Dead by Daylight has had a very successful run releasing DLC based on classic horror franchises, but the newest addition to the lineup adds a lot more to the game than simply a familiar movie monster. The asymmetric horror game always pits one killer against four survivors, and, as you would expect, the player community has divided themselves up between those two sides. However, with the addition of some new mechanics, the new Saw chapter that has been added to the game expects to turn survivors on each other. In a move that's right out of the Saw movies, survivors can now be placed into traps by the game's new killer. However, those traps are only dangerous if the other survivors make them so. I had a chance to speak with Dead by Deadlight game director Mathieu Coté who explained how the traps work...
If you don't get [the trap] off, and someone fixes a generator, it will trigger the timer on the trap. The traps will do nothing to you unless another survivor screws you over. If the survivors are eager to get out they will trigger the traps and then you have a minute to find a key or your head is going to explode.
Dead by Daylight's traditional gameplay has always come right out of a horror movie. One player plays as a killer, who hunts down four survivors in a map. The survivors hide while attempting to repair generators that will open the door to safety. Normally, after a killer has taken down one survivor, they get hung on a meat hook in order to take them out of play, but in the new Saw chapter, the killer, who is the character Amanda in the iconic Pig mask of the franchise, has the ability to place bear traps on survivor's heads.
From there, the game proceeds as normal, players can rescue each other in an attempt to escape together, but Dead by Daylight's game director fully expects that some survivors won't stop trying to get themselves out and will thus end up putting other survivors at risk. It turns out, this is sort of the point. Mathieu Coté explained to me that, as with many game communities, players have found the types of characters they prefer to play, but since there are four survivors to every killer, the sides are imbalanced. Part of the idea in adding in these new mechanics is to get the survivors to turn on each other, so that not all the player frustration from a survivor who loses is focused on the killer.
What we really wanted to achieve in this, and I think we're going to do it very well, is to make sure that the survivors will start screaming at each other for screwing them over. It's not even going to be the killer's fault for putting a trap on their head.
Saw is a franchise whose main focus has never been about the "killer" so much as it has been about the elaborate death traps that the killer uses. These traps usually force the characters to make terrible decisions, like hurting somebody else in order to save themselves. It looks like Dead by Daylight has figured out how to bring that same idea into the game. This will certainly add a complication that will keep the game fresh for longtime players, although it sounds like it may start to draw some lines between those players as well.
