Dead By Daylight: 10 Years on

Dead By Daylight (or referred to as initialised; DBD) is one of my favourite games of all time, it's also one of my least. For the average DBD player, they can surely share my sentiment.

For those of you unaware, DBD is an online asymmetrical multiplayer game where you can be either one of four survivors who must work together to fix generators within the games "trials" to escape, or as a single killer whose sole task is to stop the survivors and sacrifice them to an overarching eldritch presence simply known as "The Entity."

Whilst I can go on about the lore, I'll give you the TL;DR: The Entity is the being responsible for the trials, it takes every survivor and killer and makes them perform these trials to feed on the extreme emotions, even manipulating events in some characters backstories, even having a cult dedicated to it, and it's not just our world, but across the multiverse, explaining several of the games licensed chapters.

The game first released on June 14th 2016 with only a handful of killers and survivors, now, ten years on, the character roster features 43 killers as of June 2026 with the current release of the 10th anniversary chapter of Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th franchise, and 53 survivors.

It has been an eventful ten years, ten years of growth, setbacks, community and championing. We have seen the ugly, the bold, the beautiful and the wretched, and it only promises more.

Sure, the game has had its overwhelming problems; server issues, bugs, community backlash and toxicity, license losses and lack of gameplay versatility, but that comes with pretty much any game. The positives do truly shine and outweigh the negatives, such as the developers commitment to authentic storytelling through the games and characters lore and creating a mix of characters of various backgrounds, ethnicity and identity, especially in a world of rising right-winged political ideologies taking centre stage in the world right now, where marginalised communities are given a platform to feel seen and represented despite the current climate, such as the trans character Orella Rose released mid 2025, and with the new survivor Shane Wiigwaas, the first Native American survivor set to release later this June, it's standing in the face of ignorance which keeps the game strong, rallying support from its community of players and bringing more into the fold.

The game has also made a bold use of its licensed chapters, from classics like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Child's Play, to more modern and unique takes on horror such as the manga turned anime series Tokyo Ghoul, table top role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and other video game franchises such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill, all to keep the game fresh, draw in more players and ensure the longevity of the game, all this for a game that struggled to find its footing in the early years and many believed would die off like a lot of other games of its ilk, like Friday the 13th and V.H.S (Video Horror Society) that had a good couple of years of service but ultimately couldn't compete and shut down their servers.

Throughout the last couple of years, the developers have expanded the game with in-game events, whist some have been ongoing for most of the games lifespan, such as the Lunar New Year and Anniversary with the twisted masquerade (an event that was ultimately ended last year in favour of the new anniversary event "The Black Banquet" set to start June 25th to mid-July,) and more modern events such as the Lights Out and 2 Vs 8 modes, the latter having such a grip on the community that it is now a regular event with regular updates with each new iteration, but therein lies the issue.

The game was so big that it had its own platform for smartphones. This iteration of the game was developed separately by Netease, this iteration had more features, cosmetics and game modes that the actual game lacks. The game featured a prop hunt mode, a game mode seen in other online games such as the Call of Duty franchise, a mode that I myself, and many others, would like to see implemented into the game. The game doesn't feature much variety in terms of its games, with variety solely coming from your perk loadout and killer choice that 2 V 8 is a much needed breath of fresh air that quickly stales due to the games overly excessive queue times for killer players, with wait times being in excess of 25 minutes! Developers aimed to quell the queue times by adding a "play as you wait" feature which would hold your place in the killer queue and play as a survivor, a feature only carried across to the main game recently as a similar issue happened with the games biggest launch yet with last years anniversary chapter Five Nights at Freddy's where queue times for the killer players were into the double digits and servers crashed frequently due to the influx of player demand that brought a spike in player activity well into the hundreds of thousands, an issue that has been dampened but not fully resolved with this current anniversary with Jason as game wait times for killer players can still be up to 10 minutes, but a significant and positive difference from last year, only something else has now insidiously crept into the works and made this decennial anniversary a little unbearable for the faithful players: A Toxic Community.

Yes, the community is one of the best communities for an online video game, many players connect and meet in real life and twitch streamers gain huge followings simply by playing this game due to the communities overwhelming support, but like every community, creed and religion, there are some very, very bad apples. A very loud minority that take to social media to call out the various things they find wrong with the game to such a degree that now even your most basic players who have issue are now roped into and associated with it. Comments like "this killer is too strong!" and "these perks are too strong!" and, as I mentioned earlier about certain characters, backlash against diversity and inclusiveness. It's a shame because it feels like the developers actually listen to this very loud minority for the most part, some killers are released and get virtually no love at all from the very loud minority, forcing the developers to make drastic changes that greatly impact the characters or ignore them entirely, and typically they target the original killers, a prime example being The Skull Merchant, a killer released in March 2023, and personally was one of my favourite killers, able to deploy drones that would scan a small area and survivors caught in their radius would become tagged for a short time and alert the Skull Merchant via a tracker, deploying said drones would leave the Skull Merchant virtually undetectable for a short time, allowing for stealthy attacks to surprise survivors and forcing them to run into the drones to be tagged, this is however, no more with recent reworks. A rework that was completely unnecessary, in my personal opinion, where some less played killers got a rework such as The Nightmare and The Trickster getting a much needed rework or revamp to freshen them up a bit, the latter receiving a rework because of lore development with a new cosmetic, a new map and others to tie in with the character whilst the former got an entirely new rework not once but several times since their release, with their first rework shortly after their launch in 2017 and a recent rework of their gameplay design simply because their pick rate by the killer players was so low.

Certain perks that the game features had drastic reworks in recent years that meant various builds and playstyles couldn't work anymore, or at least to the degree that they used to. A perk like Hex: Ruin had a number of reworks, where generators that were no longer being repaired would automatically regress. Originally upon release, players would repair generators would have to pass skill checks, a great skill check, hitting the skill check in the highlighted white zone of a progression circle, would maintain repair progress, hitting a good skill check, where the check highlighted in black and much larger than the Great check, would cause the generators to lose 5% of the progress made. It was then changed to its current iteration where the generators would regress automatically when no longer being repaired by survivors, forcing them to stick to repairing the generators whilst one survivor would run around the map to cleanse the hex totem the perk was associated with in order to deactivate it and put the killer at a disadvantage. Doesn't sound so bad of a change, right? What if I told you that this change was made to regress the generators progress by 200%? It's true. Or it used to be. Now the perk only works at 100% regression speed which is the standard. This is just one of the many perk changes for killers and survivors that made the meta change up.

True, I am focusing on the negatives, some perks have had a monumental change-up for the better, but all in a way to change the meta which can affect the status quo of players and their enjoyment. Nevertheless, there are also other things that need to be addressed that other online games seem to have mastered and implemented early on or even at launch that Dead By Daylight just hasn't done yet.

Overwatch and Marvel Rivals are two other massively online multiplayer games focused on teamwork, two teams of 5 or 6 going against each other to complete an objective, and a main focus being communication between players. Whilst Dead By Daylight does have a chat feature, it is only available for PC players in lobbies and end-game, most players who play together play through a party feature, PlayStation and Xbox have party chat, PC use Discord etc, to communicate, but only PC players have an in-game chat box feature, making communication to other players possible, yet the console players, like myself, are excluded from this, and nothing has been implemented in any of the developer talks. There is practically no way of communicating with other players in a cross-play feature. I am not asking for one to be thrown in during the trials like with Overwatch and Rivals, but a lobby and end-game cross-play chat would be a nice feature to communicate and connect more players to each other, though there are prime examples rife through the PC player community that the end-game chat isn't always what it is cracked up to be; with rampant hostility between players expressing concerning levels of racism, homophobia, transphobia, threats of nefarious natures and the like, but every community has its bad apples and there are features to report players for unsportsmanlike conduct, it would be a welcomed feature by the community at large that would bring cross-players closer together.

Dead by Daylight features a hearty number of licenses, allowing players to play as characters from other trademarks, with some being mentioned prior like Resident Evil and Five Nights at Freddy's and horror movie icons like Michael Myers of the Halloween franchise and Jason of Friday the 13th being added recently, the developers have announced ahead of time in their yearly road map they do each anniversary, announcing their expected timeline of chapter releases, bug fixes, in game events, new features etc, and one major announcement that has caused a divide within the community of DBD players is the announcement of the scheduled chapter for November later this year being the recent horror franchise Terrifier coming to DBD, with Art the Clown as a playable killer; some think he's too recent and problematic with the franchise being "just extreme violence against women" and questionable ethics around the series creator and director Damien Leone, whilst others are more welcoming. I am on the fence about it, I welcome it, but a license like Terrifier feels too predictable, in my opinion anyway, and would have preferred an original killer, which feels rather like a well-run-dry at this rate. We have the community-made chapter Chorus of Sin coming later in the summer, where over the last year, the community has voted on what they would like to see in a chapter, essentially allowing the community to build a chapter from the ground up, and the results are something to behold with the choices provided; an angelic being as a killer armed with a staff that can fire and direct a ray of heavenly light, aptly named The Judgement as voted by the community, and an elderly female survivor named Aurora, providing something completely different that the community have been dying for for ages. And yet, with this community made chapter, it will be this years only original full chapter. This year we have seen the release of the Stranger Things sequel chapter with Henry Creel AKA The First, or Vecna as referred to in the show, with Eleven and Dustin being the playable survivors, Jason being released recently and Terrifier coming in November, we only have this chapter and the mid-chapters of new survivors Kwon Tae-Young who released earlier this year, and Shane Wiigwaas later this month. Last year, we only had one original killer and survivor.

Last year, we only had one original chapter, Sinister Grace, which the developers teased at being the most gruesome chapter yet, with the chapter based on Thai folklore with the Killer being The Krasue, a woman by day who becomes a disembodied head by night with all their entrails and organs trailing behind. A chapter that very very quickly fell under the radar in comparison to that chapters earlier releases of Five Nights at Freddy's and Tokyo Ghoul, let it be known that Stranger Things was meant to drop last year in November to coincide with the final season launching on Netflix, but due to development issues and bugs, the chapter was pushed back to January of this year. 2024 was also a stale year for original content, with the Doomed Course chapter introducing The Houndmaster and survivor Taurie Caine, and even that fell under the radar with low pick rates amongst players whilst that year had Dungeons and Dragons and Castlevania as licensed chapters, yet the earlier chapter of 2024 being the original chapter All Things Wicked which gave us The Unknown and community divided character Sable Ward, a chapter which had one of the most gripping marketing for a chapter that we have ever seen, and have yet to see since. With the recent years being so license heavy, one can't help but feel like it's a gimmick to draw more players in, feeling almost akin to Fortnite with all their licensed cosmetics, most being shared with Dead by Daylight, but we are yet to be running around as Sabrina Carpenter or Hatsune Miku, the game surely feels like it is losing its soul. A much needed change of pace for licenses would be something so incredibly out there that nobody would even think of it in the first place and would surprise everyone, what that could be, I cannot say, it would surprise even me.

So ten years have come and gone, the game has come a long way but is still so far from being perfect, but still a prize amongst horror games and has built a strong community around it making it one of the most celebrated games in recent years, here's to ten years, and hopefully to ten more.