Chucky is a battleground for DBDs soul...
I wish polls were a thing in this forum...
I flip flop on the changes to Chucky and his scamper constantly. After listening to people on both sides, and playing as and against Chucky a number of times of console, I feel there are 2 chains of thought on Chucky, and I think where you fall kinda indicates what type of game you want DBD to be.
Scamper Chucky
Chucky with scamper was controversial because instead of trying to catch people at loops with his more skillful power (especially after it's turn lock nerf), you could instead just dive under the pallet and the mind game was heavily in Chucky's favour, even on medium tiles and it felt rather easy and cheap. However in the the same breath... his power was on an 18s cooldown and he was stuck as a 4.4 killer for quite a long time after doing it. This long cooldown balanced out the scamper ability to not be too oppressive really, but it did have the knock on effect that Chucky slice and dice was a dangerous ability to use, where if you missed, you were very heavily punished.
This all made skill expression on Chucky much harder and less rewarding... but it did make Chucky more consistent across lower levels of play. For console and less skilled players he had a fallback, but overall was less efficient and effective at higher levels...
However more importantly... Chucky felt like Chucky. His scamper, while annoying, was the defining part of Chucky's kit... and it being as useless as it in on modern Chucky robs a lot of Chucky's identity.
Modern Slice and Dice Chucky
On the other side of the coin, modern slice and dice Chucky is a lot stronger than old Chucky. His slice and dice is hard to use, console and low skilled players miss SnD often (though in fairness you get a lot more chances to try)... however this makes Chucky unappealing at these levels, as unless you can consistently S&D accurately, Chucky is a 4.4 killer who has slightly better mind games, but otherwise tends to get dumped on.
However accurate and skillful Chucky's, who are able to flick their aim are very strong and hard to juke. He feels somewhere in the regions of Blight and Spirit in terms of strength, and really rewards players for being actually good with his power.
This comes though at the downside... his scamper while SnDing is trash, cause it yanks your aim behind you as you vault, so 99% of the time any chance you had of landing a hit becomes none existent... so his scamper barely features at all in his kit, and the effect of that is Chucky kinda feels rather generic, and just dashes round corners every 10 seconds. He's still got all his voice lines, his 3rd person camera and height to feel unique... his roar as he charges is always great... but his gameplay is just that of sprinting around with lunges constantly, we never see scamper and we don't get very long trying to read his short stature at tiles before the next dash is coming.
And that's the trade off...
Skill Expression vs. Character Identity.
Camp Blight or Camp Myers?
I can't really say which side I prefer... I would like both if possible... some configuration where skilled players can show their skills via S&D and be strong at high levels, but we also get to see Chucky's scamper and play tiles as a very hard to see 4.4 m1 killer from time to time...
However the 2 contradict one another, and where you fall I think is a strong indicator of what kind of game you want DBD to be…
Comments
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I definitely prefer current one. 18 seconds of being 4,4 is what discouraged me to play him before.
I think 4,4 killers obligated to have strong chase power, but old Scamper, while looking over time, was way more boring for both sides. Two players waiting for free hit on timer.
But from the point of killer identity, yeah, I miss it, because it's literally what was shown in his trailer.
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Chucky is not difficult to use on console, maybe you have less stuff you can do, but he is so easy. I’m playing on ps5.
Ever since they removed scamper he has been very boring to play and I don’t understand people who say slice and dice is less of a free hit than scamper. It’s the exact opposite you could play around scamper while slice and dice is always a free hit if you don’t mess up. We have so many abilities that are stronger than scamper was and that give more free hits than it did. I really don’t understand people here.
I would have been fine with nerfing the numbers of scamper (for example to 1.6s), but straight up removing it was…. Scamper was the only reason besides the hight why I played him. I never liked slice and dice, because it is just charge free hit repeat, with scamper on the other hand survivors could still loop just fine and you could get free hits when people camped pallets which is fair.
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The rework was unjustified and based on complaints that should have been ignored.
Chucky is the perfect example of why they should wait for the playerbase to learn how to play before taking any action, if they followed this example Vecna would have lost his "Mage Hand" no one talks about anymore.
They did something similar with Alien, leaving the tail power practically bugged, but the complaints had already ceased so no need to fix it. Now thanks to this, we have a killer that practically no one plays. Alien is strong? Yes, but who wants to feel constantly robbed?
Chucky should be reverted to his original version. It's totally false that the Slice and Dice requires skill, in fact it's one of the easiest powers to hit in the whole game. That's why he's much stronger now than he has ever been before, but he has lost his identity in exchange for it. A power that had something unique to offer was preferable to just another charge at the survivor.
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I lost interest in Chucky the second they removed flicks. The cap feels awful to me and it dumbed down the killer to a level where I felt that there was almost no skill expression left.
This didn't change after they removed scampering outside of S&D although now he seems even more dumbed down because you just spam his power.
I would happily take the 18 seconds cooldown, if they brought back flicks but maybe I am alone with this.
I would prefer DBD to be a game with a relatively low skill floor and a high skill ceiling but that is very hard to achieve.
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I suppose I fall into the skill expression camp but in a different way from what you're describing. It's why despite not being very popular I love killers like Singularity, Twins, Pinhead because the level of macro knowledge needed to play those characters well is enjoyable to me on both sides and will forever be more engaging to me than dodging a wesker, chucky or legion who basically all do variations of the same exact thing. The idea that the entire map and all survivors are in play at all times is so engaging rather than 1 survivor is in chase and 3 others go do gens.
I feel killers with global abilities is where the future of this game should go and why when Freddy gets reworked being in the dream world does something passively for all survivors rather than just be a requisite for Freddy to use his power in the first place. But on the subject of chucky I don't love his power either wat but definitely prefer current chucky as just losing a chase cuz "lolscamper" feels terrible and DBD is a game first and if you play enough the feeling of horror will leave but the chase and the mind games of chase will always be there.
That being said you can do both and I think Unknown is proof of that. Unknown will always be just a little bit unsettling from their music to their sound effects to the anticipation of being able to dispel a hallucination before they can teleport, there will always be a lot of tension with Unknown while at the same time mechanically Unknown is one of the most fun killers we got in years and on that PTB I saw more interest and excitement from experienced streamers trying to do trick shots with Unknown than I have in literal years and that was so nice to see. So I really do think you can have both.
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I much, much preferred the previous version (both as Killer and Survivor). I win a lot more trials with him now because even if you miss with the Slice and Dice, it doesn't feel like a big deal since you get it back so quickly. I don't use any slowdown or regression and I'm still able to do fairly well with him. That said, some Killers I just play for fun and I don't care about outcome of the trial and Chucky, like Myers, is one of those. What I really want from a licensed Killer is for them to feel true to the character. Everything else is secondary to me.
He was very well designed and his powers were well balanced but now he's all about the Slice and Dice. He has lost a lot of what made him appealing. I still think they could have found a way to nerf his scamper ability yet still preserve that aspect of his kit.
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The game has to be fun; that is much more important than making a character subjectively feel like they do in their source material. Ideally you can do both, but the former is essential and the latter is just desirable.
Chucky is a miserable slog to play against in his current state and his original state was similar. I appreciate the music and some of the thematic elements, but the voice lines after you get downed are so irritating. It's like a basekit BM after one of the most broken attacks in the game lands.
Edit: And there are polls on the forum.
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I preferred old chucky, Scamper was his most unique ability. Now it's so useless its effectively been removed
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Chucky is… an interesting one.
He fits the game, as most horror icons do, and that is already a massive W. His pseudo-stealth and footsteps are awesome, they really help with the horror atmosphere, which is an important aspect of the game.
3rd person point of view and the ghost of Charles Lee Ray appearing when hooking a survivor are unique aspects, and we all appreciate having unique killers. I'm not the biggest fan of his voice lines, but I understand why most people like them.
However, when we get to the aspects of his power that got changed due to balance… well, I think both versions were terrible. I am really tired of movement based killers (and M2 zoning, but that is for another discussion) so regardless of what they do with Slice & Dice I don't think it will ever be fun to go against.
Edit: There are polls on the Forums, friend:
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I like how you narrowed down Chucky’s… Schism.
I’m always going to be on the side of theme. But yes gameplay is essential too. His scamper somehow needs to be better than it is now while not giving the free hits that it did before.
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I feel like they should let you readjust after scampering at least. If I scamper a window, I want to be able to turn 90° and run along the wall rather than just run straight away from the building. This is why scamper in general is basically useless now.
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This comes though at the downside... his scamper while SnDing is trash, cause it yanks your aim behind you as you vault, so 99% of the time any chance you had of landing a hit becomes none existent...
Just to be sure, by 'a hit becomes non existent' do you mean that ?Vs. Chucky weird dodge on dropped pallet (Youtube)
If yes, that is just you don't 'see' the Chucky's collision during the hit or maybe the aim assist (for console players) prioritize to hit the dropped pallet instead the vaulting survivor…Just to illustrate that, you have the same thing facing on Hillbilly: if the pallet is dropped when he is charging his chainsaw, if the survivor quickly vaulting during the charge, the hit by chainsaw will always focus on the dropped pallet & wll not focus the vaulting survivor. Same thing with the breakable walls, as the window & the Wesker's dashes…
I can't explain these 'desync hits' in another way…1 -
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I just wanted to add this to the discussion…
Scamper takes 0.4 seconds less seconds to go under a pallet than it does to perform a Fast Vault on a pallet as Survivor. Even if you didnt mindgame, youd still gain distance on the Survivor from using Scamper, which was the main complaint at the time.
If Scampering was slower but was more mindgame focused, it would be perfectly fine since it has a risk/reward element with the amount of distance you would make/lose on the Survivor.
This all made skill expression on Chucky much harder and less rewarding.
Survivor drops a pallet? Scamper underneath, Survivor loses distance. Survivor vaults a pallet? Scamper underneath, Survivors loses distance. You really did not have to think. Im really tired of people acting like Scamper Chucky had some high level of skill to get hits when they really didnt.
Cooldowns dont "limit skill expression," mechanics do. Look at Wesker for example, Wesker has a lot of techs and tricks to playing them, Id argue that they have the highest skill expression in the game at the moment, but they have a longer cooldown than current Chucky, and this is solely because the mechanics behind Wesker are what elevate their skill expression here.
Skill Expression vs. Character Identity.
I dont think it is "skill expression vs character identity," I think it is "balance vs character identity."
Nemesis is a good example. Within the RE games, Nemesis is designed to be this giant unkillable wall that hunts you down and obliterates everything in it's path, but in DBD, they have to be toned down for balance. This also applies to other characters with high strength or have a god-like nature to them; because the game dictates that balance is required over lore accuracy.
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Gameplay is always more important than "identity" because this is a multiplayer game and if something is unbalanced that is an issue, no matter how "in character" it may be.
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They just need to rework Rat Poison and significantly increase his M2 cooldown.
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outside of situations where you can’t see him at loops I never understood complaints about chucky every version of him was perfectly fine to play against
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I preferred old Chucky. Playing against Scamper was slightly more interesting than current Chucky who just hits you then dashes and hits you again and that's it, you lose. Boring to play as, boring to play against, and the character's theme is strangled in the process. The fact they took out the thing he does in his own trailer is just sad, but not as sad as current Chucky matches are which are miserable slogs. Even Blight wasn't this annoying.
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I firmly believe that the faithfulness of a character is the most important priority, the gameplay of the character themselves can be balanced out.
Adjust them to balance them out, but under no circumstances should any of the most important elements and features of a character ever be outright removed.
The removal of manual scamper was entirely needless and should never have happened.
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He can still flick because of "techs" discovered by Chucky mains. https://youtu.be/erk7OpMA8Nc?si=ETR2JGDehqDUQRr_
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Survivor drops a pallet? Scamper underneath, Survivor loses distance. Survivor vaults a pallet? Scamper underneath, Survivors loses distance. You really did not have to think. Im really tired of people acting like Scamper Chucky had some high level of skill to get hits when they really didnt.
Just to be clear, you do know the point I was making was because scamper existed there was little skill expression in Chucky's kit? S&D was far more punishing if you missed, and scamper was easy and safe exactly as you describe... so why try the harder S&D hits vs. The safer and easier scamper hit?
I think we agree... but just want to check ^^
Thanks folks! Today I learned 😁😁😁😁
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