A New Early Game Mechanic Would Greatly Improve DBD's Health
I remember a while back, I think it was during the 4 year anniversary stream, that the Devs announced they were working on what they called the Early Game Collapse. The devs didn't disclose what this might be, and we haven't heard much of anything about it since. Whatever it was the devs had in mind for this, it would be great for the game's health if it were implemented soon.
Lately as I've been trying out new perk combinations, I've noticed a rather annoying trend. If my loadout doesn't involve any slowdown perks, the match ends very quickly, giving me barely any time to get the ball rolling over even do what I set out to do with my perks. The speed at which games end leads to two main issues that I can identify. The first is the aforementioned perk experimenting. The fact that I more or less need to run 1 or 2 slowdown perks to keep the match means I am punished for trying to be creative with my perks. I feel safe in saying I'm not the only person who thinks this way. A lot of killer mains will run Ruin+Undying not because it's particularly fun for them to do so, but it feels necessary to keep the game from ending too fast. There are a lot of cool perks in the game that I want to try out and be creative with, but at the end of the day they are overshadowed by the slowdown perks that I basically need to run.
The second issue is the killer adept achievements. The Killer adept achievements are already significantly harder than survivor adepts at base. Survivors get their achievements just for escaping, while Killers need to perform perfectly in every category to get the points to earn merciless killer. This problem is then amplified further for killers that don't have a slowdown perk as part of their unique perks. Gens will most likely get done very fast, which will lose them a lot of Gatekeeper points, making it significantly harder, if not impossible to attain merciless killer.
A new core gameplay mechanic that serves to extend matches by making it so that you can't just hop right on generators, which is what I'm assuming the Early Game Collapse is/will be, would greatly help to alleviate these issues. I believe this would be beneficial for both killers and survivors. With more time at the start of the match, killers won't have to rely on slowdown perks as much, which leaves them free to experiment with some of the game's other perks. In turn, survivors won't have to deal with the slowdown perks they find annoying quite as often. This would also serve to strengthen killers such as The Trapper, Hag and Demogorgon, who need to set up at the start of the match. Finally, I believe this will make new perk creation easier down the line. A new mechanic added to the game means something new that perks could potentially be based around.
TLDR:
How easy it is to work on gens stifles creativity, forcing killers to rely on slowdown perks, and makes killer adept achievements very difficult. Adding a new early game mechanic would alleviate these issues. Less reliance on slowdown perks would make both killers and survivors happy. It could also serve as something the devs could work with when it comes to making new perks.
Comments
As much as many people want this it really won’t change what the issue is: solo Q v. Swf Q.
slowing down the game in the beginning via some mechanic that affects gens is something we already had (old ruin). It will still be troublesome for solo Q and make little difference against average swf. (Also see current ruin/undying)
until bhvr addresses swf everything else is simply a bandaid they slap on the game and then remove because the game at its core is supposed to (and nearly is) balanced around solo Q.
they don’t have the fortitude to address the cause, they just want to muddy the effect. (The muddying will also be seen with them intending to hide MMR)
Ruin and Ruin//Undying aren't mechanics though, those are perks that can be removed from the game. I'm not talking about some thing that can be worked around, removed or ignored, I'm talking about something that you literally need to deal with in order to progress.
the trial start up idea is pretty balanced, basically for the first 1-2 minutes of the game gen speed is reduced by 50% until the killer downs a survivor or the timer expire.
I don't think this would be unfair even to solo que and it would really help out killers in the early game.