In one of the more unusual Steam updates I've read lately, Dead by Daylight's developer Behaviour Interactive has announced it is suspending plans for numerous hotly anticipated features in favour of what it terms a 'substantial quality of life initiative' that will run throughout 2025.
As the update explains, Behaviour's focus this year was supposed to be on expanding DBD's existing offering, adding new character updates, limited time events, event modifiers, and more. But all these plans are now delayed, with the studio instead addressing "many longstanding concerns and frustrations our players have been experiencing."
The initiative will occur in two phases and run from April until the end of the year. The first phase is detailed extensively by Behaviour alongside the announcement, headlined by the addition of "Surrender States". Designed to "limit player frustration on both sides", these will let both survivors and killers surrender the game to the other players under two role-specific circumstances. If you're playing as the survivor, you'll be able to surrender the game when "all remaining survivors have been slugged." If you're the killer, you can yield the floor when "all remaining survivors are bots".
Also being added in phase one is "Go-Next Prevention", designed to limit instances where "a Survivor deliberately does everything in their power to quickly go to their next game"—basically throwing the match on purpose by doing things like walking right up to the killer. Behaviour says is "implementing measures" to detect such conduct, upon which the guilty party will receive a disconnection penalty point and "lose an entire grade." It sounds like some algorithmic trickery will be involved, an approach which has its own pitfalls. But Behaviour says it will be "keeping a close eye on this system to ensure its accuracy".
Likewise caught in DBD's balancing net is "Extreme Hiding", an excellent term for the annoying behaviour of "Survivors drawing out an unwinnable match by ignoring their objective and waiting out the clock." To clamp down on this, Behaviour plans to alter how its "AFK Crows" operate to ensure avoidant players are more quickly and accurately identified.
Other updates coming with phase one include changes to survivor spawn rules to give the killer a better chance of catching them, an adjustment to the "Map Offerings" system to prevent players from forcing map selections that give them a competitive advantage, additional anti-bot measures, and a "Quest System", which Behaviour says it will detail properly farther down the line, but notes as part of that it will be "reworking the challenge system" to "reduce the grind".
Regarding phase two, Behaviour only provides the headlines, but the overhaul's latter half will include "anti-tunnelling" and "anti-camping" initiatives, as well as "map & key item balancing" and "accessibility improvements." Finally, across both phases, Behaviour aims to provide "bug fixes for long-standing issues".
All told, it's quite the shift in direction from Behaviour. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Dead by Daylight's play experience has got itself a mild case of the Team Fortress 2s, with a combination of bot problems and unsportsmanlike player behaviour souring the experience. In any case, at least Behaviour seems committed to supporting DBD in a dedicated and continuous manner, and hopefully the studio can pull the game's recent Steam reviews out of their current "Mixed" rating.
