Dead by Daylight 5th Anniversary Event Review (Game Event, 2021)

The Dead by Daylight 5th Anniversary Event started last week and the scale is…smaller than previous years.

For one thing, it is limited to the in-game event. The annual art, cosplay, craft, and game guide concepts are not running. This doesn’t mean they won’t return in the future, but they are not part of the official event this year.

For another, it is largely a repeat of last year’s event. You interact with crowns on podiums to unlock a head cosmetic for unlicensed survivors and killers. Killers just need to grab a crown before the trial ends to earn it; survivors need to actually survive the trial to earn their cosmetic. It’s unbalanced, just like it was last year.

For the first week of the event, there was an iridescent shard bonus every day you logged in. Why the giveaways were limited to the first week has not been explained. Previous years have split up shard giveaways with bonus cosmetics only available on certain days or bloodpoints. Everyone who logs in during the event does receive 500,000 bloodpoints, which was a nice bonus.

The gameplay during this event doesn’t feel as aggressive as it usually does for a Dead by Daylight event. Those 105% stacking bonus bloodpoint cakes seem to be the tipping point for not intentionally griefing other players in the game. It’s either that or a lack of motivation with the event otherwise being identical to last year.

The only other new element is the return of the community challenge. If the player base can collect hundreds of thousands of crowns during the event, we can unlock a 5th Anniversary cosmetic for David King and Wraith. As of writing, we’ve unlocked charms and heads. Each level of the community challenge has a different requirement, so even though we’ve blown past the threshold multiple times over, the counter resets for each level. You do have to use promocodes to collect these items as opposed to just unlocking them, which is a needless hurdle to throw in.

What worked last year still works this year. The event generators and hooks look good in game. The event items that shoot out a burst of confetti when used correctly (or completely) are fun. The loading screen overlay with quotes from the different Behaviour employees is a fun celebration of the game.

Would it feel more special if the game didn’t copy the same color theme and graphics from last year? Yes. Yes it would. At this point, I’m amazed that swapping out graphics on the generators and hooks didn’t cause survivors to load into matches without their heads or killers to be permanently stuck in the ground (which did happen on certain spots of maps last year).

I just wish that something had changed to expand the event again. We know they crank out a lot of cosmetics for the game. Being able to get fifth anniversary cosmetics for Trickster, Twins, Blight, Yun-Jin, Elodie, and/or Felix as a login bonus would’ve been nice. They did it for Deathslinger and Claudette last year and it was good incentive to keep checking in each day.

They also still seem hesitant to include Blood Hunts in the game anymore during events. These are the special events that offer 50-100% bonus bloodpoints with no offerings for a week or long weekend. Tons of players login and play when those events are happening, which means more people having a chance to get the limited event items and maybe even spend their money on the in-game store items. It feels like this is a win/win situation for everyone, but Behaviour has not done it in years (unless an event launched with massive game-breaking bugs).

The 5th Anniversary Event isn’t bad. It’s just underwhelming. They scaled back on events without really adding any new incentives to participate. The decision to switch back to a community challenge rather than login rewards is also frustrating. The game being (again) massively broken on console doesn’t exactly build good will for the event, either.

The 5th Anniversary Event runs until 15 July.