Dead by Daylight

♥	This article is dedicated to transgender voice actress Zoey Alexandria, who voiced The Unknown, died on April 30, 2024, due to complications from a rare autoimmune disorder at the age of 29 (November 14, 1994 - April 30, 2024), anyone who disrespects her death will be dealt with.

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Dead by Daylight
"Fuck you, buy our cosmetics." — Behaviour Interactive's unofficial slogan
Genre(s): Survival Horror Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Playstation 4 Xbox One Nintendo Switch Android iOS Stadia Xbox Series X/S PlayStation 5 Release Date: June 14, 2016 Microsoft Windows WW: June 14, 2016 PlayStation 4, Xbox One NA: June 20, 2017 AU: June 22, 2017 EU: June 23, 2017 Nintendo Switch WW: September 24, 2019 Android, iOS WW: April 17, 2020 Stadia WW: October 1, 2020 Xbox Series X/S WW: November 10, 2020 PlayStation 5 WW: November 12, 2020 Engine: Unreal Engine 4 Developer(s): Behaviour Digital Publisher(s): Behaviour Interactive Starbreeze Studios (2016-2017) 505 Games (PS4/XONE) Deep Silver (Switch) Koch Media (Android/iOS) Country: Canada Successor: Hooked on You: A Dead by Daylight Dating Sim (spin-off)

Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical survival horror video game developed by Behaviour Digital, the development division of Behaviour Interactive. It was initially released in 2016 for Microsoft Windows, being published by Starbreeze Studios, until Behavior Interactive became the independent publisher of the game in 2018.

Gameplay

In each Trial of Dead by Daylight, there are two sides; the Survivors, and the Killer. As a Survivor, you will need to cooperate with your team by fixing five generators around the map and unlocking the exit to escape, while at the same time trying to utilize the environment and mind games to outsmart your danger. On the other hand, the Killer must take down the Survivors, and hang them on a sacrificial hook, for The Entity to fully kill them, rendering the sacrifice as successful.

Qualities That Won't Make It To Daylight

1. Despite having been released several years ago, and having received numerous updates, the game is still riddled with bugs and glitches which range from mildly annoying to game-breaking. For example, in some maps, there are places where, thanks to their smaller collision, survivors can go and make themselves unreachable by the killer.
2. Poor visuals. Despite running on Unreal Engine 4, Dead by Daylight looks like a budget game released in 2010, featuring low-poly models, muddled textures, and poor lighting (there are many maps where lights and shadows are "painted" directly on the textures of the environment), nearly non-existent particle effects, and stiff animations. All in all, the game looks unpolished and unfinished.
3. The game is poorly optimized. As mentioned above, it is visually outdated, but it still performs poorly, even on high-end systems, and it is borderline unplayable on last-generation consoles due to constant frame drops and short freezes.
4. The game doesn't have dedicated servers, meaning lag switching and cheating are rampant, a problem that is made even worse by the mods being few, lazy, and absent. All of this is despite the developers pumping out paid DLC packs and grossly overpriced cosmetics in industrial quantities through an in-game store.
5. Dead by Daylight is not free, and yet, as mentioned above, since June 2018 it features an in-game shop that allows players to purchase cosmetic items. Those items can either be purchased with a premium currency named Auric Cells or obtained with a free one that can be earned by leveling up your Player Level called Iridescent Shards. The problem with this is (just like with any other game that runs on a similar business model) that Shards are very time-consuming to obtain enough amounts of, and each piece of cosmetic (even the lamest repaints) requires a lot of said currency. It's made worse in that each piece of clothing that is not a simple redeco of something that is already part of the base game costs many Auric cells equal to $10. That's half the price of the game and nearly double the price of one of its DLCs.
   • Fortunately, the mobile version is indeed free-to-play, making the shop more acceptable.
6. Extremely painful grinding. Dead by Daylight features a progression system called the "Bloodweb", which is the equivalent of an item shop. This progression system applies to every character in the game and contains Perks, items (for Survivors), add-ons (for Killers' Powers and Survivor items), and Offerings (perks that can alter a match in many ways). All of these items can be purchased with the basic free currency that can be obtained in-game from matches called Bloodpoints. The problem is, that Bloodpoints are capped at 1,000,000, which means that after you reach the limit, you won't earn any more until you spend those that you already have. This means that if you plan to save your points for an upcoming character, you have to stop playing if you don't want to play matches without being rewarded and wait for any moment when the game could reward you Bloodpoints (BP) as a gift, getting past the BP cap. The fact that 1,000,000 Bloodpoints are often not enough to reach Level 50, the Bloodweb cap, is also to be noticed.
   • Another issue about the Bloodweb is that it can be a little confusing for newcomers, as instead of a traditional item shop that has random items that refresh every specific time, it's instead a randomized web that randomly generates the items you can buy. It also doesn't help the fact that after Level 10, you will also have to deal with The Entity (which after a specific amount of purchases will start to consume items, rendering them unpurchasable) and higher rarity items at the same time, meaning that you may have multiple items you wanna obtain, but suddenly summon it and in the next turn lose the item you wanted to buy. Thankfully, Dead by Daylight Mobile has a traditional item shop, making things much easier.
7. The game is unbalanced and the devs are heavily biased toward a specific side. As mentioned in the first paragraph, it is an asymmetrical game, which means that there is a side composed of numerous members supposed to be underpowered and thus in need of cooperating and playing mind games against the other side to succeed (the Survivors), and another composed of a single player that although outnumbered by the opposing side, is supposed to be powerful, able to stomp his opponents in a 1v1 scenario, and still have an edge if their opponents are grouped (that would be the Killer). In short, the Survivors are supposed to fear the Killer. And while it's true, it doesn't always work like that in Dead by Daylight. Instead, the Killer's powers are rather limited, due to many factors; the first one being that the Survivors' objective, which consists of repairing five generators, can be completed so fast that if they play optimally, have the best items (primarily Toolkits for faster repairs), add-ons, Perks, and focus on it (as they should) the killer has no chance at all, even worse if the Killer encounters a Survive With Friends group. The main cause of this problem is the fact that perfect play can see survivors extend a chase indefinitely. This is due to many factors, but the most important ones are two: bad map design and glaring exploits that have existed from time immemorial and are still to be fixed.
8. As mentioned above, the developers are heavily biased towards one side, that side being the survivors'. This bias created, over the game's lifespan, several balance issues, the most jarring ones being related to exploits that don't get fixed as long as they're on the Survivor side. The most notorious exploit is known by the name of "looping", and can be split into two categories: infinite-looping and pallet-looping. Infinite-looping was a major thing during the game's early days and was caused by bad map design. Now, survivors could (and still can, to help them break the killer's LOS) vault windows faster than the Killer, and most buildings in most maps had at least three windows on each side, which meant that survivors could just keep vaulting the same windows in a specific building and the killer could never reach them. The only way to overcome this issue as a Killer was to play specifically as The Trapper, place a bear trap near one of the problematic windows, and hope the survivors would step on it, which would lead to them being stopped dead in their tracks and caught. While this issue has later been mitigated by the introduction of blockers that close windows if a survivor vaults them more than two times in a row, pallet-looping still exists to date, and even if it's not as bad as infinite-looping was, can still waste enormous amounts of the Killer's time. Long story short, it's an exploit that allows survivors, due to their smaller collision box compared to the killer's to make sharper turns around objects and debris, effectively nullifying the Killer's higher movement speed. Survivors usually do this near pallets, barricades that they can drop once the Killer finally starts to catch up to them, hence why this exploit is called that. This is not the primary reason why pallets are in the game (they are used to briefly stun the Killer if they get close enough and as mentioned before, as a barricade) but even when someone brings up this issue during one of their Q&A live streams, the devs either play ignorant or shrug their shoulders and subtly insult their interlocutor. As mentioned before, this exploit has practically no way around for the Killer: they can only mitigate it by using some specific perks (that come with paid DLCs) or playing a specific character that is very frustrating to learn and not very fun to play as (such as the Nurse). This leads us to the next point.
9. The game design is horrific to the point where both survivors and killers can turn a match into a stalemate in a pretty much infinite number of ways. One of these is a former tactic known as the "Hatch Stand-off". When three generators were fully repaired (on DBD Mobile when two survivors remained alive (regardless if other Survivors escaped or got sacrificed/killed), a hatch would spawn in the map. When there was only one more Survivor or one of them had a Key, it would open, allowing them a chance to escape. On one hand and depending on the situation (e.g. being chased by the Killer and everyone else having escaped, or a Survivor having a Key and finding it), it can be a great alternative if you by any chance find it. On the other hand, though, you can see that it has its flaws. Glossing over how wrong it is to give a player the umpteenth (last, if there's only one Survivor) chance when it's clear that they royally messed up (whether they like it or not, the Survivors are a team, and if one or two of them screw up hard, they all go down), this mechanic opens up to a scenario that is very common at high ranks: both the Killer and the last Survivor would stand on the edge of the hatch, refusing to do anything, as moving first would result in either the Survivor escaping or the Killer grabbing the survivor the moment they try to leap into the hole. This scenario was recently changed at the expense of Killers, as they are now unable to grab survivors when they leap into the hatch. The official tournament held by BHVR for the game's second anniversary ended up being a trainwreck for this reason. Some might argue that killers are now able to close the hatch, but the truth is, it doesn't matter, as a survivor jumping into the hatch can, at any time, override the killer's action of closing it. The worst part is if the player had a Key, which was considered one of the most toxic items a Survivor could bring if the Killer closed the hatch, the Survivor could instantly open it again and escape from the Trial (either alone in the best case scenario or in the worst case scenario, the entire team) Another popular way survivors used (and still use to, to an extent) to hold the game hostage was to open the exit gates and then tea-bag and taunt the Killer until they were forced to leave by the latter. Later on, a timer called the Endgame Collapse (EGC) was added to urge Survivors to leave once the exit gates were open and to put some pressure on them, forcing them to think whether staying to try and help their teammates is a good idea. The truth is, though, the timer doubles in duration each time a survivor is dying (on the ground, bleeding out) or hooked by the Killer, essentially defeating the whole point of said timer.
   • Thankfully though, since the release of the Chapter update Portrait of A Murder, the problem of the overpowered Keys and the Hatch was fixed, as now the Hatch can only spawn once one Survivor remains alive, and opening a closed Hatch with a key takes a few seconds, giving a small window of opportunity for the Killer to find and stop the Survivor from escaping. And while they didn't suffer any nerfs themselves, Keys are now not a viable choice anymore, as the only other way to use them is by necessarily attaching Add-ons to unlock aura reading abilities depending on the add-on.
10. As previously stated, once every two or three months, a new DLC is released. Each DLC costs $7 (except for DLCs that only include a Killer and of big collaborations like Resident Evil, each costing less or more respectively) and contains a new survivor (if included) and a new killer, both of them with three perks for their side. However, the main and biggest problems with these DLCs are not their price, but the perks themselves. All perks have a unique variant of them once you reach a character on Level 30 and every five levels till Level 40 called "Teachables", which they can spawn in the Bloodwebs of the other characters after being purchased, and they range from useful perks that should be part of the base game (such as the Killer perk "Barbecue and Chili" from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre DLC, that once equipped increases the Bloodpoints awarded to the player at the end of the match) to downright game-breaking. The biggest example of this is the Survivor Perk Decisive Strike, which can be obtained by leveling up Laurie Strode from the Halloween Chapter DLC. This perk allows a survivor who was caught by the Killer (meaning that it sugarcoats the Survivor with a second chance), once per match, to escape the killer's grasp and stun them in place for 5.5 seconds if the Perk is in Tier 3 (even though the description of the perk states that the stun lasts four seconds only) by succeeding a simple Skill Check (which is a quick-time event), without the Killer being able to do anything about it. In the hands of inexperienced players or in cases of toxic players 'tunneling' a player (tunneling is focusing on one sole Survivor till they get knocked down), Decisive Strike is no big deal and can make for a pretty good Perk, but if used by experienced survivors, it can make the game a living hell for the killer, as it has no drawback, allows them to extend the duration of a chase to biblical proportions and, even worse, all four survivors can run it. The only thankful thing is that it can only be used once per Trial, but it still doesn't help the fact these issues exist. The second big problem is that, more often than not, the devs use perks and new content in general as band-aid fixes for the game's balance issues. And most of the time, they aren't even good band-aids. The most notorious example of this is the character (most specifically a perk from The Hag) Killer perk, "Hex: Ruin", a perk that is meant to slow down the progress that survivors can make on a single generator and instantly regress them if nobody works on them, thus giving the killer more time to chase and catch them. However, as you might have noticed by the name, Ruin is a "Hex" perk, meaning that it's tied to an entity on the map called a Totem (more specifically in this case, a Hex Totem), that survivors can outright remove from the game, a thing that can happen mere seconds after the match starts, both because survivors can spawn on it and because Totems are very poorly placed. It's even worse if a Survivor has the universal Survivor Perk "Small Game", which allows them to get a sound notification if they look somewhere where a Totem could be hiding.
    • Thankfully though, if you're lucky enough, they may not find it and instead find Dull Totems (which do absolutely nothing when cleansed, aside from getting 1000 Bloodpoints).
11. As mentioned in the previous point, the Survivor perk "Decisive Strike" has always been a huge problem for the game's health and balance, and, despite this, aside from a few nerfs in regards to how it works, the perk received substantial buffs in patches 2.6.0. and 2.6.3.: the stun was increased in its duration from five seconds to effectively seven when it's in Tier 3 (even though the perk's description states that the stun only lasts five seconds), the Killer can no longer know exactly who is running it (previously they could know who did, thanks to the Perk marking the Survivor who used it as the Killer's Obsession), all survivors can use it immediately, provided that they were hooked at least once and the necessary time which is active doesn't expire, and the killer perk Enduring can no longer reduce the duration of the stun.
12. As mentioned earlier, the devs have a huge bias towards Survivors (that is probably due to them representing the majority of the player base), and this means that everything survivors want, they will get. Survivors have abused this thing numerous times over the game's lifespan, growing more entitled every time. The most notorious example of this is the so-called "Freddy fiasco": the game features the iconic Freddy Krueger from the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise as a playable killer (however it's based on the 2010 remake, which is a completely different story). When he was added to the game, Freddy was arguably the weakest Killer in the game due to him having every game mechanic stacked against him (for example, he was the only Killer that had to give his targets a seven-second head start before he could even interact with them), and yet survivors screamed so much about him being "unfun" that the devs nerfed him into the ground mere days after his release, making him unplayable against any Survivor with more than one hour of playtime until his rework where those flaws no longer exist. This was not the first time the devs essentially shoved a middle finger down the Killer player base's throat to pander and please Survivors. It also happened with Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise and The Nurse (a Dead by Daylight original).
    • Speaking of Almo, he is often frowned upon for his dumb decision-making. Instead of listening to community feedback for things that need buffs/nerfs, he reads an invalid statistic for things and assumes they are accurate results. He is also very oblivious to a lot of complaints and doesn't even know why Freddy is overpowered. He said, and we quote: "Freddy is overpowered. I don’t know what makes him overpowered, I just know that he is."
13. The devs aren't only biased, but also malicious and disingenuous. In their constant pandering of one side's requests, they frequently make changes to the game without mentioning them in the changelogs. These are known as "shadow-changes" within the community. 1.1.1., one of the early patches, enormously increased the range at which a killer can be stunned by a survivor dropping a pallet, and despite it making such a big difference (killers would get stunned through walls and around corners) the change is not listed in the actual patch notes. Another shadow change was made in 2.5.0., where Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise was changed so that he gets stunned and starts a Tantrum if he uses his chainsaw near a hooked survivor. It's also worth mentioning that whenever someone brings up a balance issue during one of their Q&A streams or in the official forums, as long as it's a killer-related issue, the devs always give the same answer, namely that killers should "mind-game" and "git gud"/adapt. Unfortunately, every time Killers adapt they get nerfed, and what these "mind-games" they always talk about are supposed to be is still "unknown".
14. Sometime around patch 1.4.x., a bug was introduced that caused permanent loss of progress for the players, meaning that all of their character levels, Player levels, character Prestige, and all currencies were back at the very start. It took Behaviour almost a year and a half to finally fix it. Furthermore, this issue caused most of the veteran players to lose their Legacy outfits, which were pieces of clothing for the first OCs of the game that could only be obtained under certain conditions that, when the loss of progress problem arose, could not be met anymore. To add insult to injury, the devs refused to give those outfits back to the players, even to those who could show irrefutable proof that they previously legitimately obtained them.
15. BHVR's awful habit of turning horror icons into laughing stocks doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon: One of the more recent killers they released, Ghost Face from the Scream franchise, gets kicked out of his power, his incomprehensibly loud "Stealth" mode, by Survivors simply looking at him.
    • Speaking of Ghostface, like in Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers and Jump Force, the Scream franchise is poorly represented. Firstly, Ghostface is a standalone Killer who doesn't come with a map and survivor (although this isn't the first time they released a Killer exclusive DLCs, with good examples being Leatherface and the Hellraiser Chapter). Ghostface's robe looks nothing like the robe in the movies. And on top of that, the identity of Ghostface in the game isn't even anyone from the Scream franchise. Instead, you have Danny "Jed Olsen" Johnson, a journalist reporting the crimes that he's committing. However, the real reason for Ghostface's poor representation is due to the fact the developers chose the rights to the mask over the franchise; the Ghostface Mask and Scream franchises are under different licenses (due to the former being released before the first Scream film's release).
      • If Behaviour isn't going to have the rights for the Scream franchise, they should make Jed Olsen an original character and make Ghostface an entirely different character, but without any known identity behind the mask.
16. The chapter update named A Binding of Kin, made way for some of the most game-breaking bugs that the game has ever had, making it one of the worst, if not the worst update in the game’s history.
    • First of all, the new Killer. The Twins were released with an unfinished power. At release, Victor wasn't able to hold lockers until a later update that they had planned during its PTB.
    • The new Teachable perks for The Twins didn't even work properly and are still utterly useless to this day.
    • And most infamous of them all, there was a bug where Victor would literally fly off the screen.
17. As of 2021, Behaviour Interactive's greed became even more noticeable than ever. Not only did they rush out a chapter (A Binding of Kin), but they also started catering to more mainstream audiences with the All-Kill chapter, with the chapter having a K-Pop theme. The chapter wasn't received very well by a portion of the player base for that reason alone. However, the K-Pop theme could be a good thing for those who enjoy the genre, and it isn't necessarily a bad quality.
    • Not only are most chapters noticeably cash-grabs, but the Eternal Blight event felt rushed as well. You could no longer earn any of the cosmetics through playtime, unlike the last two Blight events, and it gave players fewer skins than the last events.
    • The original Hallowed Blight event gave players skins for the following Killers: The Trapper, The Wraith, The Hillbilly, The Nurse, The Doctor, The Huntress, Dwight Fairfield, and Claudette Morel. The Withering Blight event, which came a year later, gave us skins for The Hag, The Clown, The Spirit, The Plague, and Jake Park. The Eternal Blight, however, only gave players skins for The Blight (The main focus of the lore for the Blight events), Ghostface, The Legion, Feng Min, and Felix Richter. Out of all of these events, The Eternal Blight had the least Killer skins.
    • All 3 of the Blight events also had a lot of controversies surrounding them. The Hallowed Blight event only lets players unlock one skin through playtime. Due to the backlash that was received from players, the developers allowed more skins to be unlocked through playtime; as for The Withering Blight, the event was delayed to late October; making the event feel more like a Halloween celebration than anything; and finally, The Eternal Blight, which had the most backlash of them all. The devs visibly felt less passionate about this one, making it seem like the devs had to do the event instead of wanting to do the event. Most of the event can only be experienced through The Rift, which players will need to pay Auric Cells for. In addition to this, certain serum add-ons were added for both survivors and killers, with the killer add-ons being a disadvantage to that side. Using the add-on will sacrifice the chance for some killers to be able to use some of their abilities, and the add-on didn't allow killers to attack survivors while dashing, making the add-on completely useless. The Eternal Blight was received so poorly, that the devs decided to cancel their yearly Winter Solecistic Christmas event for 2020.
    • After the poor reception for the new HUD/UI in a later update, the devs got an even worse rep than ever. Instead of listening to the player base's feedback and complaints, they instead straight up ignored them until later.
    • After backlash on one of the game's balance designers, Ethan "Almo" Larson, complained about how someone kept asking for a colorblind mode in one of his streams, the devs decided to add a colorblind mode after being called out for it. The way they announced Colourblind mode looked very suspicious and was viewed as nothing more than damage control to the community. Colourblind Mode would later be added to the All-Kill PTB, which would also be released alongside the chapter's live release.
18. As if A Binding of Kin’s patch was bad enough, Patch 5.0.0, which brought the iconic horror game franchise Resident Evil into the game as a DLC, caused the console port for the game to become almost unplayable. While playing on a console, the game would have very distracting and awful lag spikes and frame rate issues that made the game unbearable to play. These issues would later become a problem for PC too, and took over a month for the developers to fix the issues. Even to this day, some players are still experiencing these frame rate issues, so not all is good so far.
    • The Resident Evil chapter introduced the Raccoon City Police Station (RPD Station) as a new map, which is now arguably considered by the player base to be the most unenjoyable and broken map in the entire game, since Ormond and Haddonfield. Due to the map being extracted straight from Resident Evil: RE:Verse's RPD Station, it is difficult to navigate for players who haven’t played the Resident Evil 2 Remake. It makes matters worse when the map includes areas from the game that serve no purpose in Dead by Daylight without context, causing most of the corridors to lead to dead ends.
    • On Day 1 of the chapter’s release, the RPD Station would often crash the game for players; this caused the developers to disable the map for a month.
    • The A.I. for The Nemesis' zombies is sometimes awful. While they may function and stay consistent in their role sometimes, Zombies may get themselves stuck on dead ends and empty tiles a lot of the time, which shows that the developers aren’t that efficient or knowledgeable at developing an A.I. for enemies.
19. The Skill-Based Matchmaking update. In a nutshell, it's considered the worst update in the entire game, as it replaced the original matchmaking with a new one, and it's abysmal. Firstly, Ranks were replaced with Grades, which feels more like a first-person shooter's competitive ranking system, and second of all, your Rank/Grade doesn't matter anymore, as now it's all a matter of a hidden MMR counter that determines your apparent skill level, but straight up sucks, as it only counts your escapes as a Survivor, and kills as a Killer, and not a mix of every action. The worst part? Succeeding in these two only reward you a measly amount of MMR points. Overall, the game feels more competitive, and if you have a low MMR, you will be stuck with players who are not experienced, resulting in dull matches, and even encourages being selfish for the sake of retaining and increasing your MMR. The worst part is that everyone would complain, yet Behavior didn't care, proving how incompetent and uncaring they are with their community.
    • Adding insult to injury, the beta of VHS (now renamed to Video Horror Society), an upcoming free-to-play game of the same genre, also had an MMR system, which calculated all actions you did, so if you played a big role with your actions yet still lost the match, you could still gain a higher MMR. When indie devs that haven't even publicly released their game yet manage to make a better MMR than a game released years ago, you realize something's wrong on the side of Behavior.
20. As of October 18, 2021, BHVR has openly admitted to supporting NFTs for the Hellraiser Chapter DLC in collaboration with Boss Protocol and Park Avenue. With that being said, the developers of Dead by Daylight were okay with Boss Protocol scamming their customers.
    • In case you don't know what NFTs are and why we say that Boss Protocol is scamming their customers, fully known as Non-Fungible Tokens, they are tokens that you can buy with Ethereum (a type of cryptocurrency) that essentially give you a copy of the NFT into your virtual wallet. However, the problem is that they are extremely harmful to the environment (the Ethereum Blockchain is very energy inefficient, and uses a ton of electricity), and are a big scam, primarily the fact you don't truly own the rights to the NFT (you just own a copy of it as we said), among other things including art theft to illegal profit from it, money laundering, and the mere fact you buy literal JPGs, which you can just right click and save! Overall, never use NFTs for your games, regardless if it's directly or indirectly in the game, or anywhere for that matter.

Qualities That Would Make It To Daylight

1. Though it may be a hit-or-miss in its execution, the concept behind Dead by Daylight is great.
2. The character designs are generally good.
3. Despite all of its problems, Dead by Daylight is still the less problematic asymmetrical multiplayer horror game available, which says a lot about its competitors, and might be the reason why it still has a player base.
4. The game allows the players to play as horror icons such as Freddy Krueger (called in-game as The Nightmare) from the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (although unfortunately based on the 2010 remake, which is a whole Other Story) and Leatherface (called in-game as The Cannibal) from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
5. There are some instances in which Dead by Daylight can be considered a true horror game. One of these is the beginning of a match as a Survivor playing against Michael Myers (known in-game as The Shape) from the Halloween franchise: thanks to his stealth abilities via his Killer Power "Evil Within", and the fact that he has no Terror Radius (the Heartbeat) early in the game during Evil Within's Tier 1, you never know where he is or what he's doing, and you're very likely to be caught off-guard. And especially when he reaches Tier 3 he can one-hit Survivors, and he can be a dangerous Killer, especially when played by an experienced player
   • The same can be said for Ghostface from Scream, who also has stealth abilities in which he can jumpscare the player; accompanied by one of The Doctor's perks "Monitor & Abuse" can help well with scaring players with Ghostface and Michael Myers.
   • Another Killer, who can scare players like the other two killers mentioned above, is The Demogorgon from Stranger Things. It is very loud and players can hear its roars/screams from miles away. Its unique chase music can give some players anxiety. Unlike Michael Myers and Ghostface who are scary for their stealth tactics, The Demogorgon is scary to players for existing, according to a lot of content creators for the game.
6. Every Killer has the same basic abilities (can hit survivors, has a Terror Radius, vault windows, and break pallets), but each of them can use a unique power (The Wraith can Cloak with the Wailing Bell thus making him invisible, The Nurse can 'Blink' with her Power "Spencer's Last Breath", allowing her to teleport around the map, The Huntress can throw hunting Hatchets, and so on), making them interesting.
7. Almost two years after the Freddy Fiasco, Freddy Krueger has been reworked. He gained new abilities that match his character (Dream Snares that allow him to hinder a Survivor's movement, with some add-ons that replace Snares with fake Pallets to fool survivors, the ability to warp from generator to generator), and he is no longer as frustrating to play as he once was.
8. The game now has a matchmaking ban feature that punishes those who Disconnect early in matches. The more you do it, the more harsher matchmaking punishments you will receive.
9. The following DLCs The Last Breath, Of Flesh and Mud, and The Spark of Madness chapters are for free on the console ports of the game; same with the cosmetic set called The Bloodstained Pack.
10. The game doesn't rely on cheap jumpscares and instead relies on suspense to be scary.
11. Despite not being able to play as any Ghostface from the actual scream movies and you have to play as Danny Johnson, Danny Johnson is a very interesting Ghostface and he does share similarities with Mickey Altieri as both were serial killers for a very long time and take sadistic pleasure in their kills, and he is also similar to Nancy Loomis as they are both reporters who are reporting the crimes they commit.
12. Great soundtrack. They even got Akira Yamaoka, the composer for the Silent Hill franchise to compose the soundtrack for Pyramid Head’s menu and chase music.
13. The cosmetics, while most of them are expensive, look great and creative most of the time.
14. The developers were actually okay with fellow clone game Identity V due to NetEase asking permission to use some of DbD's mechanics. They even co-developed the game with them.
15. Despite all its flaws (and toxic community) Dead by Daylight is pretty fun to play.

Reception

Dead by Daylight received mixed to average reviews according to review aggregation site Metacritic. The PC version has an aggregated score of 71/100, while the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch versions of the game received scores of 64/100, 58/100, and 61/100 respectively.

Trivia

• The game spawned a lot of memes, such as "Shirtless/Daddy Myers", and "NOED FTW" (a reference to the universal Killer perk "Hex: No One Escapes Death", one of the most hated and overpowered Killer perks in the entire game used by trolls and toxic players), "Dwight is love, Dwight is life" (along with other memes about Dwight), "Oni-Chan" (referring to one of the game's original characters, The Oni), "Too op, plz nerf", "7 seconds", "Fedora man bad", and many more.
• In response to the memes revolving around the fan request to add a sex scene into the game, Behavior Interactive later released Hooked on You: A Dead by Daylight Dating Sim in August 2022. The game is a visual novel featuring the in-game killers as a romanceable character, with an out-of-screen sex scene.
• Zoey Alexandria, the transgender voice actress of The Unknown, died on April 30, 2024, due to complications from a rare autoimmune disorder at the age of 29. Behaviour Interactive soon posted its tweet in her memorial on Dead By Daylight Twitter.

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