Dead by Daylight: Players demand less content, want something completely different

The Dead by Daylight community agrees. They want a better game – not always more content.

The fact that the Dead by Daylight community is never really satisfied is now old hat. But some topics boil up again and again in the subreddit and the official forums. The developers should finally put more time into fine-tuning the game and not rush from chapter to chapter. A demand that is being made again after the latest “Portrait of a Murder” chapter.

What’s the problem with Dead by Daylight? This cannot be determined in terms of a single problem; rather, a whole series of difficulties create annoyances. A quick recap of the players’ most pressing concerns is here:

• Buggy patches: New updates come with a multitude of new bugs that take several weeks to fix. The first 2 weeks after a patch are just annoying for many players.
• Too Much Grind: The grind required to unlock all the perks in Dead by Daylight is getting bigger and bigger. In the meantime you have to invest several hundred hours of play if you want to have all the perks on a character with a fresh account.
• Useless Perks: Many perks serve no real purpose or are so weak that they almost never get played. There should be a major balance and function overhaul of all perks.
• Questionable matchmaking: “Skill-based matchmaking” creates dissatisfaction. It’s too simple and doesn’t pick up on many of the subtleties of the game. It’s just based on the number of survivors who escaped. This distorts the rating and repeatedly creates questionable matches that frustrate both killers and survivors.
• Boring Killers: Legion and the Twins are considered extremely boring and one-sided killers that only allow one style of play. Revision is requested here.

However, at the same time you have to say that Dead by Daylight lives mainly from the new patches with new killers and fresh perks. This always attracts new maximum numbers of players – which is why the developers seem to have been sticking to it so far.

What does the community want? The wish of the vast majority of the players in the forum is clear. They would like more time for bug fixes, problem solving and general quality control with Dead by Daylight. Less new content until the existing content is all in better shape.

A corresponding proposal in Subreddit of the game got over 1,600 upvotes, with an approval rate of 98% – the players of Dead by Daylight rarely agree.

The collective wish: one or two new chapters should be dropped so that the focus is completely on improvements and revisions.

Why don’t the developers do this? Their annual plan shows that the developers are planning bug fix patches, but not deviating from their 3-month cycle. Many players are now of the opinion that this simply does not work, since with each patch only major bugs come along.

One of the biggest problems is likely to be that Dead by Daylight – so far – has remained almost unrivaled. There is hardly a game with the asymmetrical “4 on 1” formula that has grown so strongly and survived the last few years. However, this could change in the foreseeable future, as several games with a similar style of play are currently in development. “VHS” in particular looks tempting for the players of Dead by Daylight and could outstrip the horror game by Behavior in the long term.

Perhaps it is precisely this competition that ultimately prompts the developers to rethink and ensures that Dead by Daylight is even better. Because Dead by Daylight is already a pretty good game – but with more focus on the existing game and less ever new content, it could be a lot better.

Or how do you see that?