The Dead By Daylight Lights Out Modifier Kinda Sucks

 

Dead by Daylight introduced a new temporary mode to the game recently called Lights Out and while it's cool to see BHVR try new things with the forumla this is a lackluster addition to the game that only works to generate boredom and frustration instead of the intense scares I think they were aiming for.

The idea behind Lights Out is very simple.  It's the same thing as you're usual Dead By Daylight match but perks, add-ons, items and offerings have been disabled as well as most of the HUD elements.  On top of this survivors don't leave scratch marks when they run around and killers don't have a terror radius.  The cherry on top is that all the maps avaliable in Lights Out mode have been significantly darkened and visibility is extremely poor so ambushing people from the gloom or accidently running into the killer are pretty common occurances.  

I will admit, the first match I had with this modifier I thought it was kind of neat but it failed to hold any interest after that first game.  Things are especially boring after you kill two people and the remaining survivors start to sneak around more to hold the game hostage for significantly longer than usual.  Wandering around the dark gloom for 10s of minutes, unsurprisingly, not all that fun.  Also the lack of variation kills the mode after the first match.  There's a fun game to be played in regular DbD where you are trying to work out who has what perks and how to play around the team to avoid having your efforts thwarted by a nasty Decisive Strike or what have you.  If you catch someone, you are going to kill them, its that easy which sounds like it would be great for killer mains but when its this easy its just boring.  I'll take being teabagged at the exit gates any day over 0 effort victories like this.  Killer in Dbd is satisfying because it's extremely hard and Lights Out removes the difficulty and therefore removes the fun

The one good thing about Lights Out is it does prove to some degree just how stacked the game is towards the survivor side.  Thanks to no perks and no items, survivors don't have their arsenal of bullshit get out of murder free cards to use as crutches when they play badly.  It really does prove that playing regular DbD on survivor side is just playing the game on easy mode.  I'm sure for survivors lights out is even more miserable but I've not tried it so I wouldn't know personally.  A quick Google of the mode seems to support my idea though that this mode just isn't fun for survivor.

I think there's also some techinical fuck-ups going on too where every game I have played has been on the Yamaoka Esate despite there being 4 maps in rotation.  Also every 3rd match of Lights Out just fails to load properly and disconnects which would be a minor annoyance in most cases but queues for this mode are LONG, probably because not many people are playing it so when you're match fails like that its extremely frustrating.

I do commend BHVR for trying something new, I just wish that they had tried a mode that was actually something new and not just "Dead by Daylight but less and darker".  I personally would love to see a mode where the killer has some kind of objective to fulfill and the survivors have to stop it, could be a fun sort of reverse twist on the usual formula although I understand that would require a lot more work that what we got.  Still, I hope the modifiers are a thing that's here to stay but maybe shelf Lights Out and let it rot in the darkness where it belongs

Dead By Daylight Killer is Immensely Frustrating

 

Dead By Daylight is a game I've become somewhat obsessed with in recent months.  Usually I steer away from multiplayer games because I hate having to deal with teams of people either giving me shit when I'm not very good or letting me down constantly as I improve.  Dead by Daylight solves this issue by being a 1v4 game so I can just play the 1 and have a grand old time although in the last few weeks playing that 1 has become an immensely frustrating experience.

Just in case people don't know, Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer game that is basically horror themed freeze tag.  There is one killer and 4 survivors and the idea is that the survivors must repair generators and escape and the killer must well....kill them all, go figure.  Each character in the game has 3 perks which are like skills that you equip that change the game in some way.  For example killers get perks that reveal survivor locations or slows down generator repair and survivors get things that just make the killers life absolutely miserable.

Now granted, I'm not a pro DbD player by any stretch but I don't see myself as shit either.  Given enough time in the month (ranks reset on the 13th) I can get pretty deep into the gold ranks for both survivor and killer and with a bit more practice and a better understanding of builds I think I could start getting that Iridescent rank pretty soon.  I would say that's not bad for someone whos been playing only a handful of games a week for about a year.

There's something though about playing killer in this game that is just IMMENSELY frustrating.  I never really get upset when a survivor game goes poorly, probably because it happens so rarely but it's just not a big deal.  Get hooked, shrug and move on.  There's something about stuck in a killer match where everything is going wrong that just makes me want to break the keyboard over my knee.  There is a pretty big debate in the community about if the game is "killer sided" or "survivor sided" and if you ask me it is ABSOLUTELY survivor sided.

The survivors just have so many tools to just completely ruin your day it's mind boggling.  They can bring flashlights to prevent you from performing sacrifices, toolboxes to rush generators, medkits to completely reverse any progress you made as well as countless palettes to stun the killer with and windows to make quick escapes.  That's not even getting into the immense amount of perks at their disposal to halt your progress too.  There are perks for speeding you up when injured, perks for taking more than the usual 2 hits, perks for instantly picking up downed survivors, perks for unhooking yourself, perks for picking up yourself it's enough to make your head spin.  As killer you have to deal with SIXTEEN of these abilities being used agaisnt you while you only get 4.

One example is a match I had the other day against a quite organised group of survivors, maybe they were in a discord call or something because I wanted to pull my own hair out.  I would chase a guy down, bash him and couple of times and grab him.  On the way to the hook, nearly EVERY time one of his teammates would come along and break the hook meaning I was forced to drop him and not make any progress.  Even when I got wise to it and would try and chase the extra guy away, multiple members of the team had the ability to break hooks so in the time in took me to go back and pick the downed guy up, SOMEONE would crawl out of somewhere and fuck me up.  Not to mention that in the time it took me to even get the down in the first place, generators were just being completed left and right.  I still managed to squeeze out a single kill that match but holy fuck it was miserable.

In fairness, balance in a game that is inhererently unbalanced is going to be impossible to do and credit has to be given to BHVR doing a good job but getting destroyed as killer is a uniquely miserable time and it only seems to get ever so slightly worse with every patch.  One thing I have noticed though is that it's a lot easier to rank up as killer.  I've had games where I get 0 kills and a handful of hooks and still gained a point where I've had survivor matches where we repaired all the gens mad quick, avoided the killer at every turn and escaped basically unscathed only to get nothing at the end, it's very strange.

Either way, despite the frustrations DbD is addicting as all hell and I don't plan to stop any time soon.