Dead by Daylight is now 10 years old and has been played by 70 million players worldwide, making it one of the older and most successful live-service games–and horror games–ever made. It’s changed a lot over those years, but one change you may have noticed is in its depictions of violence.
The game has gotten more graphic over time, the game’s creative director Dave Richard explained to me. It’s been a conscious decision by the team, and he explained how pop culture’s increased interest in horror led to it.
“When we started Dead by Daylight, we wanted to be as accessible as possible. We’ve talked of other games like Outlast, for example, and you know, [Outlast developer Red Barrels] are our neighbors. We love them, but 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.
“But today we’re revising this level, and we’ve been doing it through the years, raising the volume a little bit more every year. 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.”
Richard said horror is “more interacted with and celebrated today than it was, you know, 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. As a horror fan, I’m sure you share the feeling. It’s just awesome to see, and it’s really, really inspiring.”
The violence “volume” being turned up suits DBD’s future well, as Behaviour has recently revealed a great number of changes coming to the game, including a collab with the Terrifier franchise, which is well known for its especially unflinching violence. You can read about everything new coming to Dead by Daylight, and why there’s likely never to be a Dead by Daylight 2.