Game Flattening
This has been on my mind for a while so I'm just gonna see if I can dump this out in a way that makes sense.
DBD is an extremely complex game in the background, but a deceptively simple game for the players. Over time the game has grown to be more nuanced, but I never feel as if that is truly reflected in the game. For the most part every trial is more or less the same and no matter what perks or items or addons you bring into a trial ultimately everything has a very limited amount of ways things can progress. The game has resisted more nuanced ways of playing from the player side deeming a small set of optimal or "appropriate" ways to play and sticking to them. While in the background the game has been allowed to remain basically the same overall.
We've had a lot of things change, but the core game is still extremely simple and mostly unchanged from what we started with. The nuance injected by players has had to be the driving force of keeping the game fresh, but with two unequal sides the things needed to facilitate continued growth often oppose each other. Recently, the game has started to really show the effects of strategies and playstyles that become extreme outliers in the area of effectiveness to the point of being harmful to the overall experience. So it is understandable that these needed to be sufficiently addressed to curtail their over effectiveness into something more manageable.
This however has also started to flatten out the game in weird ways. While both sides are suffering from this flattening issue they aren't suffering the same way. Survivor gameplay has never been super engaging as the objective asks nothing of the players other than hold left click and tap space bar sometimes. It's serviceable and works well enough, but that means interactions with the killer have to generate all the engagement. The problem is survivors don't have many ways to engage with killer outside of chases and saves. While the game started with an emphasis more on stealth, players ultimately disregarded for high intensity interaction or brute forcing their objective as fast as possible. That isn't inherently bad, but a lot of the game is now living and dying on that alone other ways of playing aren't really respected or at least really rewarded.
Killers while possessing unique powers and handicaps have found their own set ways to engage with the game that have proven to be more effective than it should have been, but also in weird ways becoming necessary depending on which killer you wanted to play. Killers attempting to do different things often find themselves discouraged from doing so if they want to win with a level of consistency or even just have fun regardless of outcome. As the devs have intervened to smooth out the problematic outliers the knock on effect has been a slow flattening out of gameplay options for both sides, but killers are feeling it more acutely than survivors currently.
Even as killer powers become more complex, the overall ways to approach the game are being flattened out in a strategic sense. A lot of times it feels like playing outside of a standard chase dynamic or objective focused dynamic isn't really allowed to happen too much. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like the game is just getting heavily reduced and flatten out to the point of players not even being sure what the game or devs are expecting to see.
Comments
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While I agree that the game should have a lot more variety of game play styles and certain playstyles will still be around, it's just that their extreme forms are not welcome (facecamping is out, proxy camping is still in, tunnel off the hook is out with BT, but you can still tunnel effectively cause anti-tunnel perks have been nerfed, you can still slug without much consequence atm).
Generally by keeping the extreme form of certain strategies, makes the game uninteractive, probably an unpopular opinion but it makes no sense for the game to have the survivors unable to get up themselves after some amount of time. And I mean logically. Ok survivors can't get up for they have the strength to unhook themselves AND afterwards run around after they've taken a hook close to their heart. For the survivor gameplay all those downtime periods that can occur make the game dull, and like I said don't make sense. I can understand that maybe for the killer those strategies can be a breather and I'm not saying killer should be stressful 24/7. It's just that BHVR has to find a way to accomodate both. Less downtime for survivors (being on the hook is downtime, being slugged is downt-time), that's why there are many survivors who seem addicted to chases, and less stress for the killers at certain points in game. Perhaps that game would have to change significantly to make some progress on both of those goals.
And let's not forget that due to the nature of those roles, it's bound to cause different feelings. Killer is stressful because people who want to win feel they have to prove themselves and juggle a lot of things at the same time, this of course isn't unheard of in other games as well where people have roles with big agency. Some roles are stressful by their very nature. Survivors can "win" individually and maybe that's why they are not as stressed, because they believe they can get hatch or something even if their whole team died.
Now make it so survivors only win if they get 3 out, survivor will suddenly become a lot more stressful because they'll have to manage their teammates as well too, more that they already do. And unlike killer they have reduced agency because they're playing with other people and the frustration will grow. Survivors doing good things for the team usually contribute like 25% on average I would say, but a survivor making a bad decision alone can contribute up to 50% to a loss.
If I were to compare survivor and killer to lol roles, as far as agency goes and how people on average play them and why I'd say, killer has the same multi-tasking as jungler. Flashy killers like Huntress, Whesker etc. could be personified by the midlane player who loves playing skill intensive champions and snowballing by ganking botlane etc. Survivors addicted to the chase could be top lane wanting to 1v1 all the time. They could be a lot more team oriented but they like to duel more, which may not always be good for the team. Support is the teammate who unhooks you and heals you, sometimes even giving their life for you. They are usually not that good at looping but they enjoy being helpful and don't want to stress a lot, so they never learn how to do it. ADC is the guy who stays on gens whatever happens because it'll lead him to end game/escaping (ADC have the least agency and have to rely mostly on the team while they farm and get stronger).
So yeah certain roles in other games can be stressful, less stressful depending on their impact, even if everyone is essentially playing the same game on the same map.
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I'm not coming at this from a stress related point of view, but from of a place of confusion and restriction.
The changes happening are necessary, that isn't in question, but it is the feeling of the changes and the lack of any sort of growth with it that clearly shows what the expectations are in terms of what is worth doing if players on either side want to engage with the game without being pigeonholed to a small handful of ways to play. If the game is supposed to have an emphasis on freedom and skill expression then we need to be able to have that be rewarded and understood both at the player level and also in game. If the game is truly meant to be played only in the small subset of ways that it is currently approached then the gameplay around that needs to seriously be looked at and improved/overhauled so that is very clear and feasible for players to do no matter who they play.
Right now, killer feels very limited and even with added complexity of killer design you often find that there is one way that actually works and then rest are just orders of magnitude worse. On the other hand if you find a playstyle the killer is better suited, but it lies outside the established norms it is often patched out and this is something that has been an issue long before now. It's just lately it has become much more noticeable that more and more it seems like killers are being driven towards only doing chases while the game is more or less punishing us for chasing. It does not feel good to engage with the game right now as the more you sit back and look at what killers can do in theory, but instead know you're relegated to taking actions not in your best interest.
If the goal is high intensity player interaction via chase, ultimately killers across the need to be redesigned so they can do that well. Chases aren't fun if you don't feel like you're empowered to be successful and timely in them. Like if the game is truly about direct interactions then empower on both sides, give survivors more interesting ways to interact with killers, but also just give killers more ways to interact with survivors. We've been playing the same for 8 years and still don't know what truly constitutes skill expression, normal gameplay, or even what is the win condition of DBD is from a developer or player standpoint.
We have guesses, we have personal thoughts, but what is this game? What are supposed to be doing and what is being done to empower us to do whatever that is and has the core gameplay not changed at all in 8 years? League is functionally not the same as it was 8 years ago. Maps have changed, roles have changed, champion kits of changed, even champion visual designs have changed and even the ways players can interact with the game has changed. This game has been the same overly simplistic yet exceptionally punishing and confusing thing for 8 years now. The changes we are getting don't really feel like they empower or clarify what it is this game expects from players and things like stealth, hit and run, passive play, or defensive play are wrong, but since you're not incentivized do anything that isn't standard aggressive chase, is that truly what is wanted?
As a survivor we've doing the same generators and running the same loops for 8 years. There has to be more to this at some point right? Why has stealth been abandoned? Why have not gotten more ways to interact with killers outside of standard looping chases where there is perceived agency for one side? What is the developer's understanding of skill expression in this role and are we actually being empowered to express that skill?
That is where I'm at, like the game hasn't truly changed, but it for some reason is just much less rewarding and harder to play while still feeling just as undefined.
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