I Watched the Dev Stream So You Don't Have To (Again)!

Hi everyone!

Just like back in November, I watched the Dev Stream again today and took copious notes for myself and for all those who don't want to or don't have time to watch the stream, but are still interested in the information it contained (or those who did watch the stream but would like an easy reference point so they can remember what was said without having to go back and rewatch).

Once again, while I made every effort to be as accurate as possible to what was said on the stream and not elaborate on it myself, these notes are written by me and not the developers. The information is official, but the wording is not, so take everything you read here with a small grain of salt. The exception is anything that is in quotation marks - these are word-for-word quotes from the devs themselves. Anything enclosed in square brackets [ ] is my personal note or conjecture, but I have tried to keep this to a minimum.

Lastly, I am aware that an official recap of the Q&A portion of the stream has been released. I decided to include the Q&A section in my notes anyway, because there were some questions which were addressed on the stream but not in the recap, and many were expanded on beyond what was written down in the recap post. Even in cases where the question was not elaborated on in the stream, I have tagged the asker to make sure they know that their question got answered.

I have included the text from the recap below in cases where I believe that it explained a certain point as well as or better than those on the stream did, along with additional verbal information which was delivered in the livestream. If you are interested in reading the official recap post, you can do so here: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/113941/live-q-a-recap-december-18th-2019#latest

For those who would like to watch the stream themselves, I have provided the links below.

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/523225267

YouTube: https://youtu.be/vde613ZMd88

And now, here is everything you need to know from the December 2019 Live Q&A:

News and announcements

DC Penalty Test

A DC Penalty Test is currently live on PC and Switch. The test will end tomorrow at 11AM ET.

The devs have been gathering lots of data during the test. They are currently going through the feedback and working on analysing and improving the system.

They are looking into problems with crashes and infinite loading screens for which people are being penalised, and they are also in the process of isolating some bugs which may also be causing issues.

Some players aren’t seeing the first disconnection penalty they receive (for various reasons, such as restarting their game and not returning to the lobby until after it has already expired), which is why some people’s 'first' penalties are appearing longer than they should be, because it's actually the second or third penalty.

EDIT: I have decided to include a direct quote from not_Queen, due to some confusion in the comments over exactly what was meant by the paragraph above, so people can draw their own conclusions: "We got some feedback about the UI, or the information going to the players. So some people don't see their first bans - or their first disconnection penalty, let's use the right word - because they restart their game. By the time they're coming back, they didn't even see they had one. So when they get their second one, it's longer. So, they didn't even see the first one."

Matchmaking and Queue Times

The devs are aware that matchmaking is in a bad spot at the moment, for both roles, specifically when it comes to queue times.

They are looking into changing some values in the backend to improve the matchmaking experience over Christmas, so players may notice some changes in the ranks they are facing as well as improvements in queue times.

When they come back next year, they’re going to investigate problems with matchmaking in more depth and look into some possible solutions.

Holiday Blood Hunt

There will be a Blood Hunt starting January 2nd 2020.

The Blood Hunt will coincide with the end of the first Tome, which will give everyone an extra burst of motivation during that final stretch. It will not, however, boost Rift or Tome progress in any way.

Studio Closure

The BHVR studio will be closed between 25 December and 1 January, and there will be very limited support during this period.

Things will also be slow for the first two weeks of the new year because many BHVR employees are taking time off for the holidays.

End-Of-Year Developer Update

There will be an end-of-year post released on New Year's Eve (31 December), which will discuss the Year 4 roadmap, what has been achieved this year and plans for next year.

This post will also contain an update on the dedicated servers, what improvements have been made so far and how dedicated servers will be operating when they go live on consoles.

Winter Event

There will be no winter event this year of the kind that we have grown used to in past years.

The developers have given the players a bunch of winter gifts (details of which can be found in the 3.4.0 Release Information, here: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/108882/release-information-3-4-0#latest) and there will be a Blood Hunt in the new year.

Nothing else is planned, and there will be no "festive ambience" in the game.

Sales

Dead by Daylight will be going on sale on Steam, Xbox and PS4 (including Asia) starting this week and lasting until early January.

Q&A

Questions about the Oni

What is the relation between Rin and Kazan Yamaoka (Spirit and Oni)? (from @Superpablog)

"Kazan is Rin’s great, great, great, great, great grandfather. Kazan attracted the Entity through his dark actions and forever cursed the Yamaoka bloodline."

Kazan appears to be the reason why Rin was cursed.

Why did you decide to give Oni his own chase music? Will other killers get their own chase music? (from @KJoor)

Yes, other killers will be getting their own chase music – they will slowly over time be implementing unique chase music for all killers. This will most likely happen alongside killer updates and reworks – for example, the Doctor is next in line to be updated and he will be receiving his own unique chase music at the same time. His music was described as “intense” by those on the stream.

Can we get the Oni’s power to work on consoles the same way it does on PC? (from @Tzubss)

"We have tweaked the rotation limitation on the newer hotfix patch, both PC and console should now have the same limitation. Tweaking the sensitivity or remapping the keys should no longer have an impact. The flick has never been an intended behavior in the design in the first place." This is why the flick was inconsistent between platforms to begin with, because it was not intentionally designed or balanced prior to release. They have now “normalised” the flick across all platforms.

They received a lot of feedback about the turning speed of the flick, and this was something that the design team discussed and wanted to review specifically. They are aware of the player frustrations over the revised turning speed. They are still looking into it, and "are considering some changes that would make it feel better to use which still maintaining the overall cap." This is being handled by @Janick, who is one of the killer designers.

Oni shouldn’t be able to absorb blood orbs when a survivor is on a hook. Will this be changed? (from @xB00MHAUERx)

In the original question, this feature was compared to the fact that Myers can’t stalk hooked survivors. However, Myers and Oni’s powers work quite differently – the Oni only receives two blood orbs from hooking a survivor, and survivors don’t continue to produce blood orbs over time while hooked.

Myers, on the other hand, can stalk healthy survivors, while the Oni has to land a hit on the survivor(s) first. They feel that “the two are balanced and that each one has its pros and cons”. So they both have a charge up mechanic, but each one is dependent on different circumstances within the game to charge their power. Michael’s power is also “on-demand”, that is, only requires the survivor to be in sight, while the Oni’s requires more agency and input on the part of the killer.

There are many other ways they could have done Oni’s power, and they have received a lot of suggestions, but the way the Oni’s power functions currently seems like the best fit for the time being. You should always expect that different killers will work differently from one another – it makes them more unique.

Why does the Oni lose a portion of his power duration when downing a survivor? (from @NuclearBurrito)

"This was done in order to limit the slugging aspect of the initial version and have players make a decision about what do to next after downing a survivor. It's also a value that can be used later on to tweak or rebalance the Killer in his future revision."

This is something they often do - they give killers meter-based powers, and when you get a hit while using one, they assume that the power has helped you to do that. If you have the ability to continue using the power after that, it makes it more powerful. This is why the power gauge is drained when Legion, for example, gets a hit on a survivor, because you don’t necessarily need to chase a survivor again when you’ve just hit them.

Are there any perks that change the frequency of blood orbs spawning? (from @Dip)

"We are trying to make perks less impactful on a specific aspect of a Killer`s power (e.g. Slippery Meat only affects hooks and the Trapper’s Bear Traps). Perks are about synergy with your playstyle and what to use to compensate for what a particular Killer power is lacking. A Killer power can quickly get out of hand and become impossible to balance when affected by perks. We deliberately made sure that no perk would affect the Blood Orb spawn rate, only add-ons."

They discussed this internally with relation to No Mither in particular, and whether No Mither users should be able to starve the Oni of his power, before ultimately deciding that the answer was no. They’re going to try to move away from that kind of thing (perks that heavily affect a particular killer’s power) in the future.

What was the most challenging part of the Oni to create? (from @Thatbrownmonster)

"The most challenging part was making sure that the Demon mode felt powerful enough to justify charging his power while making sure that Survivor didn’t felt hopeless and cheated when facing the Demon form."

Where did the inspiration for Yui come from? (from @MedicSpirit7)

"The inspiration came from motorcycle gangs, and wanting to create a character that defied norms and blazed her own path. Yui’s premise was that she doesn’t wait for help, she ‘finds a way’. This is her motto and it was reflected in all her story beats as she goes from scooter racer to world class grand prix racer."

How do you feel about Oni’s early game potential... any scrapped ideas on him? (from @ShrekIsHot)

[I have made minor grammatical edits to the quote below]

"We were not super confident about his M1 Killer instance when no Survivors where injured, because it felt, compared to our other Killer designs, like he was missing a tool or something to go against survivors.

In the original concept, the Kanabo weapon was available at all times; you could swap between your Katana and the Kanabo but you were only given the extra lunge, not double damage. It was found to be too confusing for the player.

We tried multiple Kanabo attacks in a row, sort of a combo effect, but it was super ineffective against survivors because of the nature of the first-person camera - you would lose track of the survivor really easily.

We also tried to make the absorb effect work on any survivor, no matter what their health status, but it was too similar to the stalking mechanic and was hard to understand what was happening on the Survivor’s side."

It was a complicated process which went through a lot of iterations, and they feel that the current iteration of the Oni’s power addresses all the problems that they had with others during the design process.

Questions about design decisions and the creative process

Are all killer perks created to work with that killer’s ability? (from @CashelP14)

"Not necessarily. Perks go through an intensive process before being chosen. We make sure that they don’t clash with a Killer power, and it's good if there is some synergy with the Killer, but it's not required. It is more important for a new perk to have some synergy with other perks or previously released Killers."

What is the process of designing and implementing perks? (from @ImmersedNurse)

The process typically has ten steps:

1. Brainstorm 10-15 new perk ideas for each new character
2. Clean out
3. Detail
4. Review each potential perk
5. Discuss the perks with designers individually, to get a good idea of where the perk designs are heading and make sure they’re not veering too far off track
6. Review perks based on overall feedback
7. Send out a survey to the whole team ("to gauge interest and help us to determine which ones we should go through with")
8. Cut the list down to 4-5 perks per character ("we narrow the list down to decide which perks would be the best fit for the characters and the game as whole")
9. Round-table with designers to review and rate each perk
10. Determine the final three perks for each character

"The final three perks (per character) then get prototyped, tested, and tweaked until we are satisfied with them."

How long does it take to create a character and release it? (from @ProfoundEnding)

According to the lead designer, it’s about a five-month process, but it also depends on a lot of things, particularly the killer’s power and how the feedback process goes [the more iterations that they go through on the design, the longer the process takes overall].

The process is longer than it used to be, because they now have a better understanding of what needs to go into the creation of a killer.

Not_Queen shared a memory of when she first joined the team: Huntress was created, and there was a lot of thought and feedback put into her development, and then very soon afterwards Leatherface and Freddy were developed in quick succession. Leatherface in particular came together very quickly. This period was described by those on the stream as “intense”.

Nowadays, developing killers is a much more “deliberate” process, where they go through several structured phases of prototyping, collecting feedback and iterating on ideas. "The first few months are dedicated towards prototyping the Killer and figuring out how we want their power to work, while the later months are spent fine tuning them and getting them ready for the PTB."

Sometimes, killers come together quite quickly – the killer they are currently working on, which has yet to be announced, is one such example.

Can you please put the ranks back for survivors? (from @4Two_)

There are no plans to restore this feature. The only reason ranks showed up in lobbies in the first place was because of a bug. The reason they want to keep it as it is now is because people made assumptions about what might happen in a match with teammates of certain ranks and therefore dodged lobbies, which they don’t want to encourage because it costs everyone in the lobby more time.

While it is true that bugs have become officially endorsed features in the past, and they have heard player feedback on the subject loud and clear, this particular bug impacted matchmaking too heavily for the developers to want to keep it in the game. Since they are trying to make improvements to matchmaking and queue times, a feature like this which encourages lobby dodging would only hurt that endeavour. They went out of their way to mention that matchmaking is not “broken” as it is now, they just don’t want to make it worse.

Are there any more changes in the works to bring solo queue survivors closer to the level of SWF groups? (from @Venom368)

This was part of the goal behind the Kindred changes. "Whenever we do balance changes, one of the questions we ask ourselves is, “How does this affect the SWF/Solo issue?” Things that make the gap worse are less likely to get done, and things that improve it are more likely to get done. It’s not focus per se, rather it is a concern that underpins a lot of our work."

Why not add Kindred to the base kit? (from @CakeDuty)

It’s not only the community who are divided over this idea – the design team has been as well.

There are a lot of features that people in the community have requested as basekit – Ruin, for example (which is not going to happen).

They hesitate to make Kindred basekit “because of the massive amount of information that it gives”. Displaying the killer’s aura near the hook, in particular, is a lot of information to give to survivors by default. The sort of changes they aim to make to the basekit are things which don’t have as huge an impact as a perk like Kindred.

It was confirmed on stream that “Kindred is not going to become baseline.”

Why did you change how rank reset works? (from @Masusder)

"The previous system was knocking everyone down so far that immediately after the rank reset, anyone could be matched with anyone. We didn’t like the prospect of rank 15 players getting matched with those who were in red ranks the day before. Newer players would be matched with much more experienced opponents, which could sour their experience of the game. Likewise, experienced players would be matched against newer players and have trivially easy matches.

By bumping everyone back one colour range, players are matched with people of a similar skill level. This way, you’ll still slowly drop in rank if you haven’t played a certain role in a while, but your matches should be relatively similar whether you play at the start or the end of a ‘season’.

This also has the benefit of smoothing out some of the rough edges with matchmaking. Previously it was possible to rank up too quickly if you played a lot immediately following a rank reset. This would leave you in an awkward place where the game could not find enough people around your rank to match you with, leading to excessively long queue times."

There are some who are disappointed with the new system because they relied on rank reset to be able to try out new killers that they weren’t so good at, against less skilled opponents. The devs are aware of this problem with the current rank system and the fact that it has only one “mode”, and they would like to try to address it, but they can’t yet specify exactly when or how.

They will be monitoring the new system and looking out for feedback, and they may even revert it in the future if they decide that it’s not healthy for the game after all.

Why are high-ranked players being matched with low-ranked players (outside of the 6-rank limit)? (from the livestream chat)

There are some bugs related to this. The devs [appear to] know specifically what bugs are causing the problem, but can’t be explicit with the details. In some situations, lobbies will receive incorrect rank information for the killer, which is something that the design team are looking into. It is a system bug, not a flaw in the design. It will not be fixed by Christmas, but they are hoping to get it fixed in the future.

High-ranked killers can also be matched against low-ranked survivors because of how the SWF matchmaking system currently works, which is also something that the design team are looking into and may or may not get changed.

Why did you nerf Balanced Landing? (from @woota)

When the perk first released, the stagger reduction was on cooldown, and this was changed because at the time, there weren’t as many large drops in the maps. This has changed over time, and created situations where survivors were able to infinitely loop the killer using Balanced Landing. This was determined to be problematic and bad for game health, so they decided to apply the exhaustion cooldown to all aspects of the perk.

This frees them to develop other perks with similar effects, and also makes Balanced Landing more powerful when it does activate, since it now also muffles sounds. "This will allow you to be a little more unpredictable and confuse the Killer, buying you some precious distance." The hope is that the perk has largely retained its appeal, but the change was made because it was ultimately unhealthy for the game. And not just because of the map design, but also because of the design of the perk itself.

Why make the change to Deep Wound? (from @RainbowPatooie)

"Deep Wounds has been giving us problems for quite some time. When we hit upon a solution that’s not abusable by either Killers or Survivors, we decided to implement it as quickly as possible. As an integral part of The Legion’s power, we needed something sensible that eliminated the possibility of abuse such as “moonwalking” with the version that stopped going down while in a chase. The version that only went down in TR was better, but interacted badly with certain perks and Killers that removed the TR. The only conceivable way we could foresee someone abusing this change would be by sprinting for the rest of the match, which would mean they aren’t doing anything else (generators, for example)."

Now that Deep Wound is in a stable position, the devs can focus on monitoring and improving Legion, because they know that he’s quite a weak killer and has been since his release.

What was the motivation behind the Legion nerf? (from @Its_Vigo_Here)

The developers did not set out to nerf Legion. The intention was to do a “consistency pass” on basic attacks across all killers. They wanted to normalise basic attacks and all related perks. This meant that Legion would have reduced synergy with certain perks, and they knew that this would have a negative impact on the killer, but the goal was not to nerf Legion but simply to improve consistency across the board.

Now that Deep Wound has been stabilised, they can look further into Legion’s performance, specifically with regards to the basic attack change, and make further changes as necessary. They will be keeping an eye on Legion going forward.

Any plans for further Legion updates in the future? (from @BenZ0)

There are no specific plans to update Legion, but there are also no plans not to update him. They will be monitoring his performance and making adjustments as necessary if anything comes up.

"So far, there doesn’t appear to be any statistical change in their performance before and after the update."

Would you guys consider re-examining Spirit’s post-phase speed curve? (from @thesuicidefox)

"There is actually a bug with the Spirit post-phase at the moment. Right now, you will receive a speed boost as expected. However, if you were to lunge while you have this speed boost, you would do a normal lunge attack rather than an extended one like you previously would. This same issue applies to the Wraith’s post uncloak lunge. We’re looking to have this fixed as soon as possible."

If the smoothness of the speed curve turns out to also be an issue, the design team would like to work on that as well to make it feel smoother.

Do Kindred and Open-Handed still interact like they did before? (from @Yoshi39)

With multiple instances of Open-Handed running at once, the survivor ability to read the killer’s aura with Kindred is capped at 24 metres. At the moment this is still the case, but the team are currently re-evaluating it to determine whether the original reasons for adding that feature to the game are still valid.

Why did you guys decide to bring back hooked survivors taking a free hit for the unhooker? (from @mistar_z)

It has always been the intention that hooked players should be able to be hit. The reason it was restored was so that the rescuer has the ability to mindgame the killer by tricking them into hitting the hooked player (“meatshield tech”). "Putting the hooked Survivor between the Killer and yourself allows you to possibly get a save without being hit, and an otherwise difficult unhook becomes quite possible."

The ability for survivors to “phase through” a hooked player was removed as it was not an intended feature.

Doctor changes

They are preparing a detailed post for early January with details of the upcoming Doctor changes.

explanation for the update

They decided to update Doctor next because he’s the most annoying killer to play against. His passive ability to make survivors scream was intended; the level of frustration it caused was not. "To the person playing the Doctor, it could feel inconsistent as you could pass right by a Survivor and there’s a chance they wouldn’t scream. To the Survivor, it could feel very oppressive as your madness would constantly be increasing without any interaction with the Killer."

The intention is not to nerf or buff the Doctor, rather to change him to be less frustrating to play against. The planned changes are not a rework, but an update – slightly above Nurse level, but lower than Freddy level, in terms of how drastic the changes are going to be.

Basekit changes

The Doctor will no longer be able to switch stances - instead, "The Doctor will be able to shock a Survivor and then hit them without needing to change modes." He still has his Shock Therapy attack, which works much the same as it does currently. The range is slightly larger, but this is compensated for by the fact that his range-increasing add-ons are less powerful.

The static field and passive madness increase from being in the Doctor’s terror radius have been removed. This will be replaced with a new ability called Static Blast, which is similar but more limited.

The Doctor can change Static Blast for 2 seconds, and moves more slowly while doing so. Once charged, the power hits everyone in the Doctor’s terror radius with a blast of static energy, causing survivors to increase a full madness tier and scream, revealing their location to the Doctor. Static Blast has a cooldown of 60 seconds. Static Blast is affected by terror radius perks such as Distressing.

Add-on changes

The Interview Tape add-on (which changes the Shock Therapy attack zone to a ray rather than a cone) remains, but the Scrapped Tape add-on (which changes the Shock Therapy attack zone to a ring rather than a cone) has been removed.

The Doctor still has add-ons which increase his terror radius.

There have been changes to the Doctor’s ultra rare add-ons. Iridescent King can no longer cause Exhaustion, but it can now trigger counter-clockwise skill checks for afflicted survivors.

There is also a new add-on called the Iridescent Queen. When equipped, survivors will gain a “charge” whenever they are zapped with Shock Therapy, which will activate when they get within 4 metres of another survivor and zap the second survivor, causing them to scream and reveal their location as if they were hit with a Shock Therapy attack.