We don’t talk enough about UI in games. They can really make or break an experience, with a poor UI dragging even a great game down. The UI in Dead by Daylight has been ripe for criticism for a while, with the new menu system particularly sparking discussion in the community. The next update, however, will overhaul the selection menu and even though it’s been changed thanks to fan feedback, the main issues are still going ahead.
Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive regularly posts threads on its forums, Steam, and Reddit to tell the community what it’s working on and what players can expect soon. The latest has just gone live for the horror multiplayer game and there’s plenty of interesting stuff in it, but one change – or lack of a change – is causing a fair amount of frustration with fans.
It all centers around the game’s UI when selecting a character to play as. A few weeks ago on the game’s public test build, fans got their first look at the intended changes and it’s fair to say they landed poorly. A clean-ish selection screen has been replaced by something far more cramped, with much fewer characters visible at any one time to browse through. Behaviour has, to its credit, walked back some of that – with information such as an ‘owned’ tag on characters you bought being removed, and the ability to see four characters per row instead of the previous three.
Where it continues to go wrong – and where fans are still voicing their concerns – is in areas such as the ordering of characters. Prior to this update, characters you owned were listed at the top of the menu, meaning you could find them easily. Now they’ll be interspersed with ones you don’t own, making it much harder to hop into characters at a moment’s notice. In addition, the fans continue to report that the UI feels cramped, with customization and a huge search bar taking up valuable real estate.
Away from the game’s UI, this upcoming update will contain some changes that have had a much softer reception from the community. For example, the killer perk Stridor was rendered useless if survivors were using the newly buffed perk Iron Will, with them being made utterly silent. This will now be changed, meaning killers will have a counterplay to be able to hear grunts of pain even if Iron Will is in play.
The Knight and Singularity have both received some changes to their core skills, aimed at helping the Knight’s summons chase survivors for longer without being stopped, and the Singularity’s biopods are being made easier to aim exactly where the player wants them. Both of these have received a mixed response, with some players feeling like neither alteration truly helps the killers.
You can read the full developer update over on Steam, with the Dead by Daylight 8.1.0 patch hitting live servers on or before Tuesday July 16.
If you’re hopping into the fog, you can take a look at our Dead by Daylight killer tier list to make sure you know who’s the top dog in terms of the game’s lovable murderers, and you can grab a few things for free with our list of all current DBD codes.
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