DBD has a honeymoon period like nothing I've ever played. Its core gameplay loop is not only fun, but unique, full of depth, and easy to get into. I no-lifed the game for about a month when I started, and continued to play regularly even after that initial rush wore off. There is a legitimately brilliant game at its core.
It's also a really hard game, and like I said, it's unique. Outside from a handful of killers that play vaguely like conventional FPS characters, there are basically no areas where the skills you've built up in other games will transfer to DBD. As a new player, you're left flailing around helplessly. It's still fun (since your opponents are also flailing), but it takes a long time before you're able to start playing purposefully. I mean hundreds of hours to get the basics down for just one role. The result is that the overwhelming majority of players are comically bad at the game. Thanks to a bad ranking system that overvalues time spent, even most of the players in the top ranks are unable to put up a fight.
Unfortunately, since it's so hard to learn, that means you get hundreds of hours of playtime before you start to notice that holy shit the game is a fucking mess. Maps are randomly generated, and the algorithm for generating them is trash. Sometimes a map will just give the survivors nothing to work with, other times it'll give them the most obscenely powerful structures imaginable. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that roughly half the maps are terrible regardless of RNG, due to terrible fixed elements or abnormally strong/weak structures.. About a third of the killers have powers that remove any meaningful way for survivors to interact with them, so they're really boring to play against. Worst of all, the strongest strategies for killers are really unfun for survivors. Instead of fundamental changes to fix these problems, survivors are given a bunch of overpowered perks that act as bandaids while being miserable for the killer to play against. And then there's the whole item system, which enables players to bring things into a match that will completely break the balance.
All of this misery bleeds out into the community. Once you've climbed up enough in the ranking system, it's nonstop toxicity as far as the eye can see. Going a couple of matches without at least one ragequit is like finding a unicorn. If you manage to put up a halfway decent chase, most killers will BM you as hard as humanly possible for daring to try to play the game. As for survivors, I'm not sure it's physically possible to get through an entire match without one of them teabagging the killer. And then you get the slur-riddled postgame chat!
The developers don't seem capable of fixing any of this. They primarily balance the game around statistics instead of the subjective player experience. So the fact that an item players can bring into the match is broken doesn't matter, because it doesn't get brought that often! This completely degenerate perk doesn't get brought that often, so it must be fine! (Said perk doesn't get brought that often because it's locked behind a paywall.) No need to nerf this miserable, degenerate killer or buff this pathetically weak one, their kill rates are fine!
Since almost nobody is playing at a level that I would describe as competent, the statistics reflect something entirely different from the experience you have once you get the hang of things. The game is brilliant fun when nothing terribly bullshit comes up, but when things do, it's the worst game I have ever played. No hyperbole. I've played some real stinkers, but DBD tricks you into caring before tossing you into a trashfire of a match. It's awful.
Normally, I'd get to this point and just quit, but thanks to Fortnite's wonderful contribution to gaming culture, Dead by Daylight also comes with its very own battle pass!
I'm intimately familiar with exploitative game design, thanks to a gacha game that took me for a wild ride. Turns out, it's not just lootboxes that I'm susceptible to. When I hit the point with DBD where I could start to understand just how miserable most of my matches were, it was in the middle of of a battle pass season. For the next couple of weeks, I continued playing (a lot) while actively despising the game. It was a very recognizable feeling. (Ever spend $1000 on a gacha game in a day? It's like a less soul-crushing version of that.) Rational me was saying, "You're having no fun, the rewards on this battlepass aren't even that good. You already got the hag skin. Just stop." Rat-in-a-box me was saying, "You've already got like 50/70 levels, just go a little further. It's not that many hours a day. Don't you want that hideous charm you'll never equip? You gotta get the axe to finish that outfit (even though it looks like trash and you'll never equip it)."
I wasn't able to just stop playing in the middle of the season, but after the battle pass finished, I was thankfully able to back out. Haven't played since. And having experienced it, holy wow fuck battlepasses, fuck Epic for popularizing them, and fuck Behavior for using them in Dead by Daylight. They may not be as financially damaging as gacha trash, but I feel like they're just as awful They look for a similar group of people with psychological vulnerabilities, but exploit them for their time instead of their money. Fuck gaming as a service.
