Behaviour Interactive’s Dead by Daylight is now the most-played horror game of all time. While the multiplayer game may have started off quite tame, the beloved online title is continuing to ramp up the violence as it aims to last another decade.
As part of the game’s tenth anniversary, DBD is receiving a massive graphics overhaul. Character models and animations will be massively improved, maps will be revised, and fans will be treated to a much more violent version of the horror game.
In a recent interview, creative director Dave Richard explained that this sliding scale of violence is inspired by the evolving audience of the game. “When we started Dead by Daylight, we wanted to be as accessible as possible,” he told GameSpot.
“We wanted DBD to be scary, thrilling, but also accessible to more people, so that subjects that are too disgusting, or too violent, or, you know, too horror, would not be part of Dead by Daylight, so that we get as many people as possible.”
Just a decade in and the level of violence in horror media is now significantly higher. Dead by Daylight is no longer just collaborating with the slashers of the 80s, but hyper-violent characters like Terrifier’s Art the Clown. With this in mind, it makes sense to scale up the violence to match what the modern landscape calls for.
“We’re revising this level [of violence] and we’ve been doing it through the years, raising the volume a little bit more every year,” he continued. “With the horror renewal and people getting into [ the genre more], it’s like, they want more. They’re not as sensitive to it than in previous years, and so I think it’s part of our normal evolution that we get, more gory, more violent, and you can see that in the [kill animations called] moris, the moris is in the early days [versus] the moris today.”
The plan is to keep Dead by Daylight evolving with its audience for years to come. Right now, there are no plans to make a sequel. There’s no plan to remake the game from scratch. Instead, the platform will evolve as much as possible to suit the tastes of the horror audience, and right now the call for more violence is at the top.
