Dead By Daylight Interview: Devs Currently Have No Plans To Move On From Last-Gen Consoles

Dave: My name is Dave Richard, and I am the Senior Creative Director of Dead by Daylight. I was one of the original team members on Dead by Daylight. My current position means that I am involved in all aspects of DbD. From the general direction of the game to the Outfits that we produce for our Characters, I am involved in all of this. It’s a blast – we have a fantastic team, and I’m very proud of what we have accomplished so far in the game.

Dave: While I can’t go into the specifics for any of our ongoing collaborations, I can tell you that, on average, we can take 9 to 12 months to build a licensed Chapter.

Dave: Well, first off, let me tell you that we are not some sort of omniscient power that decides the strong and the weak. We, as developers, have our instincts when it comes to what we think will work. We’re also human, and we make mistakes. Sometimes, we create perks, and in our internal playtests, we realize that these don’t work. And sometimes our community tells us – the balance is off, and it messes with the meta. We then go back to the drawing board and tweak it. Live balance is hard, and it is not a perfect science. Our game is meant to be chaotic and challenging, but we also want it to be fair and fun for all. So we appreciate and encourage our community to continue sharing their thoughts with us.

Dave: We updated the trapper several times in the last year, giving him more of an edge, more specifically on the speed of acquiring and setting traps. We are still monitoring reception to these changes and will continue to iterate on them.

Dave: Vecna imposed itself as a very strong contender from the beginning. He is evil personified and someone both the Wizards of the Coast Team, and we thought it would fit perfectly in the Dead by Daylight universe.

Dave: I can’t share specific details, but I will say that we got along very well with the Wizards of the Coast team, and so our conversations flowed, and we were all aligned very quickly on which characters we wanted to bring in the game. And now everyone can play them. It’s really neat!

Dave: We are all HUGE fans of Matthew Mercer here. He has single-handedly helped bring D&D to the forefront of popular culture, and he is one of the nicest people around. He very kindly agreed to voice Vecna, and it was a blast working with him.

Dave: I think players might actually be very surprised – many may think that D&D is a huge departure from DbD but the truth of the matter is D&D is stock-full of horror elements. There’s an entire universe that is horror-centric. And so yes, our goal will always be to delight and surprise our players with cool crossovers – but first and foremost, our goal is to be the house of horror. This will not change, and we look forward to bringing diverse horror experiences to the players.

Dave: We don’t have any updates on Cross-Progression but stay tuned.

Dave: Maintaining the game across multiple generations of platforms comes with its challenges, and yes, in some ways, it leads us to be unable to fully utilize the hardware of the current generation or even newer technologies that might not be available the earlier hardware. With that said, releasing on older generations of platforms played a very large role in building up the massive following that we now have for the game, and we are still seeing a very healthy player base on past-generation platforms. Until that situation changes, we believe supporting multiple generations of platforms is the best thing to do for the game.

Dave: Sadly, nothing I can share with you yet. But keep your eyes peeled – more to come soon.

Dave: I think this Chapter feels very exciting – we’ve got tons of cool gameplay mechanics that are really fun and are cool throwbacks to D&D.

Dave: I want to take this opportunity to thank our fans for their continued support of our game. I hope they enjoy playing the D&D Chapter as much as we had fun making it. And right now, we have our Twisted Masquerade Event happening in the game with rewards, surprises, and much more. See you in the Fog!