This is NOT a Casual Game
I've seen talk around time about this being a casual game. It's not. It's so very not. For many many many reasons.
First of all, it's PVP. Someone wins and someone loses and players compete for the who gets to be which. It's a PVP game that requires SKILL. If it was completely 100% RNG then it would be casual but it's not so it isn't.
"It's the not the game it's the peop-"
No.
A game is as competitive as a player can make it. There's a level that someone can play at. Either you willingly decided not to be as good as you should be to win or you just weren't good enough to win. Calling someone a try hard (which in will always be just a dumb attempt to save face with yourself) because they decided to value a victory more than you is stupid and you have no one but yourself to blame for your loss and you deserve said loss.
There's also a Meta, perks you use that can heighten your chances of victory against other people, in order to win. Especially for Survivors.
To say this game is casual is completely asinine. This is a Matchmaking game, someone is going to bring their best build and if you just want to make a gimmicky fun build then that's on you and you will be rightfully awarded with an L.
Comments
That's the point of discussions in here. Fight to the death, claim no prize.
Yeah i see where OP comes from but unfortunately just because you see yourself playing at a competitive level doesnt really mean that the game fits a competitive field. As many already pointed out there are just way too many factors that makes this game more of a casual game rather than a competitive one. Alot of people here have pointed out the rng aspect but i think that the most obvious thing to look at is the balancing around the new and casual players. The dev team has made clear with each update that they are more focused on balancing for fun rather than hardcore playstyles. They also already stated that they will be removing the ranking system (i know that ranks doesnt really reflect skill but if they are removing it they are clearly making a more casual look to the game) so they can replace it with a hidden mmr system which if it is hidden it means that you shouldnt really care who you are playing against which to me looks like a very casual way to play against people.
The opposite of competitive is not casual, it's cooperative.
The opposite of casual is not competitive, it's hardcore.
Mario party is a casual competitive game
League of legends is a hardcore competitive game
Animal crossing is a casual cooperative game
Dark Souls is a hardcore cooperative game (give or take a few mechanics involving optional PvP)
The game defines the win conditions in it's tutorial in plain English.
Survivors have to escape
Killers have to kill the Survivors before they can
I used to think this game has competitive potential, but then i see survivor gameplay and think: where is the competitive stuff pressing a button in a gen? Its interesting watching chases, but then again the other 3 people are just pressing a button and then the game ends in 5 minutes? Also no thanks, too many second chance perks and rng.
I see alot of people here playing the dictionary card to prove their point and thats fine dont get me wrong but i think when we are talking about "Casual" or "Competitive" we dont really mean the literal sense of those words. I think its pretty evident that what most here mean is competitive in a "esports tournament ready" way.
Yes but talking about competitive in terms of esports makes it hard to talk about it in terms of a competition as opposed to cooperative.
It's just easier to communicate a variety of ideas if we all stick to the proper definitions.
What is at issue here? It seems like we're arguing over whether DBD is a competitive game.
It is. There's no functional position to take otherwise. It is fundamentally about two opposing sides with asymmetrical goals, who are directly at odds with one another for the entire match.
There's a bunch of random stuff that makes it way less "pure" than, say, chess or whatever. Every game is a giant roulette wheel. Compared to other video games, you wouldn't easily be able to put DBD on the same high-stakes pro competitive level as Counter-Strike (which is often about raw skill and robotic execution) or Hearthstone (which is about leveraging odds and deck synergy as with any other CCG), but it is still a competitive game. There's a sliding scale here, and DBD just sits elsewhere on that scale.
It's also not Mario Party, or whatever TF people said up there. 😄
And i would agree with you if the definition of the words was on debate, but its pretty darn clear that what people are debating here is more focused on game mechanics, fairness, balance, etc. So to me when people use the dictionary card it feels that they just want to win the argument rather than discuss it.
Look. I just want people to use the terms right.
This has came up in the past and makes it much harder to discuss this sort of thing.
Fair enough.
It's not competitive either lol
Yep exactly this, im currently silver 2 on league and i got to rank 1 here effortlessly within the first month playing this game.
An online game's difficulty doesn't factor into whether a game is competitive or a casual game. You constantly getting wins does not invalidate the argument that DBD has competitive elements. That being said, your store has some amazing wifi
Then why can a player rank up by losing and derank by winning?
Because the emblem system is a dumpster fire, and needs to be addressed to correct this exact criticism. Ranking goalposts need to 100% match up to the specified main objectives of the game.
pretty much, I much prefer playing casually since I play video games for fun, not to sweat like a mad man
I'm not a big fan of the system either but the thing is it was like that from the very beginning. There were bloodpoints instead of emblems but the game still rewarded players for a ton of things besides escaping/killing. So that's by design. Which already means that the game wasn't designed as competitive.
I can only imagine someone popping on DBD for a casual game.
All snuggled up. Cup of herbal tea with a couple biccies. Listening to a bit of whale song. Scented candles around the room.
First game: they get flash-stunned/bodyblocked or tunneled/mori'ed in to the next universe.
Sitting there, rocking back and forth, in total shock, fixated at the post-match screen with less than 10,000 blood points acquired from their drubbing.
It doesn't have a functional ranking system, therefore there is no point of trying to be incredibly competitive about it.
Until ranks actually matter, I will consider this game as casual
your definition is lax, though.
What you define as competitive is, in fact, player versus player, and what you define as cooperative is player vs environment, which is a possible way to look at it, but absolutely not true per se.
For example, I could say that a competition presumes a win and a lose condition (often a draw as well), a score system to keep track of the win/losses (and sometimes the partial score), a set of game rules and that's about it.
Using your example, Dark Souls can be a competitive game, once you try to speed run it.
On the contrary, DbD has an asymmetrical scoring system: bloodpoints and/or pips are not really comparable between survivors and killers, meaning that a killer could, depending on the definition of win you use, win against the game together with the survivors (or, in other words, they can both win).
Even if you decide to take the kill count to define the win/loss, it's still something arbitrary and competitively speaking meaningless: it wouldn't reflect your skill level, nor the inherent point system of the game (bloodpoints / pip score),
Not a casual game? Did you see how huge the killer attack cone is? Hint: so big that it need's camera "autoaim" to make it look like you hit where you looked. You can't get more casual than that.
Because the ranking system is trying to determine skill separately from success.
The idea being that it would pick out players that are either being carried, or players that are skilled but get held back by bad teammates.
Personally I find that reasoning to be shortsighted, but I'm not the devs, and it sounds like the MMR system they are implementing soon will resolve that issue for all practical purposes anyways.
Of course Dark Souls speedrunning is a competitive game.
However Dark Souls is not the same game as Dark Souls speedrunning. They use the same mechanics but differ in their win condition, making them distinct entities.
Just like how minecraft isn't quite the same game as spleef, even though spleef is played within minecraft.
You are UNBELIEVABLY wrong. This IS a casual game. I am a rank 1 clown main and the game is very causal to me. It's obviously also competitive, but it is also casual. Splish splash your opinion is trash
Also winning in any game in general doesn't inherently require skill. The only reason why it appears to is because while skill isn't strictly required a lot of the time, you can often use skill in order to be more consistent compared to someone else that isn't using skill.
This is why in practice you can't just hide in a courner and escape every game as a Survivor. Against bad Killer the 3 remaining Survivors will often just complete the gens for you and you can escape, but given a proper ranking system (which we don't have right now and is why I find the emblem system shortsighted) such a Survivor would eventually rank up to the point where they are facing Killers that consistently can kill all 3 Survivors in a 3v1, leaving them to have to rely on hatch plays which are not in their favor.
But even if they DO manage to win the hatch 1v1's enough, they'd just be further ranked up into Killers that slug for the 4k, which you would expect because if the Killers are ranking up (again, assuming a proper ranking system that hasn't been implemented because emblems are not it) it's because they have a more consistent strategy than the ones that didn't.
And the same reasoning can be applied to camping Killers.
Anyone that abuses a low skill gimmik strategy will eventually be ranked up into the point where they are facing players that know it's counter. And if it's not something that can be countered then it's a domanent strategy that you would expect the best players to use anyways and thus they should still be ranked up while the devs do some rebalancing.
Basically, the emblem system is shortsighted because it's trying to encourage/discourage specific playstyles through the ranking system instead of through the games mechanics. Which is why you have successful Killers/Survivors with extremely consistent strategies that still aren't being pipped up so they can face higher level players that might know it's counters.
@NuclearBurrito
Also winning in any game in general doesn't inherently require skill
In a competitive game? Yes. A game that doesn't inherently require skill to win/lose is not a competitive game, it's just... a game.
Otherwise even rock-paper-scissor is a competitive game - and btw I suppose you honestly think that rock-paper-scissor is a competitive game, because of your definition of competition (every game that's player vs player).
That's a definition that I reject though.
Ahem:
League of legends does not inherently require skill
Counterstrike does not inherently require skill
Both of those games are esports played professionally. The reason professional play requries skill is because the other players are optimized to the point of crushing anyone without skill. However that's circumstantial, not something inherent to the game itself. That same set of circumstance that comes from optimization of your opponent also applies to Dead By Daylight, Mario Party, Mario Kart, Monopoly ect. The games difficulty is entirely dependent on your opponents ability to counter your strategies.
Well you are not wrong, but we go back to the definitions and dictionary cards again, what you say is true but as you said, under that definition anything can be competitive, also you dont really need skill on anything in order to participate, thats correct you only need knowledge and the rules or mechanics of the game. But comparing cs go or league to dbd is just way too much of a stretch. In both of those games the skill ceiling is way too high compared to dbd.
It's only competitive in that there are two teams pitted against each other. Too much RNG and too simplistic a core mechanic, however much anybody wants to glorify the "mind games" that occur while running around a pile of trash. There's never going to be an e-sport scene around this game.
Doesn't mean it can't be fun and it doesn't mean you can't take it seriously but it's the definition of a casual multiplayer game. Not every game has to be some hardcore test of skill.