Dead by Daylight: After 6 years, the most annoying mechanics will be removed

Dead by Daylight promises tons of improvements for solo players and removes the most annoying gameplay. Gone are the days of button mashing.

With its meanwhile 6 years under its belt, Dead by Daylight has blossomed from a small horror insider tip into a genre giant. The darkest horror licenses come together in the 4vs1 killer game – but the gameplay still has annoying features in some places. The developers have now revealed what should be improved in the coming months and have taken a look at the future.

Dead by Daylight’s most annoying mechanics will probably go away.

The end of the eternal key press

If, as a survivor, you are in the comfortable position of having a team colleague keep the killer busy for a long time, then the gameplay on the generator is rather annoying. This is mainly due to the fact that you have to hold down the left mouse button (or the corresponding button on the gamepad) so that you can continue working on the generator.

A new option in the upcoming patch will change that. If you want, you can set options in the future so that such actions become permanent when you press a single button. So you click once and then sit at the generator until you press the button again.

Of course, skill checks will continue to appear during this time, for which you have to press the action button in good time.

However, you have one hand free when repairing the generator and you no longer have to hold down the mouse button for over a minute at a time.

This is accompanied by the option that ongoing actions (such as healing, repairing the generator, cleaning the totem, etc.) automatically cancel when you start a sprint. So it cannot happen that you “accidentally” get stuck to the generator, although you actually wanted to flee because you have not yet got used to the new setting.

The end of the annoying “wiggle spam”

Another annoying feature of Dead by Daylight is the “wiggling”. Survivors can fight their way free if carried by the killer. You have to repeatedly press two buttons in quick succession. Not only is this not much fun, it also causes pain in the fingers after a while.

That is why the wiggle mechanism is also converted into skill checks, similar to generators or the 2nd phase on the hook.

However, the skill check is a permanent phenomenon while the survivor is being carried, with 2 hit zones – left and right. Every time the survivor passes a skill check, the wiggle gauge continues to fill up and the skill check goes in the other direction, where the second hit zone must be hit; back and forth, always alternating.

Power-making should finally be improved

Although Dead by Daylight has been using “SBMM” (Skill Based Match Making) for a while, the matches have been criticized again and again. Often times the games feel unfair and if one player disconnects, all other survivors will be punished because there is a high probability that they will lose and their rating will drop. Therefore, there are three main changes that the developers are working on.

Improvement for successors: When a player leaves a lobby, Dead by Daylight tries to fill up as quickly as possible and neglects the quality, so that players often join who are far below or above the rating of the rest of the team. That should be changed in the future.

Improvement in Disconnect: Disconnects are not yet handled well in a game. Here you want to make adjustments so that the change in the rating is not so serious if you lose quickly due to a disconnect.

Easier matches after long breaks: Anyone who has taken a few weeks or months off and then goes back to Dead by Daylight is no longer as good as it was a while ago. The rating has not been influenced so far, so the first matches will be tough and devastating. In the course of time, the rating should be lowered in the event of inactivity, so that you can have a more pleasant re-entry into the game.

Solo players should have it easier

A little later – probably not for many months – the developers want to make a number of improvements to support solo players on the survivor side. They are currently severely disadvantaged. Depending on your skill rating, there is a 15% difference in the probability that you will or will not get out of a match alive.

In order to compensate for this difference, one wants to give the solo survivors more information so that they feel more involved in the team action. The idea here is, for example, an icon on the portrait of each survivor, by which one can roughly see what the survivor is doing: For example, whether he is working on a generator, opening a box or hiding in a cupboard.

However, this has only been considered so far and the developers want to hold this discussion openly and get feedback from the players.

After all, the goal is not to give the survivors more advantages and to make the game more difficult for killers – it is only intended to compensate for the disadvantage for solo players among the survivors.

You can test the first of these changes in the Steam version of Dead by Daylight from tomorrow evening (January 5th, 2022), then the PTB should go online.

What do you think of the planned changes? Good and meaningful ideas? Or is that unnecessary?