Compliments To The Chef

How and why update 6.1.0. is likely one of the best patches of Dead By Daylight to date

Today, Dead By Daylight update 6.1.0. dropped on all platforms, bringing with it some of the largest changes to date. In the past, these mid-chapters often followed a specific cadence, rebalancing the perks and killers that came out in the mainline update before last. However, over the course of the past year, Behaviour Interactive has been chiseling away at their backlog of forgotten and underused perks in an attempt to shift the existing gameplay meta. Update 6.1.0. took this effort leaps and bounds further and after a few hours with the new update, I have some thoughts.

Now, as a disclaimer, I won’t be covering every single granular detail of the update. Instead, I’ll be giving my opinions over the changes that cut into the overall flow of gameplay the deepest and disrupt the meta the most.

Gameplay — Generators

Let’s first start on the ground floor and discuss core gameplay. For the first time since 2020, generator times have been increased. What once was an 80 second task (when repairing solo), generators now take a solo survivor 90 seconds to complete. Of course, holding a button and occasionally tapping a second button button isn’t exactly engaging gameplay from the survivor side of things. But from the killer perspective, generator progression speed has been an incredibly common complaint. This is the case for many reasons but to put it plainly, a killer’s time is more valuable than a survivors due to the asymmetric nature of the game. To start, killers have to spawn into a match and find a survivor to chase. Once engaged in chase, the killer needs to navigate tiles and break pallets to catch their prey. Since survivor resources are most abundant at the beginning of a match, the first chase can (at certain levels of gameplay) take upwards of 45–60 seconds. Afterwards, the killer has to pick up and walk their target to a hook, utilizing an easy 5–10 seconds of time. While matches don’t always follow this formula, this makes it easy to understand where killer time is spent. Contrast this with survivors spawning relatively close (if not right next to) a generator and then working that generator for a duration of time. If three survivors split up while a competent teammate burns the killer’s time, 3 generators can get completed before or as a killer achieves their first hook, setting them up for an easy and fast disadvantage.

Now, don’t misunderstand me here. Survivors can often waste time, group up on a single generator or misplay tiles to end chases incredibly early, giving killers insane early game advantages. That’s not to mention mid game blunders like unsafe unhooks (trades) or looping near a hook. But I think this shows the discrepancy in balance. Not all situations can be balanced around, nor should they. When it’s commonplace for DBD Twitter to muse about never being heard, I think it’s important to see this update for what it is.

While I would love to not have to hold M1 for even longer when on a generator, other options like speeding killers up, adding mechanics to unlock generators before repair, etc, are likely to have far more adverse effects on gameplay as a whole while not necessarily doing much to dampen the fundamental issue.

Gameplay — Interaction Speeds

Next up for core gameplay changes are interaction speeds — primarily in relation to killer. Kicking, in relation to generators, pallets, and breakable walls, has been increased by a flat 10% all around. Basic attack cooldowns have also been given a 10% buff, down to 2.7 seconds instead of 3 seconds (which allows 8 stacks of STBFL to augment basic attack cooldown to a spicy 1.62 instead of 1.8 seconds.) Following being injured, survivors are also met with a shorter sprint burst, down to 1.8 instead of 2 seconds. But what does any of this mean???

On paper, it’s no doubt hard to conceptualize what these seemingly small metric tweaks really equate to. Hell, even when playing today, these changes felt large for all of a few minutes. Across say, 10 pallets in a match, these updated kicking speeds only give the killer a flat additional 2.6 seconds. But to hand-waving these numbers whilst removing the context and importance of micro gameplay is to misunderstand or misrepresent the flow of a match of Dead By Daylight entirely. In many cases, an additional third of a second is the difference between taking another pallet stun or getting that last minute hit.

If you couldn’t tell, the intent here is to make it so that killers have to waste less of their time (again, razor thin margins for error) doing things like kicking pallets or standing still to wipe their blade clean, so that they can spend a bit more time engaged in a chase. On hit, survivors can now (when holding W) make 13.6 meters of distance (6 m/s for the 1.8 second speed boost and 4 m/s for .9 seconds) instead of their previous 16 meters. Here we see that the combine nerf to distance made on hit and buff to basic attack cooldowns start to have an accumulative effect on a match. I’m not necessarily saying that it’s mind blowing. I’m certainly not saying that it’s broken or overtuned. What I am saying is that it’s a brilliantly subtle change to base mechanics that wont disrupt the normal flow of a match for 90% of players, while also potentially changing the long-term gameplay landscape in healthy ways.

I want to take a moment and emphasize that over my few hours of killer gameplay following the above changes, matches felt normal. I’ve tossed and turned several times on whether the subtlety felt here is good or bad. Because there’s no doubt that if changes aren’t felt, there’s a looming question of how much they truly effect gameplay. This is a key reason why status effects like obliviousness or blindness, especially in relation to perks, are generally considered low tier; because the person in the killer role can’t really feel or even see their effects. (These perks are also often weak because they don’t scale against player skill very well.)

If updates are too subtle and fly under the playerbases scope of understanding or feeling, they risk being seen as useless. Inversely, a change that is too heavy handed in it’s implementation risks shaking up gameplay too much, angering and alienating a playerbase. While I believe that gamers are far too averse to change, there is a certain balance to be struck here. I believe that Behaviour has delicately walked this tightrope well, introducing a core change that quickly integrates, becoming nothing more than a subtle component whirring in the background. Whether or not these changes effect kill rates, escape rates, or killer player population is still to be seen, so keep submitting your respectful feedback in the months to come.

Gameplay —Bloodlust

Bloodlust is a commonly misunderstood DBD mechanic. So let’s talk about what it is and how it functions first. Bloodlust is a contingency that boosts a killers movement speed based on a tiered system; After 15 seconds of chasing, a killer can get a 0.2 m/s speed boost, after 30 seconds, this gets bumped to 0.4 m/s, and finally after 45 seconds, this goes all the way to 0.6 m/s.

The most recent patch saw the timing dropped to 15, 25 and 35 seconds, respectively. Seems deranged, right? “Killers just get free speed for being bad at chase” the Twitter vocal would bemoan.

No. Because here’s the rub…bloodlust (and the build-up of) resets after a pallet is broken, a survivor is hit, a killer ability is used, or chase is broken.

With that being said, yes players can choose to “blood lust you” — but only in select locations. If the pallet is dropped at shack (and you don’t fumble the holy grail of “what is this killer doing” moments) no amount of bloodlust is going to close that gap. But if you’re spinning circles around an unsafe trash heap on Azarov’s, than yes, you may get bloodlusted…after 15–20 seconds.

Even in this perceived “losing scenario” survivors have wasted a precious 15–25 seconds of the killers time, as a killer getting to bloodlust 3 is as rare as Trapper mains are.

So, is bloodlust worth mentioning? Not really. Is this change massive? Not really. In a shift+W meta, it has potential to help in a handful of games, but is unlikely to effect most matches, especially considering the most common bloodlust — tier 1 — remains unchanged.

Gameplay — Endurance on Unhook

Since it’s introduction, Borrowed Time has been amongst one of the ever-muttered “necessary” perks for survivors to snag. With it’s ability to shield unhooked survivors from killers with a penchant for marshmallows or from teammates with underdeveloped decision making skills, Borrowed Time’s endurance effect became so common that killer players just assumed every survivor had it.

Well now they do.

As a base mechanic going forward, any survivor who gets unhooked will always automatically have the endurance status effect for 5 seconds. In addition, unhooked survivors will always receive a 7% haste buff for 5 seconds as well. If you want to shift a meta away from the necessity of a certain perk, you have to address the reality of the necessity. And Behaviour did just that. During all of my matches today, I didn’t equip Borrowed Time once, instead opting to use that perk slot for Distortion.

Distortion enjoyers unite.

Ultimately, this change didn’t effect my killer gameplay too much. At a certain level of play, Killers are just conditioned to assume everyone has Borrowed Time. Now that everyone effectively does have Borrowed Time, the guessing game has been removed. Which actually…helps…my gameplay. At least in consistency. The more concrete information I have, the easier my next steps are to plan. No longer do I have to make fast judgement calls on whether someone has borrowed time or not based on their behavior. In a game with perk, map, hook, and tile RNG — the fewer variables I have to estimate, the better.

That being said, everyone having endurance effects means that there is the potential for a select group of survivors to be aggressive and tank a hit for their teammates. I can’t overstate how rare I think this occurrence truly is, so let’s not whip ourselves into a frenzy over it.

All of that aside, Borrowed Time did get a small perk change — but we will address that at another time.

Summary

I’ll have to dig into perk changes, prestige changes, and Attack on Titan skins in another post. Admittedly, this one has gotten quite lengthy. But overall, the attempted changes to balancing aren’t as jarring as some naysayers had thought. In my multiple Killer matches, both generator and interaction timing quickly faded to the background, feeling good at first but ultimately intangible as acclimation set in. Matches ended up feeling rather normal, which as stated previously, I find to be quite good. Compliments to the chef. Changes of this nature need to be subtle as to not implode a carefully maintained (and sometimes volatile) machine. Their long term effectiveness is up for debate as we all fade from our swooning honeymoon phase into the more normal daily gameplay. But that debate and reevaluation should be just as careful and thought out as it was in this first iteration — from both the developers AND the community. Be respectful in your feedback and remember that human beings work on this game.

If you want to hear my thoughts on Dead Hard, Monstrous Shrine, Pop (RIP), and more — stay tuned!