Dead by Daylight Mid-Chapter 4.5.0 Patch Review

I’m not going to bury the lead. Dead by Daylight is in a bad place right now. The game is not functioning like it should and it’s not an exaggeration. The newest mid-chapter patch broke so many things that recent ratings on the game’s Steam page went from mostly positive to mixed with 48 hours and the player base actually dropped down. Survivor, in particular, is so bad right now that killer queues are moving at a crawl.

So what did Behaviour Interactive do? A whole lot.

First, there’s the new HUD. This was part of the colorblind controversy that blew up a few weeks ago, but the end result was hardly what we were promised. Basically, one of the developers went off on their personal Twitch stream about how asking for accessibility options like a colorblind mode just annoys them since they’re not allowed to fix or announce things the company won’t let them fix or announce. It was incredibly pessimistic, they got called out by the founder of AbleGamers, and immediately started backpedaling.

About the only positive element of the awful new in-game HUD is the slight modifications to make it not completely inaccessible to colorblind gamers. The information is randomly strewn throughout the screen, meaning you have to take your eyes off the actual gameplay and objectives to see the status of survivors, how many generators are left, the hook count, and other vital in-game information as killer or survivor. The initial effects when a survivor is hit or impaired are still not colorblind friendly, and the Band-Aid fix of adding some representational white graphics over the orange on red (over the blue/green backgrounds) doesn’t really help since you have to look away from the game to see.

Robert, you’re being mean. Behaviour already announced they’re fixing it.

Yeah, in the next new chapter launch. That’s at least one month away, if not two. There was talk of Behaviour slowing down production to only produce three new chapters a year instead of four, though we never got official confirmation on that. That could put the fix for the new HUD no one asked for anywhere from March to April of this year. This was after the overwhelming response to the new HUD was negative on the Public Test Build, which is designed to collect player feedback; Behaviour’s response was that they were not going to reverse the design change because too much work went into it.

The sad part is the HUD is the least damaging change to the game.

Hit detection is broken. I’m a killer main. I’ve already started to have concerns about how the game is trying to make it so much easier for killers to get a 4K in a match. They nerf a lot of survivor perks if there’s any chance it could shift the balance of the game away from killers. Now, hit detection is so far removed from the reality of the game that survivors are getting downed in completely separate rooms and hallways from a killer’s lunge. A killer swings, a survivor is nowhere near the range of the attack on their end, and they’re suddenly in the dying state on the ground.

I don’t need the game to cheat for me, Behaviour. I need the game to be fair to have fun.

They also, once again, completely redid survivor animations in the game. The last time they did that was for the Ghostface mechanic where survivors have to make eye contact with him to cancel his power; that power is still completely broken (either impossible to cancel or cancelled immediately with no consistency) after being introduced in June 2019. People were overwhelmingly opposed to that change, too, and Behaviour did it anyway.

The new survivor movement change is where they really messed everything up. They wanted to make more advanced graphics for the game that better reflected how people actually move. That’s not a terrible idea, and I personally don’t mind the aesthetics of the new animations.

The execution is terrible. The new graphics slow down survivor actions like crouching and turning 180 degrees. Behaviour claims these are visual bugs that don’t actually impact gameplay, but players are literally losing chases because they try to turn around, get stuck on the map, and get knocked down. The new injured running animation is clipping with environments, making it so paths survivors easily fit through when healthy are unusable when they’re injured. They actually had to remove Autohaven Wreckers and Crotus Prenn maps from the game for a week because the new animations made so many paths impossible to use for survivors.

So the HUD makes it too hard to access information in the game, killer hit registration is completely broken, and the new survivor animations make many chases impossible in the game. What else is there?

I’m glad you asked. The pip system is broken again. This one, in particular, makes me frustrated.

Behaviour’s favorite expression is “this is a visual bug.” I…don’t think they know what that means. A visual bug is things like an item on the blood web just growing larger and larger if you hover over it; it’s not being able to prove that your rank is dropping and your score total doesn’t add up with your in-game actions because the pip system is broken.

They’re claiming that people who are depipping because emblems are not being awarded, eventually losing ranks and not earning as many points, are not actually impacted by depipping. Many players have provided proof to Behaviour that the pips are not registering correctly from game to game and Behaviour claims no one’s rank or scores are actually affected. There is a visual glitch with representing some emblems, but Behaviour refuses to acknowledge that something is broken in the scoring system. Both issues can exist at the same time but Behaviour says they can’t.

The nicest thing I can say about the mid-chapter patch is that they finally figured out how to make a special hook and generator event work without creating a needlessly toxic environment. Every hook and generator for the new Lunar New Year event is a special hook or generator. That means killers can’t camp the event gens and survivors can’t make it their only gameplay objective to sabo the event hooks. To earn bonus points, you burn the offering. That’s it. Every hook or generator gives you the points if you burn the Red Envelope. It took almost five years to figure it out and they broke the game so no one wants to play in the process.

This is the worst update Behaviour has made to the game since releasing The Legion in Chapter X. Remember, that was when they knew the killer was totally broken and able to cheat beyond the boundaries of their intended power to win and their response was “no they’re not.” Yeah, this is much worse. This isn’t one broken character destroying the balance of power in the game; this is every design choice forced on the players actually breaking the game.

Dead by Daylight is available on PC and all consoles. I don’t recommend buying it. I’m not going to play again until they actually fix these mistakes, and even then they’re not getting my money for the next DLC unless they fix the game and learn how to communicate with the player base. Based on close to five years of telling us nothing and doubling down when they mess it up, it looks like Behaviour just lost a paying customer who bought the game and all the chapter DLCS on day one. I’ve already uninstalled the game so I’m not tempted to support a broken product.

Time to find a new main game to play on stream. This one’s broken.