of some of the different elements. To me, the perk icons and the power/item (and addons) icons feel way too big in comparison to the other elements. The hook timer and name, as well as the text for the points you gained in the top right as well as status effects such as (borrowed time, exposed etc) is very small. I appreciate the ability to adjust the UI scale in the settings, but the problem is that editing it to be smaller/bigger makes everything smaller/bigger. Why is this a problem? With the different elements being all different sizes, you can make, for example, the perk icons smaller at the expense of all the other elements being even smaller. You should either fix the different sizes to be at a suitable size (such as in the old UI) or allow us to individually change the different elements.

I have also found certain icons hard to distinguish too, such as the timer for your exhaustion. The time remaining is a lighter red, while the rest of the circle around the exhaustion icon is a slightly darker red. Again, I don’t have any form of colour blindness but even I find it a little difficult to look at, as the two different shades of reds just blend together until I really focus and take time to look at it.

There’s certain unnecessary information that just takes up more space on the screen, such as the different information for survivors and killers where the generator counter is. For the majority of the people, they don’t need to be told to ‘find the hatch’ for example. It should just be shortened and made cleaner as it’s just taking up room.

ANIMATIONS

I personally prefer it over the old animations. I like that survivors aren’t slouched over anymore, I like that they don’t just have their arms sticking out. It makes sense and feels more natural and realistic to some degree. The problem is that it makes them feel too much like a statue. One you stop moving, There’s nothing natural about them standing still. They don’t start to slouch, lean more on one leg, cross their arms, literally anything that is just natural to do. Before they used to turn their heads and look around if you didn’t move the camera, but I’m pretty sure they don’t do that anymore. So yeah, for me I think the issue lies more with when you become stationary, but I think when you’re actually moving, it’s pretty nice.

I also wish I could walk with a straight back rather than slouching over, it’s more natural and the fact that you go from a straight back when stationary to slouching when moving exaggerates it. Not a huge fan of that.

and the injured run... I really don’t like it, looks quite silly in my opinion!

Turning now feels very weird. Especially if you’re downed on the floor. It’s like you’re pivoting around a specific central point which feels odd to me, at least it didn’t feel like that before the update.

EDIT: I assume this is a bug or something, but when getting hooked, your camera goes down instead of up towards your face/body for a brief second, as if you’re being downed again (Going from the normal POV to the dropped POV when downed). It’s nothing major, but it does get very irritating after a while.

EDIT 2: Survivor icons and injured icons are very hard to differentiate. They are really unclear and not nice to look at. It also gets confusing when you’re playing a character and the cosmetics you use are completely different to the default icon that are used. For example, I had a Cheryl teammate but they were using the schoolgirl outfit (Alessa Gillespie or something along those lines) and it was quite hard to tell initially who they were in the top left. If it could be updated to change with your cosmetics then that would be great. I know that games like Ror Honor has this feature in loading screens and leaderboard/scoreboards.

It also seems less obvious when you have certain effects active, such as Borrowed Time after your unhooked, the little icon and notification that pops up isn’t as obvious as before.

Ok so first the locomotion survivor update. It feels like its too stiff and i would even say a little bit more unrealistic like before. What i mean by this is just imagine ur a survivor like the ones in dbd irl. If i knew that a bloodthirsty killer is coming in my direction,i wouldn’t t pose like a bodybuilder in fornt of him. Insead ill try to stay low like the old characters did and run instead of jogging when im getting chased. On a more technical stand point, survivors were able to do jukes with their movement before (like 360s, moonwalks, window fakes and more) which are at the very least very inconsistent now. Thats my point: old movement just felt more consistent overall. If i wanted to go back, i would press s and go back, not wait for half a second for the animation in a game where every second counts and a split second decision like that could win your team the game. That was the fun in dbd, the movement.

As for the new hud, its just EVERYWHERE. That is just overall bad designing. Nobody requested an ui change, not a single soul asked for that. Its pretty exhausting to look to see how many gens are left, who’s injured, what is ur flashlight’s durability looking like and if u have ur dead hard or not while getting chased. Its just unnecesarry. The only good things about it are the character portraits which also would use a second look at them because they kinda ruin the immersion, being too colorfull and the hook counter.

You could have spent your time and effort on something else that the community was asking for instead of this.

I'm going to quote what I put in a seperate thread regarding the HUD here:

"It's simply too spread out. With the old UI, there were only two references to check for information - bottom left corner and bottom right corner. Now it's spread all over the screen, making the HUD feel scattered and forcing players to constantly look at different angles for quick information. This takes away from them being able to concentrate and focus on the match itself.

The Survivor icons don't really fit the display and feel a bit out of place. IMO using the images for each survivor's "Adept [Survivor]" achievement icon would better match the display imagery currently used for the Hooked, Obsession, Marked and Sacrificed/Killed icons, seeing as the icons don't reflect cosemetics and only need to show which survivor is being played as. The achievement icons I'm referring to are these ones:

Additionally, having the survivor display in the top left feels like a bad move as it obscures that part of the screen, where a killer or survivor could be. It doesn't block much but it's enough to possibly distract a player from seeing someone on that part of their screen, which isn't an issue when the displays are in the bottom - it's just not possible for a player to be hiding at the bottom of the screen with how the camera works. Without other information, the item/addon icons feel like they're just floating with nothing establishing. It's important to know what items you've got and what their charge is, but without anything else it's just an icon in the corner. Similarly the 'Hook Counter' for Killers kind of floats in between the survivors display and the power icon. I definitely think that keeping all this information in more contained spaces benefits the game so much, especially as awareness and vision are so important for survival and killing.

The old HUD was compact and neat - perks in one corner, survivors in another along with gen progress and your item for survivors/your ability for Killers. It was excellent design. I know that the old HUD is unlikely to come back because there needs to be space for the new Hook Counter display, but I do think it's a much better display than the new one. I don't want to be excessively negative. Like I've said there are positives - the new Hooked counter is a great addition for survivors, the new animations are very fluid and knowing which character each player is using really helps in knowing what's happening in the match. But this new HUD is a downgrade in my eyes. Please re-evaluate this - it's so dizzying and you've done better in the past."

And I'll add some additional nickpicks: the bars for the hook timer is far too small and, once a survivor's been hooked, there's no icon then to show who they are, jsut that they are hooked. The slashes on top of the portraits doesn't fit the art style (much as the coloured portraits don't) and generally aren't pretty compared to the simple icons used before to indicate an injured player, with blood splatters to highlight their state. The Killer's Hook Counter doesn't really benefit them unless they're attempting to get an irisdent emblem for hooks, and even then I'd argue information like that isn't important during a match, especially since the counter doesn't reflect when Survivors enter Struggle on their first hook or die on the first hook.

I'm honestly at a loss about why these changes were made when the additions could've been made to the existing HUD with little interference.