BHVR Almo on why ASYMS fail

I think part of why vhs failed wasn't really because of the faults like its hard to turn it into a 3v1 and get the game in your favor it was more people didn't want to stick around long enough to play vhs, they more wanted dbd that "fixed" the things they didn't like and when that dried up they didn't have any attachment to the characters or sunk cost fallacy from a price tag on the game so they just left.

Not to mention being physically forced to stare at the ceiling any time you got a hit lol

Talk about trying to fix what wasn't broken with dbd's post hit 'weapon wipe' idea

I remember he answered my question about giving Mikey some buffs about 4 years ago on one of their Q&A streams.

He said he looked at Mikey's performance in terms of pick rates and kill rates and felt he was in a good spot with both. He also said he felt Mikey's power was unique and didn't need any changes.

I suspect its because of him or people who were influenced by him is why Mikey went years without any changes.

Not entirely sure how what's been said so far is attacking the guy (or maybe it's been edited without the "edited" caption?)

But on the topic:

I have never played VHS and I've never developed my own game - but I have done a few things on causation and the sheer number of variables given by the guy makes it kinda impossible to tell what the reason of VHS not succeeding was.

Given that he names "fun" as the main argument in favour of dbd, I seriously doubt it has to do with a camping/tunneling mechanic; it's one of the things players find the most unfun (except all those who find it fun somehow never say so anywhere). Some say it's necessary - but that means it should be addressed.

I do agree with the expectation part though; tools against the killer directly should be limited; it's all about stalling the killer, not stopping them. It's 'playing for time'.

I mean, as much as I appreciate the developer side of the argument for once… I feel like his comparison to VHS kinda falls flat. I assume this was written around the same time that VHS shut down, so that’s why he was talking about it.
Apparently this is very recent. Curious, that.

I think he gives DbD some undeserved credit here. VHS failed due to mismanagement. No question about it.

For starters, the closed beta lasted far too long, which made its playerbase too good at the game. Because of that, there was no initial honeymoon phase that normally comes with a new release, where nobody knows what they’re doing and it’s exciting and fresh. Instead, new players were put off by just how unforgiving Monster was to play against experienced teens.

As a side effect of that long closed beta, it seemed to take forever for any new content to drop. For that matter, the Monsters that were there and did get released barely differed from one another, ability-wise. Only Dollmaster presented a unique playstyle.

The comment about the devs accepting feedback directly contradicts what I’ve heard, though I don’t know enough to really comment on that.

You could very much camp and tunnel?? Wasn’t there a “feast” mechanic or whatever that allowed the Monster to speed up the bleed-out bar? Similarly, I don’t see what was stopping a Monster from tunnelling a specific Teen. Sure, it gave the other teens a lot of time to make weapons, but you very much could tunnel.

Some other things that I think VHS had going against it:

Maps were entirely static. Randomising the locations of the crafting stations alone would’ve alleviated this a lot, I think. Some windows also were just too strong as instant chase escape options.

That random scream-towards-the-ceiling after a hit tried to solve an issue that was barely one to begin with, and somehow made the basic idea of the elegant ‘wipe’ so much worse.

What even was the point of starting as a fake teen?? You’re staggered for far too long for any ambush to work, so why even bother?

Allowing a player to stunlock another player is kind of a cardinal video game sin. Overwatch, to name an entirely different example, had this issue as well when Brigitte released. People loathed her.

The way Teens were killed was really convoluted. Quite simply, it took too long. In DbD terms, you’re effectively always slugging your downs. You don’t do anything with them after they’ve gone down, other than maybe that feast thing I’ve mentioned. On that note, that minigame you could do to speed up your recovery bar always felt really out of place to me.

WART’s model didn’t make sense. Too top-heavy for a bipedal creature. Nitpicky, but still.

Werewolf did nothing to riff on the basic concept of a werewolf. That could have worked if they expanded on who the human actually was, but as it stood it was just kinda bland.

And I 100% agree with you - I rarely tunnel and camp my survivors out and win a lot of my games, however many killers go to strategy is tunnelling because it is the most effective thing to do.

I think it's entirely possible they can encourage chasing a different survivor and discourage going after the same survivor who's just been unhooked by implementing core gameplay mechanics which support that. I don't think tunnelling and camping should be ELIMINATED strategies, as meaningful choices in gameplay is more interesting than removing choice entirely.

My rather blunt and to the point opinion on DBD's balance state at the moment is that a lot of its design and gameplay issues (on both sides to be clear) are solved by perks rather than being implemented in the core gameplay experience and I think BHVR should be looking at why that is.

Regardless I do agree with the main large point of Almo's conclusion. In spite of the gameplay and design issues I think DBD has, it is by and large exceptionally fun a lot of the time.

When you look at every asymmetrical game that has failed there is one thing that is similar to all of them.

The game was balanced in a way where playing the "1" or the "killer" or the "monster" or whatever else, was impossible at high levels because the game was balanced for "casual" players, and since, by definition, most of the players in the game were "the survivors" or "the hunters (evolve)" and whatever else.

This leads to a cascading effect where,

• at high levels, nobody wants to play monster, so they quit or switch to the survivor side
• In order to deal with queue times, the devs expand the queue system to get matches quicker
• Lower skill monster/killer players start going against these high level teams and losing more and more
• They decide to quit
• Queue times increase for everyone
• Suddenly there are no monster players left
• Everyone quits because it takes 10+ minutes to find a match that you might play for 5 minutes.

I have been playing Asym games since Evolve, and most of them have died precisely for this reason. Playing the "monster" SHOULD make you feel powerful, but in an effort to balance for the other side (because there are more players) they make them super stressful to play where a single mistake ends the game, and nobody wants to do that.

DBD has also been like that, and i feel it still has a ways to go, because at the highest level this game is still a joke, but unlike those games you have to get pretty high up in DBD before that happens. In DBDs current state, its definitely the best it has ever been (even if there is still work to do). If DBD was like it was at launch with literal infinites, 2-3 times the number of pallets and so on? The game would be as dead as the others.

It would be really interesting to see what would happen if an Asym game came out specifically designed in such a way that the monster was probably going to win every time, and what might happen to the game then, would people not want to play the survivor role because they are going to lose? What if they made it fun to play. For example, look at Battle Royale games, the reason they succeed is because they are fun and you lose most of the time still. Because they are designed in a way where, you go in against 100 people and know you probably are going to lose, but when you win, it feels amazing because you won against all odds! What if there was an Asym game like that?

Playing a game and designing a game require different skill sets. Being good at one does not mean you're good at the other. Some people who are very good at playing the game can sometimes have pretty objectively terrible ideas for game balance.

Not true for Death Garden, Evolve, or F13.

IIRC, one of the Evolve devs blamed that game’s failure on 2K not allowing them to patch more often than every six weeks. He said they often had fixes for bugs within 24 hours of reporting, and then had to sit on them for a month and a half, watching the bug ruin the game for people for that whole time.

I loved Evolve and 2K did that game dirty.

I get what Almo is trying to say but I think "camping and tunneling" is the wrong way to put it. I played VHS for a short time and Monster was miserable to play because of the teens were coordinated it felt like you were the one that had to run away from them so that already felt bad because you're the side the doesn't have a team and then when you did get a down it wasn't particularly satisfying they're just down and you know they'll come back later and it was hard to tell how close they were to dying. I think hooking is underestimated as a satisfying period to the end of a chase and VHS didn't really have that. I think that was the core issue was at no point did monster ever feel satisfying to play even when you did well because it was a clunky stressful experience that lasted forever.

I'm okay with longer games, I've had 20 minute hag games that were cinema but that's because there's better pacing of there's the setup, the initial encounter, and then the chaos of traps going off and survivors getting hit left and right. Hag games used to actually hit horror movie beats (Hag doesn't feel this way anymore for a variety of reasons but that's it's own topic) but VHS never did it just takes forever to do anything and all of it can get reset rather easily which made games that were a stomp still drag.

Also the whole looking up thing after a chase was an awful idea, it's literally the reason I don't play nurse and every monster had that and none of them were anywhere near nurse level.

I actually forgot about Death Garden and VHS completely, and didn't play either of them, just saw some footage. The Monster role in VHS did seem a chore to play effectively though. I don't think either was even available on the consoles anyway.

It's interesting how many people here seem to have played a lot of VHS, especially given how small its player base was.

I haven't played VHS, though I watched some games, and I wished this post dealt with more games out there.

First, it's extremely hard to set up an asymmetric game of any kind that works.

I think this is absolutely true and asymms add on layers of complexity to the already complex process of developing a successful video game. I also think its really important to bring up when people say 'but in other games'. Assyms are very unique.

Well, sometimes it then turns out that X is something that makes DBD work.

This is true, though generally true about entertainment in general. Sometimes the things that are disliked are actually necessary to give value to other things.

What exactly are they though is an incredibly tough question.

VHS failed in large part because the Monster couldn't tunnel or camp.

I complain about tunneling and camping, but I can see this being true. Its all about degrees. No basekit BT strikes me as absurd and pointless, but so does the idea of survivors coming off the hook as untouchable ghosts. In an elimination game the right balance needs to be struck between 'totally safe' and 'no chance'.

That said, from the times I watched VHS, monster (and the game as a whole) just seemed dull and not related to balance at all.

This brings up what's called "ludonarrative dissonance".

Massive problem with Deathgarden actually, though in a different way.

There was also the ping system, another response to something DBD is perceived to be lacking. It hurt the atmosphere and made it much more gamey. 

I think this point gets missed out on the forums a lot. A game has to have fun, theme, etc. That will die off eventually, but you need that element to actually make the game worth playing to the point that the feeling fades away.

One reason DBD works is that the Survivors try to do gens to open the gates, and the Killer tries to stop them. 

I think this is a really good point (though one Deathgarden also failed on this in its first version), that actually misses the true mark.

Both sides in DbD have differing goals, and have numerous ways that they can try and accomplish those. Killer can defend gens, spread pressure, tunnel, snowball, etc. This is true for survivors as well, they can gen rush, they can slow play and heal up, but they can also harass the killer (looping builds, flashlights, body blocks, etc) to slow down his objective.

Having this variety of possible ways to accomplish the same goal I think is one of the reasons DbD has had such a long life. Survivors should never be able to 'beat' the killer, but that doesn't mean they need to 'scatter like rabbits' to make the game appealing. And it would be a bad way to approach a game design because fear is a feeling that quickly disappears in video games, so you can't count on it if you want the game to have a long life.

But my experience as someone who was on the DBD team for 6 years and having played VHS and Evil Dead quite a lot is that these competitors just aren't as much fun.

Like it or not, despite its flaws, DBD is a brilliant game that's just fun to play and competitors have to beat that part to survive. Focusing on DBD's flaws and fixing those first is the wrong way to go about it.

Probably the best part of this, and also the part that is easiest to miss. It's hard to define why DbD is fun, but it is hitting the right mix for a lot of players.

As someone who really liked Deathgarden, played a lot of it at a time that I didn't think DbD was even a good game, let me say that is true, though Deathgarden had a lot of problems.

Hunters were overpowered as a balance issue, but worse it just felt like there was nothing you could do. Hunters could jump, stun, headshot in such quick order and there wasn't really any counterplay. Which is a huge pity, because before Hunters mastered everything BHVR gave them the game was an incredibly fun mix of chases, hiding, and decision making.

That is the opposite though, new players would be playing against new players, so it wouldn't be the case. VHS was horrible to play as a monster and nobody wanted to be the monster in general.