Behaviour Interactive is delaying Dead by Daylight Chapters and other content such as Rifts and Collections so it will have room to address the community’s biggest complaints with the game. This is part of the DBD quality-of-life initiative for 2025, which takes aim at long-standing issues and will be split into two phases. So, while new Chapters are being pushed back, Behaviour is using this extra time to finally make the core experience much better.
The Dead by Daylight quality-of-life initiative will roll out over the rest of this year. Behaviour has myriad gameplay and QoL fixes planned across both stages of the project, but it does mean that new content releases in the multiplayer game will suffer.
“To accommodate for the scope of this initiative, we have decided to delay several of our upcoming releases – including Chapters, Rifts, Events Modifiers, and Collections,” Behaviour says. “That means there will not be a PTB tomorrow [Tuesday February 18], but rest assured that we did not make this decision lightly.
“We feel confident that delaying our upcoming releases to prioritize this quality-of-life initiative will ultimately make Dead by Daylight stronger than ever. We’re always listening to our players, and this has been a long time coming.”
The first phase of this project will run from April to June of this year, and Behaviour has detailed what we can expect in that time. DBD’s biggest upcoming improvement is easily what the team calls “anti-slugging.” Behaviour doesn’t say much, but doing anything to stop killers from leaving you crawling along the ground and grinding the game to a halt will do wonders for DBD’s long-term future.
Behaviour is also trying to stop players from attempting to just “go-next.” This expression refers to when a survivor deliberately throws a game by failing skill checks, walking right up to the killer, or trolling. New measures will help the developer identify these actions, and perpetrators will get a disconnection penalty point and lose an entire grade.
Players who stick with the challenging matches, instead of giving up, can also expect to be rewarded. Behaviour says it’s “moving forward with a new Emblem-based multiplier that grants additional Bloodpoints during your following match, with the bonus stacking over consecutive Trials,” to incentivize you to stick with the tough games.
Sometimes, however, circumstances outside your control mean a game is already set in stone, and it’d just be easier to give up. That’s why Behaviour is also working on a surrender feature. For killers, this will occur when all remaining survivors are bots. For survivors, surrendering will be made available if all the players on your team have been slugged. If you do surrender, you don’t need to worry about losing out, as Behaviour assures that there’ll be no disconnect penalty and you’ll retain all the bloodpoints you earned up to the end.
That’s not all for the first phase of this QoL revamp, though, as Behaviour is also taking measures against extreme hiding. This happens when a survivor tries to draw out an unwinnable match by staying hidden and waiting out the clock, and it can ruin the game for everyone. That’s why the AFK crow will “more accurately identify” when a player is hiding for too long, and they’ll even mark the player’s location for the killer. The crows will also help prevent body-block griefing, as after receiving their third bird, the player will be stripped of in-game collision physics.
Behaviour is also introducing a system where you can spend Bloodpoints in bulk, to speed up general Bloodweb activity. There’s even going to be better AFK bot detection; map offerings will no longer guarantee the appearance of a specific location (instead increasing its chances by 20%); and you will have the ability to adjust gamma light levels on all platforms.
Spawn rules are also shifting, as Behaviour will ensure that survivors will now drop into a map within 12 meters of each other and on the same floor (if it applies to that map), in an effort to make sure they don’t get a “notable advantage in completing their objective.” Lastly, I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that you can soon see your own perk loadouts while in a lobby, as well as additional perk loadout slots.
Behaviour says it will return to recap the first part of this quality-of-life initiative in May, where it will also dive into what to expect with the second leg of the project, which will run from July to December.
Make sure you check out all the Dead by Daylight codes for some free goodies, alongside our breakdown of all the Dead by Daylight killers.
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