The game needs more complexity
Playing as a survivor boils down to :
Do gens -> Hear Terror Radius or See Killer -> Hide or get chased -> Wait till killer is gone / Stall as much as possible -> Return to doing gens -> Try to escape through gate or hatch.
There's a few things that you can do to make things a little more thrilling, like bringing a flashlight and going for saves, sabotaging hooks or boon perks, and there's a few things that certain killers bring to the table in order to make things more thrilling, like side objectives through their kits, totems, stealth or having a way to pop up unexpectedly.
This kind of makes the game boring after a while, unless you play against certain killers that can keep you on your toes and force you to be alert at all times.
I see so many streamers casually doing gens while reading chat comments and paying no attention to the game unless they hear the skill check audio or the terror radius music. That's simply because certain killers have no pressure unless they're around the survivor, and when they get close, they let the survivor know that they're coming.
I honestly believe that every single killer needs some sort of way to toy a bit with the survivor's senses just to constantly create a feeling of unease. That's what makes the game thrilling. I don't really understand how people can have fun when playing against a killer like Clown or Trickster for example, as long as you don't hear their terror radius you can pretty much watch your favorite TV Series and you'll do fine as long as you're hitting those skill checks.
Also, survivors need more things to work around with. Boons were a great addition for example and the Blast Mine perk is also amazing. But there needs to be more, when playing as a survivor I feel the need to setup something in case the Killer comes. There's so many unexplored ways to do that.
I would like for example to be able to reinforce a breakable wall or a pallet that is already dropped, if the killer tries to break the door/pallet, he gets stunned a little bit first and only then he can normally break it.
I would like to be able to insert something like a spring in a locker that opens it after a few seconds, confusing the killer.
I would like to be able to turn on the lights on a gen like it would be fully repaired, confusing the killer and making him ignore the gen even though it is not actually repaired.
I have so many more ideas, I don't really understand why the fear of adding new stuff to the game. You have a PTB, you can try things without ruining the game while doing it.
Meanwhile they just toy around by adding 1 more second to something or decreasing an already existing cooldown by 1 second, it's so weird
Comments
Bad news:
The players currently playing DbD as survivors will never accept any greater complexity.
Look at old Undying: take out 2-5 totems? An impossible task (apparently), so Undying nerfed to a flat 2.
Look at Pinhead: One survivor has to go to the highlighted box once every 90 seconds. An impossible task (if the bevvy of complaints is to be believed).
I mean heck: people complain about Pig's bear traps, and she's in the bottom five of worst killers in the game.
They'll have to make a new game (or DbD 2) with the more complex gameplay from the start because there is a zero percent chance current survivors will tolerate anything that makes the "click M1 on gen, repeat, leave" snoozefest more difficult or dynamic.
I totally get your point but a lot of my suggestions were for extra stuff that don't really hinder the survivors, rather gives them advantages if they accomplish them, something that gives them more to work with.
When it comes to killers, I understand that some might be frustrating, but at the same time it's better to have a bunch of them that force players to switch their playstyle a little bit rather than have all killers do the same thing making the game a boring, predictable experience.
The game was designed at first to give out a thrilling experience, if you look at the oldest killers, they all have mechanics that make survivors be more alert, cause they could step on a trap, be surprised by a hatchet in the head or be surprised by a killer sneaking up on them by stealth or teleportation. Even Hillbilly gives a sense of unrest since he can be on the other side of the map and in the next couple of seconds get close to you.
But then they kind of stopped giving a damn, they kind of focused on the gameplay instead of the experience. Legion / Plague / Wesker / Trickster / Deathslinger lack pretty much any horror qualities, not even a scary model. And others, even though they have creepy models, they have boring kits that give out 0 sense of excitement when they chase you, like Clown / Artist / Pyramid Head/ Nemesis.
I've said it and I'll say it again, Dredge is one of the best designed killers in the whole game, he shows everyone how a killer should be. He can keep survivors on their toes since he might pop out of any locker at anytime, he has a creepy model, very good sound cues, and is able to switch up the ambiance of the map with his nightfall, That's just perfect, that's what every killer should be able to do in it's own unique way.
Old Undying is a really bad example. It gave far too much value. Especially when paired with Old Ruin.
The fact that Undying is still a very good perk now is a testament to how strong it was back then.
Could you imagine how Old Undying would pair with Pentimento now, it would be truly brutal.
I will agree that Dredge is pretty close. The Nightfall is a great concept and very thematic. The one change I would make would be to limit how many locks the survivors have at their disposal. If survivors had to gather locks from across the map, it would make the whole 'lock the locker' mechanic more dynamic than just "lock everything you come across because there's basically no downside and it's effectively instant."
It's far too far past the point to rehash that old argument, but I will say this much:
Ruin + Old Undying meant that if a killer chased you off a generator, it would begin to regress at a 1:2 ratio (160 seconds to remove 80 seconds of work). A team of 4 survivors would have to work on other gens, or would have to go totem hunting. This meant a minimum of 2 totems but could mean all the way up to a maximum of 5 totems. To help with this, survivors had multiple perks, items, and addons that would locate/track/accelerate the process.
Since then, Undying has been moved to a maximum of 2 totems that need to be cleansed and Ruin has been reduced to 1/2 its previous speed (6 minutes to reduce a 99% gen back to 0).
On the other hand, Boon totems can be blessed infinitely and killers have 0 perks/addons to help locate them. To help mitigate this, they introduced a new perk to break boons.
So, if a killer burns one of their perks just to get the baseline power survivors have vs. hexes, they STILL have to find and break all five totems to stop boons from functioning. That's a team of 1 to find all 5 - the worst possible bad luck streak a survivor team could've encountered before.
The same goal that survivors claimed was impossible to expect of their team of 4 - despite all the tools at their disposal to accomplish it - is now the ONLY path killers have, AND it takes the use of a perk to even have a chance.
This is what I mean when I say 'survivors will never accept anything that makes the game more complicated on their end.' Being expected to do totems was SUCH a burden that everything on the killer side got hacked into pointlessness, despite every possible advantage being heaped on them. But the EXACT SAME PROBLEM coming up for killers? A perk that gives them the exact situation survivors claimed was impossible despite having four times the manpower.
Because it's not enough to play hide & go seek, ring around the rosey, break doors, smash pallets, kick generators, patrol gens, try to interrupt healing, evade stuns, play around a host of 3rd Chance Perks, spread out damage, and try to remember who's already been hooked how many times. Now killers also get to play a totem hunting game that survivors couldn't (or, actually, just wouldn't) do themselves.
Do survivors need more tasks? Yes.
Will they get more tasks? No.
Toggle your M1 on the gen and get your escape points. Because that's all this game will ever be.
SoloQ.
The main problem with all these points is soloq. (although Undying sucked to play against all together)
I always liked the gameplay of Friday the 13th. Having this large map, where survivors can use multiple ways to escape and the killer must stop them however they can.
Now, I know this will never be the case for DBD, but it would be really cool if there were other ways to escape rather than just using the Gens. Like imagine if on Dead Dawg Saloon, the survivors needed to build like a carriage or something to escape the killer. Or on Lampkin Lane, they need to repair vehicles.
Despite being huge and sparse with locker placements, Mother's Dwelling in the Red Forest is my favourite setting for playing the Dredge. Bring about nightfall and hunt in the massive woodland.
If DBD had like a basic woodland horror map where the survivors just needed to survivor together and find a means to escape outside of gens I would be in bliss.
Even if it was just a survive the timer mode, it would be a huge refresher for the game and bring back that Hide and Seek style gameplay that DBD used to have. They could of course do gens/other tasks to speed up the clock, but it would be cool and it would mean that the last survivor wouldn't be locked into, find the hatch or die.
It would also fit more with the actual horror genre, as in most horror films and games, people aren't getting a masters degree to leave some scrap yard, they are biding their time and trying to hide and survive.
I like your ideas and this is just my 2 cents on the topic.
Setting a timer and opening the gates after the timer expires would be a pretty fun game mode, sort of like a hide and seek experience. Or maybe certain maps should make survivors pick up parts that are scattered randomly on the map and piece up a puzzle
I was also thinking about giving the survivors another way to escape the trial, an alternative way, like using shovels to dig a hole that acts like a hatch, but make it take a long time to dig.
Exactly. No one would have to just hold M1 an entire match, they would need to move, loot, hide and hunt for pieces in order to escape. Just something more interactive than what we have now.
Or they could introduce a simple ping system in place of comms, because why the ######### are we still mimes in 2022?
I'm of a mind that the game's relative simplicity is one of its strong points. It's relatively easy to understand the basics of what to do going in. In fact, one of my roommates, who isn't a gamet, got into DBD for precisely this reason.
My solo queue teammates can barely understand drop pallet & hold m1 on gens I'm good