Attack on Game Tone
this is going to be a very difficult topic for some people to read. for others, it's going to be very easy. that said, i feel like i really want to start talking about this before it gets to a point of being unbearable.
one game i used to really like was team fortress 2. and then they added hats, which was super fine. the devs gave heavy a ushanka and engineer got a headlamp and all was good. it was only after they added community cosmetics to the game that the game started to become kind of a mess with god knows what. aside from memes and jokes, there were also just a lot of out of character items, and it's only gotten worse over time. i saw a crop top item for the scout getting a lot of attention on social media recently..
fortnite, while i don't play it, is another huge example of this. it keeps getting crossover content with the most random things like rick and morty, dragonball z, naruto, star wars - all of these things remain present in the game forever. it makes for funny memes on social media, of naruto making handsigns before shooting a guy with a shotgun, yeah - but after a week people stop making clips of goku flossing and all that attention fades away, and that naruto content is in the game literally forever, and must coexist with every other piece of crossover content that is introduced.
dead by daylight has always had crossovers with iconic and irreverent horror movie content, barring stranger things being too new to be iconic and irreverant, however the first season at least matches tonally with the horror movies that are already present and the content works well. however, Attack on Titan feels like a big misstep for me. away from the tone of what dbd has been all the way up until now, and towards the fortnite direction.
i know. a lot of people are fans of things, and people love crossover content. i get it. i also want to see more crossover content in dbd, crossover content that some people might not like. but i feel like even fans of attack on titan can understand that attack on titan is tonally very different to everything else that's been crossed over so far, with bombastic music and huge fights and political drama, and i don't think that degradation of the game's aesthetic and tone is worth it just for the crossover alone especially when the result is some skins and a new campfire for a patch.
i'm in no position to be telling the developers what to do, but please, please just be careful about what content you're doing crossovers with in the future. dbd is... it's not fortnite, and it stands to lose a lot more players than it gains if you decide to go down a path that involves crossovers with popular culture content just because it's popular. i am not listing things because i hate them, i'm listing them because they're popular and won't fit with dbd - if we get crossovers with things like jjba, naruto, one piece, bleach, etc it will only drive longstanding players away and the people that come in for that will be sorely disappointed that the game is nothing like these shows. i certainly have a tolerance level that i reach very quickly with these kinds of things, i can only imagine some people out there are a lot more upset about AoT's inclusion.
i don't want to be playing a game of dbd and then suddenly have the thought to myself "i hope i bought enough time for sasuke uchiha to fix my generator before the nutty professor comes back and pops it. maybe lucy from snoopy is ready to open the gate? i think i remember that johnny bravo was running borrowed time" this sounds like a slippery slope argument until you realise you can right now make a fortnite lobby of goku, itachi, darth vader and rick and fortnite is one of the most lucrative games right now. investors and businessmen often encourage following the popular trend but i completely promise you that dbd will not succeed by following this trend. it will fail. i'm sorry, but it just will.
dead by daylight is at risk of being an iconic and irreverent piece of media itself. it has fought hard to carve its identity and has up until now been working hard to stay true to what it is. i would hate to see it go down any kind of trail that leads to its identity being muddied with random ill-fitting intellectual property. again, this is not an attack on attack on titan. i just think, unironically, it would have fit better as a fortnite crossover, and that's not something i want to think about any dbd crossover content.
thanks for reading.
Comments
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I tend to agree. This felt really, really out of place. We are straying further and further away from a horror game. I'm somewhat concerned they'll be adding hooked on you cosmetics and turning the theme into a joke, as well. There goes trapper running around in a duck flotation device.
Leaving visuals as a discussion, even gameplay is leaving horror. Now we have Off the Record that just encourages storming the killer for body blocks. They even buffed spinechill to remove stealth as a spooky element of the game. No need to look out for stealthers. Just stare at the gen. As long as the perk isn't lit up, you know you're perfectly safe...no need to keep an eye out. Lights up? You got 36 meter head start. They won't catch up. Even the gameplay is straying away from fear of the unknown and into staring at ui elements or running up to the killer.
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I've never watched Attack on Titan so don't really care about the show one way or another. I don't care that much about the skins being in DbD either, as long as they look nice and people like to buy them that's fine with me. And heck, there's other goofy skins in the game that I like, such as Milkman Hillbilly and some of the funnier looking survivor outfits. Which is great, horror movies having a bit of a sense of humor in them are sometimes some of the most fun movies to see! 😄
I do agree that Attack on Titan doesn't sound like it fits the theme of DbD at all, so I'd probably be raising more of an eyebrow if they made an actual chapter out of it. But as is it doesn't bother me. 🤷♂️
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As long as they're just skins and not fully fledged dlc characters, i'm pretty whatever about it.
With that said however, would much rather see actual horror Anime & Manga IPs join dbd instead of IPs such as attack on titan and similar ones altogether.
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Attack on Titan has scenes of people being eaten alive with graphic gore and blood. It's not horror but it's awfully close to it.
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Attack on titan is great horror. Outside of that I disagree with variety making people lose interest in dbd. On the flipside I agree with the notion that dbd shouldnt lose its horror feel. Plus to me the survivor skinds look like comicon cosplayers and not the actual characters. Which to me is better. To put your mind at ease devs have stated in the past that they what to keep dbd horror oriented so I dont think we'll see a nutty professor skin haha.
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i haven't seen the show, so it might not fully be my place to comment on it, but the problem i have with the sentiment of "it contains gross stuff" is that that's one of the more optional ingredients when it comes to horror. horror can be done perfectly well without any gore at all, but gore isn't horror by itself.
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DbD stopped being scary in a visual aspect back when Trickster was released. I'd say Oni's new skin looks scarier than any of Trickster's cosmetics
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I think I understand. It would change the tone to a comedy instead of a horror. Yes there are funny moments in DbD, but they are a relief to the oppressive horror tone that you expect to find. If they became the norm, the game would lose what makes it fun.
If Scooby Dooight ran up to start working on the generator next to me and Jokester came around the corner throwing cards at us the game would have a completely different feel to it.
They did an excellent job on the Titans for those skins though. I'm not a fan of the anime but if I were to main Oni or Spirit I would be grabbing those.
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Watch the show then. Some of the gory scenes are pretty graphic.
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Trickster was never meant to be scary looking in the first place since his whole horror aspects lies in the ¨People like this guy exist in real life, normal on the outside but twisted on the inside.¨ area, just like ghostface. They both do the same thing but in different ways and with different reasons for doing it.
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the gore being graphic doesn't automatically make it horror. please tell me something else about it, i am the exact opposite of someone who loves gore guns and explosions.
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It's all about presentation. ST isn't horror but the atmosphere fits dbd imo. It works super well all things considered.
Watch the show.
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Okay, let's make something very clear, the way they did the crossover was not by adding the characters themselves, but rather making survivors cosplay as those characters. So even if they added Naruto or whatever, they clearly are not the type to add the characters themselves, like Fortnite, but it would just be the DbD characters cosplaying as characters in Naruto. Which is something real people do, so it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility and would fit DbD.
Second of all:
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it's very dark and a lot of the imagery and story can strike a similar nerve that horror does without necessarily falling under the horror genre.
as anchortea said, it's about presentation. scenes of people being eaten alive by titans aren't depicted as some epic action type thing.
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I agree with with this. I'm absolutely fine with skins for some characters or like cosplays. Feng has like a hundred cosplays now of different stuff she likes. Even Joey is cosplaying a character! Attack On Titan was a fine addition as skins imo because there's no way they could really make a Titan work imo as a killer but as a cosplay yes. Attack On Titan itself started off as more or less a horror themed anime then promptly left that to become a more military themed one? Weird spin on that since I preferred season one of AOT more than the later seasons. However, something like Goku maybe wouldn't belong in DBD. Goku is not horror themed and wouldn't make sense imo as a DLC but as a skin cosplay sure. Maybe Dwight is a huge fan of Dragon Ball Z.
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