It has been more than a month since Chapter XVIII: A Binding of Kin arrived for Dead by Daylight. This new DLC added, as usual, a pair of new characters who can be acquired by spending in-game currency (9000 iridescent shards each), or simply buying it for $6.99. The new killer, Charlotte, whose power is being able to control her brother Victor, and the survivor Élodie Rakoto, a mysterious woman that works as an occult investigator, have come with three new perks each — and this is where the trouble begins.
There has been a conflict among survivors and killers because while Élodie’s perks are fun, Charlotte’s are not really helpful or useful in any way.
However, this is not the main cause of players’ complaints.
The problem lies in Charlotte’s power. Her power has presented over seventy bugs on its first release. Beyond that, it brought several changes that were not considered before releasing the new character to the players in the Player Test Build, commonly known as PTB. By the time this article is being written, there is one new perk that is not working at all on the killer, and two of them have been massively nerfed due to the developer’s perception of being too strong — whereas players felt the other way around. Victor’s gameplay (Charlotte’s power) has also been changed, adding new features that were not considered before releasing the PTB.
The multiple bugs that have been reported recently are not only on the new character, but also new skins, such as Krampus Trapper’s skin. This has caused an increasing amount of complaints to Behaviour Interactive, the developers, stating that they are “releasing unfinished content”.
In addition to these inconveniences, Charlotte’s power is considered by a majority of the community to encourage an unfun playstyle. This is because the optimal way of winning with her denies the other player’s fun on the match by camping on the hook or massive slugging, a term used when a player is downed, but not hooked.
These new problems have been added to a list that has been growing unstoppably for years and growing as a bigger and bigger nuisance. The problems reside on their relaxed schedule, which takes a long time until the content is either fixed or balanced. And while some of them are fixed, as Memento Mori’s offering or the new Hex: Undying, the number of new problems combined with the old ones overshadow those little successes.
A question then could be made. If Dead by Daylight has had all of these issues for a long time, why are people still playing it? Well, as Dead by Daylight content creator Scott Jund states in his video, there still are plenty of reasons to play. Behaviour Interactive don’t do that much because they don’t have to. There is no competition to Dead by Daylight, and it is a competition that breeds improvement. They just release the patch, and if you don’t like it what are you gonna do? Play another Dead by Daylight? There isn’t another one.
A Binding of Kin has added new content that most players have enjoyed, but it has done nothing but make bigger the list of problems players have been complaining about for a long time, and sadly for both users and company, this disconnection between what its asked and what its given seems that will not get fixed any time soon.
Luis Gallardo is a Spanish writer and video game lover who has a Youtube channel where he reviews games while explaining how they work and their design.
