Dead by Daylight 4.3.0 Mid-Chapter Patch Review (Video Game, 2020)
The Dead by Daylight Halloween event may have been a flop, but the game did receive a massive update right before it started. The 4.3.0 Mid-Chapter patch came out right before the event. I would’ve covered it already were it not for the bad behavior even the worst events bring out in the player base. Going up against nothing but non-stop shocking Doctors and Spirits/Deathslingers with ebony moris tunneling off hook? No thanks.
The easiest change to notice is another round of massive graphic updates. All five of the MacMillan Estate maps have been updated. Everything from the shades of green or blue/gray in the sky to the rust on the abandoned vehicles and construction equipment has been given a major overhaul. DBD has always had great ideas for maps and these updates with every major patch are just bringing them to a more modern standard of high quality graphics.
Less successful is the new lighting pass in the game. Behaviour Interactive loves to change the lighting effects in their game without officially announcing it. There are maps so dimly lit in the game now that I literally cannot see what is in front of me. I shouldn’t have to use outside graphics programs to have a playable game, but it’s back to those for me to be able to play at all.
This is a recurring issue for Behaviour Interactive that has literally led me to uninstall the game before. If only they could do something simple, like add in accessibility options to allow players like me with terrible eyesight—specifically light sensitivity, photosensitive migraines, and severely impaired vision in night—to adjust the brightness in game so we can also enjoy playing it.
It only gets worse as they’re playing with the UI effects again. Behaviour does not seem to learn this lesson well. They love adding splashes of color based on varying attacks and status effects to alter how the entire screen looks. This can go anywhere from terrible (Legion’s Frenzy used to cover the screen in flashing red spiderweb patterns and darken everything in the background) to the migraine-inducing (the toxic green Vile Purge effect from The Plague was so out of place in the color scheme that turning the camera when infected made the environments around you look like a strobe light going off).
There are now Jackson Pollock-esque splashes of dark crimson blood that streak across the screen if you get hit, literally blocking the view of the center of the screen. It also darkens the rest of the screen around the blood. These kind of effects are great in theory but, every time in practice, are disastrous to people with vision problems. They’re also always red or green, which can’t be great for colorblind players. Remember, Behaviour said years ago that actually adding in colorblind options would be an unfair advantage to players by making the bright red blood and scratch marks too visible for the average player. They did not want to add accessibility options because they feared players who did not need them would abuse them. That’s a horrible excuse.
Here’s my only sign of hope for that. In one of the recent streams near Halloween, there was a brief mention of graphics options coming to Dead by Daylight. Anything is better than nothing at this point. I can only hope that they might finally have listened to years of complaints and pleas to add any kind of accessibility options to this game. I can’t imagine the optics of letting a game like this get into its fourth year without even trying to do this. This is literally the only 3D environment horror game I’ve ever played from a studio since the advent of 3D game graphics that doesn’t even have that gamma slider setting where you follow instructions to make a graphic just show up on a black background. Games on the original Playstation had that. Just do better.
Dead by Daylight is the only game I play so consistently that just has me guessing what the world around me looks like. Mentioning terrible lighting is nothing new in my criticism. My eyes are bad. Part of my experience in horror is realizing that there are films, TV shows, and games that attempt to use darkness as a scare tactic, but make the screen so dark that I physically cannot see what’s happening. If you make something that dark, I will say what I always say. Hiding all the detail on the screen with dark shadows doesn’t make your art scarier; it reads as lazy, like you don’t trust your vision of a scary world enough to let it actually be seen.
This is actually quite sad. I thought Dead by Daylight was moving in a positive, healthy direction again, especially with the graphics updates in the Descend Beyond chapter. Visually, I was wrong.
With gameplay, I was absolutely right. The new perks I praised so much from The Blight and Cheryl Mason have upended the meta of the game. Soul Guard and Hex: Undying are standard perks for survivors and killers now. They open up new possibilities of stacking perks that have greatly expanded the meta.
Even better are the new tweaks to existing perks added in the 4.3.0 patch. Any Means Necessary and For the People now award bloodpoints for using the abilities in match, encouraging more players to run these great altruistic perks. We’re Gonna Live Forever also got a boost, offering stacks for using pallets or flashlights to save another survivor. Generator perks for killers like Mindbreaker, Cruel Limits, and Discordance last longer or have a much longer range, making them more useful in the game. Thanatophobia and Hex: Huntress Lullaby are now more limited in scope, no longer impacting healing and only impacting healing/repair skill checks respectively.
These are all great changes to the meta that bring the gameplay to a healthier place. The more variety of builds we can see in game, the more replayability there is in the game. It’s so easy to burnout when every survivor and every killer has almost the same build, regardless of ability or playstyle. These kinds of changes to perks add a whole lot more variety to the gameplay.
I’d love it more if I could see what’s happening.
We’ll see what Behaviour does in the next chapter. The PTB for the newly teased Chapter XVIII starts this Tuesday, 10 November. You can only participate if you play on Steam. You go into your game properties, click on the “Betas” tab, and click the drop down menu to opt into all beta programs. The game will reinstall itself and you’ll be able to test out the new killer, new survivor, new map (if there is one), and balance changes before they’re release in another month or so. Maybe we’ll even see some of the teased Clown changes in the PTB. That’s exciting.
Dead by Daylight is available on Steam, the Windows Store, Xbox 360, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. You can pick up the base game and all the DLCs for 10% off at Humble Bundle.
