http://dbd.game/killswitch
Hello Crow Friends
I’ve always been a stealth player. The quiet tension of sneaking past the killer, heart pounding as I crouched behind a rock, hoping they wouldn’t turn around. The mind games, the subtle jukes, the deep satisfaction of surviving not because I was fast, but because I was clever. That’s what made Dead by Daylight feel special—it wasn’t just an action game. It was psychological. Tactical. Poetic in its silence.
But stealth has slowly been strangled out of the game.
Recent patches seem to actively punish cautious play. Stealth perks like Urban Evasion, Iron Will, or Distortion have become borderline useless in a meta where killers are encouraged to rush generators and chase survivors aggressively. Map visibility has increased, audio cues are louder and more revealing, and even the pacing feels calibrated for nonstop action. There’s no room left for the slower, calculating approach. It’s go-go-go or get left behind.
The saddest part? The loss of stealth stripped the game of its soul—for players like me, at least. It used to be a horror experience. Now it’s just a loud, frantic race. I find myself missing the moments of stillness, the quiet escapes, the anxiety of being watched. That was real terror. Real excitement. That was Dead by Daylight.
I don’t fault the devs for wanting to evolve the game. But in doing so, they’ve alienated a core playstyle. Without meaningful stealth, there’s simply no draw for me anymore. Also, crows.
Comments
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19
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Agree. I like to play a combination of chase and stealth, but like you said, stealth playstyle has been suffocated to death with recent changes. Unfortunately, I don’t think BHVR really cares. They have no doubt seen this type of feedback from other players who prefer a stealth playstyle but have chosen to kill it anyway.
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That's exactly how I see it. I haven't been playing too long myself, but I've seen a lot of videos from the past and my friends who have been playing for a long time tell me what it was like every day. I also prefer the stealth play style because I often wet my pants from tension and fear, and I also miss the old fog, the old moon offerings and more. That was what DBD was all about. Today it's all about hunting and aura reading. That's boring in the long run. BHVR should go back to more stealth and old roots.
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Yeah, I've personally had a bit of reservation after coming back and finding "ratting" had entered the playerbase's vocabulary.
There are absolutely situations where Survivors just don't want to be found (mostly when there's 2 remaining and both want hatch, or of course the classic hiding in a corner with a key) but those are edge case scenarios and prevention of it needs to be treated in an edge case way. The Killer being able to Abandon after 10 mins of no gens being completed is a decent example of doing it right IMO.
But a new player getting immersed and crouching around the map for 2 minutes instead of finding a generator is not something we need crows to stop. I'm sure it's annoying to have a teammate be doing that, but it's a natural part of the game
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Crows are happening WAY too fast. Ive waited at gens because they got blocked by a perk. I get crows waiting for it to unblock… i cant sneak away as killer comes over, he sees them lol.
Got to double that AFK time at minimum tbh OR check you got blocked from your totem/generator and are probably waiting for it to interact again.
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Tbh I agree entirely. Stealth was a valuable part of the gameplay, and the current crow system punishes usual stealth way too much for what is supposed to counter only "extreme hiding". We already know that BHVR can track how long it's been since objectives were progressed, because that's what the abandon system does. We didn't need anything from this crow update except the loss of collision, but that didn't need to be tied to AFK crows whatsoever and could just be a "X player will lose collision if X player has not moved more than a certain distance in 30 seconds" and would be more effective than the current version (which can take upwards of 190 seconds to reach 3 crows if being bodyblocked by the killer) without actively penalising stealth play.
They massively overcomplicated the fix and, in doing so, have now dug themselves into an even deeper hole to fix it. I like to try and see where their systems can be salvaged, but I genuinely think the AFK Crow needs a full revert and to return to the oven for a bit longer, if at all, and we can take the losing collision aspect and just make it part of base kit. Abandon already exists to prevent this as it ends the match in a draw.
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EXACTLY!!! This game was, above all else, A HORROR game. I loved a stealthy playstyle. Don't get me wrong, I built myself to be stealthy, fast, and do gens. I am not someone who enjoys the looping or mind game nonsense. I like to leave that to someone who does enjoy it…
But now, you may as well shelve any perks that involve hiding, stealth or being in lockers since they will QUICKLY get you penalized. Bhvr is doing a wonderful job of butchering ANY semblance of horror elements and turning this into a weird action game…
And killers wanna complain about "hiding survivors"…uhh…DUH….of course we are hiding from someone trying to kill us! And it isn't like the game hasn't given them 4,285,732 aura reading/scream inducing/other locating perks….
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Stealth is a core part of survivor gameplay. Just deleting that almost entirely in a single patch is ridiculous.
This also destroys several perks, simply due to the fact that taking time to activate, use, and/or travel is just going to reveal your location.
Like, sure, I understand that just about anything in the game can be problematic when taken to extreme levels, and excessive hiding is no different. But this new crow system isn't it.
5 -
I agree.
You know, my least favorite thing in DBD are chases. I don't like chases, I like hide and seek. I like being stealthy, I like this thrill of seeing the killer looking for me and doing my best to hide, I like the mind-games. I never want to play a chase-oriented match, and in the past that was perfectly viable.
But it gets increasingly harder to do. As you said maps got brighter (and uglier, much uglier), the Fog is essentially gone, aura perks are a dime a dozen when there should be few of them, and survivors even got penalized for hiding.
Worst of all is that this was never even acknowledge. BHVR doesn't outright state that they no longer want stealth in the game, but players who prefer stealth, like you and me, are basically left with nothing.
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Agreed.
Sadly it seems that a lot of loud people in this forum are loop friends and don´t like stealth :-(
Hiding is the logical thing to do for every new player because this is a horror game and there is a killer coming.
All the anti stealth mechanics are very detrimental to the game in my opinion. I don´t want it to get as awful as in 2v8 where you avoid the killer perfectly, a gen pops, and you are just revealed and can do nothing against it.
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they’ve alienated a core playstyle.
This is worse than that, really. They're punishing not only stealth, but also new players, unskilled players, and generally inefficient players. This has always been described as a casual party game, as far as I'm aware, and yet this kind of system is the opposite of that. This is damn near a "gen rush or else" system. The devs also seem to have forgotten that the game is full of slowdown perks, too, because this punishes anyone hampered by slowdown.
It's absolutely batty. I hate getting teammates who do nothing but stealth around the edges of the map. This doesn't fix that. I'm still seeing teammates do it. I see them tap gens to avoid crows. I also see some just walk around with 3 crows and the killer ignores them because they're not a threat.
Yes, I want to stop getting teammates who do nothing but stealth around. No, I don't want to actually punish people in the match. I don't want to dictate how they play. I want matchmaking to work better, first off. Second, I accept that matches are going to go bad and I'm going to die a lot. That's the game. I don't mind dying. I mind my teammate who stealthed around and let everyone die and got the hatch is rewarded for that behavior. BHVR needs to fix it so a hatch escape isn't 9.5k BP and instead rewards based on relevant emblem points (safe unhooks, being chased while gens are worked on, healing, lightbringer), so a survivor who does nothing towards escaping earns nothing for escaping. Another positive would be finding a way to encourage survivors to work on gens when only two survivors remain, making it so the game really rewards trying to play through a hopeless situation. Right now, it absolutely sucks to be the survivor who works on gens, gets found, and dies while the final survivor hid and gets hatch, because the survivor who hid is rewarded far better.
The crows are just awful. A lot of people don't consider gens to be the most fun part of the game, they like going for flashlight saves or hunting for totems. Those playstyles are also hurt with these crows.
Punishment systems are generally bad. The DC penalties are necessary, I remember what it was like before them, but punishing people for how they play? In a casual game? This is some nonsense.
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As somebody who is an absolute freaking potato in chases I always preferred stealth gameplay. But with how fast the crows pop up now I fear stealth gameplay is completely gutted.
…also, I haven't had the joy of a map that is Midwich yet. But eventually I will and I can already see myself there running around with 3 crows because I can't find a single generator on this map.
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I much prefer to play stealthy and to treat DBD like a horror game where the primary aim is to hide from the spooky monster and not to run them around picnic tables like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
I don't like looping to the point that I refuse to run Windows of Opportunity because all that yellow crap would completely kill the horror vibe of the game for me. No doubt it would improve my Survival rate (or at the very least, stop me from running into dead zones or right past a nearby pallet). But this is a horror game. I enjoy the tension of sneaking around. Trying to out Ghost Face the Ghost Face. Hoping not to be found, followed by the panic of being spotted and running to wherever I hope there will be some safety.
I'm dreading the day they bring visible perks into the lobby, to completely kill off any weird, off meta builds and with it, the final remaining aspect of Survivor player agency altogether.
The annoying thing is, there's absolutely no reason why stealth and chase orientated play styles cannot coexist together in the game. I honestly don't care how my Solo Q teammates play or what perks they like to run, so long as they are being productive and progressing the game. To the Survivors who don't like stealthy teammates, well there's already a solution built into the game for you. Why not SWF up with other like minded Survivors and let the rest of us play however we like to? Stealth isn't something that needed fixing on a mechanical level.
That said, I wasn't actually able to activate the crows in any of the games that I played yesterday. So I can't personally comment if they've adversely affected making stealthy plays or not, though I've read enough to convince me that they probably do.
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I play into stealth because chase and loops aren't my strong suit, like other people. If I get in chase its a way higher chance im dying. I do objectives, of course, but if I need to slink away I will. Except now I get crows and as killer I've seen baby survivors get crows and get freaked out. It happened yesterday several times when I was on springtrap. A newer player was being sneaky because its a horror game and she kept getting crows. But I saw her do stuff too. It's just rough right now and a complete over correction of a non issue honestly.
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I don't really understand all the comments here if I'm being honest. Looping has received the EXACT same treatment. The idea is that you cannot stall the killer forever. Stealth and looping are two sides of the same coin, buying time for generators to be progressed.
In previous DBD era, you could loop the killer around infinites. Since then we've gotten fall stagger, entity window blocking, reduced pallet spawns, bloodlust, and a host of other mechanics and perks to prevent chase time from ever being excessive without a true skill difference between the survivor and killer. Even a survivor that is AMAZING in chase will eventually have their window blocked, or get bloodlusted down. This is just a natural, accepted part of the game.
But for some reason, if you can't stealth for several minutes without progressing objectives this is an issue? I don't see these chases as being anything different than the changes made to looping. You can still waste plenty of the killers time through stealthing, but eventually they're going to have an advantage to catch you. Its a 1v4, this is just the nature of DBD. Assuming you're actually progressing your objectives and altruism while you're not around the killer, you shouldn't really be getting crows. If you do manage to avoid the killer long enough to get crows, then congratulations, you've wasted a ton of their time and succeeded in the objective of stealthing. Now its time to practice your chase.
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