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Dead by Daylight is pure, unbridled, frantic fun–if you let it be.
If you are even just an on-the-side gamer, I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard the name “Dead By Daylight” at least once before. Early in its release, the game exploded in popularity. While the initial bell curve of its interest has long since hit its peak, the game is still powering on strong, regularly releasing new quality add-on content.
Ever the skeptic, several years ago, I scoffed at would-be DBD fans, thinking that they were mindlessly riding a passing wave of popularity. However, when it appeared in my Steam feed one day and I decided to take a look at it, I can’t deny that my interest was immediately piqued. After buying the base game, I couldn’t help but purchase the majority of the game’s non-cosmetic DLC, a trend that has continued every time I go back to play to see what new content has been added.
If you didn’t already know, DBD is an asymmetric horror game, where one person plays as a terrifying killer in the employ of some ancient evil known as “The Entity,” and four other people play as hapless human survivors, attempting to escape the area to live to see another day. The objective for both sides at first glance is childishly simple–the Survivors attempt to power 5 generators (symbolic in a sense that they provide light which the Entity hates) and then run out the exit. The killer, well, wants to kill the four survivors. That’s it. Anyone can understand it.
There’s a near-endless layer of depth however, that goes far beyond the simple goals of both sides that keeps thousands of players continuing to come back and play this seemingly non-complex game. Every character in the game (killer and survivor) comes with 3 unique talents that unlock by leveling up. Once a certain level is reached, these talents can then be shared with other characters on their respective side. Additionally, Survivors can take one tool (modified by 2 add-ons) and each killer has a set of unique powers (also modified by two add-ons). Lastly, both sides can burn an offering to create some kind of minor, global effect.
The end-result is a massive amount of potential variability that leads to exciting and unexpected circumstances, not to mention complex and fun strategies. Due to the cafeteria-style manner of picking skills, you can create a spirit killer that kicks through doors as hard as hillbilly killer. Or a killer clown with an unhealthy obsession taken from Michael Myers from Halloween. Or even better, you can create an Ash Williams survivor from The Evil Dead who has Jill Valentine’s landmines from Resident Evil 3, the grit and leadership of Bill Overbeck from Left 4 Dead, and the inner strength of Nancy Wheeler from Stranger Things. I mean, that alone should be enough to make any avid horror fan rush out to find out where they can get a copy of this game.
Oh. Yeah, you can play as Pyramid Head. FRIGGIN’ Pyramid HEAD. I don’t care that this isn’t an objective reason for the game being amazing, it just is.
Back on track, in spite of the game’s complexity, it’s essentially nothing more than a game of freeze tag. Killers tag Survivors and “freeze” them by throwing them on meat hooks. Other survivors can then come over and “unfreeze” their friend by unhooking them, but of course must avoid the killer who is undoubtedly nearby. Much like a game of tag on the playground, the rules of the game are… muddied. And frankly, that’s fascinating.
At no point in DBD does it ever tell you “You Won!” or “You Lose!” It doesn’t tell you in exact terms, what your win condition really ever is. Likewise, due to its asymmetry and wide variance of player base skill on both sides of the fence, there is an equally wide opinion on what parts of the game are broken or not, what strategies are unfair or should be banned or not and what even constitutes as a win at all.
Some people treat their win/loss condition purely on the game’s surface-level objective. If you’re a survivor and you’ve escaped, you’ve won. If you’re a killer and you kill all four survivors, you’ve won. However, escaping or killing on its own merit won’t necessarily give you a very high score at the end, which is much more dependent on things like protecting and rescuing teammates, working together, and escaping chases from the killer if you’re the survivor, or if you’re the killer, on things like hooking multiple unique survivors, destroying obstacles and generators and using your power frequently to your advantage. This scoring will “pip” you (increase your player rank) which in turn sets you up against better and better players. As such, to other large parts of the community, killing or escaping doesn’t matter–what matters is your score and if you pip.
Still though, there is the unlockable aspect of the game to consider as well. It’s a bit more complicated than this, but arguably, every character in the game can be leveled up 200 times (resets occur every 50 levels to “prestige” your character, which comes with a cosmetic and a minor boost to add-on acquisition when leveling up in the future). Likewise, as said before, each character can share its skills with others which requires even more leveling if you want to have a killer or survivor who has the max level of every skill in the game. Therefore, to those who enjoy the gotta-have-it-all style of gameplay, there is a near-endless supply of things to work for. To these players, the amount of Bloodpoints (EXP) you gain from each match is what’s most important–not escaping, or killing, or pipping.
Then of course though, there’s just the game itself and how much fun it can be to play, which leads us to the fourth category of “win condition,” which is to say to have fun. (Insert Yahtzee quote here about “You remember fun? That thing you had before gaming felt like a second job?”) Yes, fun; which, if you don’t take the three win conditions above seriously, you can have a lot of. The killers in this game are *really* well-designed both thematically and mechanically. It’s tons of fun to chase people down with weird and wild powers. While I tend to enjoy playing survivors less (which is odd to me, since it would seem that there are far more players who enjoy Survivor over killer and I would expect the opposite), playing as the survivor can be thrilling, hiding stealthily one moment to avoid a horrible killer and running frantically the next when they sniff out your hiding spot. Thus, “having fun” is arguably the 4th win condition–one that I believe should trump the others in a game like this.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to play well, play to pip or play to unlock things–it’s just that, if you want to devote yourself to a game for competitive reasons, this is probably a horrible game to do so with. While recent trends from the developers of DBD has been to push the balance of killers and survivors to be more on equal footing with their respective side of the game, the game inherently is unbalanced. Some killers are strictly more viable than others. Some abilities are “worthless” if all you’re trying to do is win with conditions 1-3 from earlier. Certain maps if taken incredibly seriously can be wildly in favor of certain killers or in favor in general for the survivors. Additionally, you can’t really play a DBD tournament. You can’t prove that you’re “the best killer” or “the best survivor” because of the aforementioned lack of hard evidence for a definable win condition. Likewise, a single killer and a single survivor can’t “switch sides” (like in Netrunner) after a match to play against each other in opposite roles, because there 5 players total.
It’s because of these reasons, that I believe the healthiest way to play DBD is whatever way it is that you want to play it on the day that you turn it on. There are no rules, there are no unfair strategies, no matter what one side or the other likes to scream at the end of a match. What there are, are a huge playground of interesting pieces to put together in a never-ending number of ways to shape each game to become whatever it is that you want it to be.
DBD is easily one of my favorite games at Tier 1. It’s far from perfect and the community could certainly be more supportive of each other. But as for the game itself? It’s a blast, and I’d recommend giving at least the base game a try next time it goes on sale, since the entry fee tends to be pretty cheap.
