The New Player Experience...
So I have a friend who is brand new to the game (they have less than 2 hours on the game) and watching them stream their matches Ive seen a lot of concerning things that I personally feel should be addressed. For the sake of brevity, I will be splitting this up into two sections for either role; Survivor and Killer.
Killer
When playing Killer, my friend found that seeing Survivors was really difficult. Outfits that were intentionally blending in with the environment made them difficult to spot with his colorblindness, and he felt like keeping a chase was difficult.
Most notably, realms such as Grim Pantry, Toba Landing, and Red Forest were notably horrible for his colorblindness due to the large amounts of foliage which obstructed his vision and provides areas to hide within the environment.
He also felt as if defending Generators was insanely difficult since the Killer roll lacked any regression perks.
Even with being brand new to the game they were dealing with Survivors who had far more experience than him repeatedly which led to matches where it felt like he was stomped heavily and wasnt exactly given any breathing room.
Survivor
When playing Survivor, he felt as if he was lost trying to find Generators, indoor maps were horrendous for him to navigate since it felt like there was no clear direction for him to go.
In his matches, he was often the first person dead, the Killers we had would tunnel him off of the hook and he had no perks whatsoever to help him. It got so bad within his matches that I had to SWF with him and bring perks like For The People to help protect him because otherwise he would die early on.
He told me that Survivor (role) was incredibly stressful to play and since he kept being tunneled out of the match early on he did not have enough time to actually learn how to play the game, and learning the maps was awful since he never was given the opportunity to actually explore the map as Survivor.
He was also upset to see that a lot of perks that people suggested him were locked heavily behind a grind or paywall; and with him barely able to play the game because of tunneling, he felt as if he was forced to play Killer to actually make progress in the game.
Picking Up The Pieces
My friend, despite all of this, is still kind of interested in playing the game, so I went into the custom match to help them learn and it has helped a lot. But I think regardless of such, a fundamental issue still exists.
The New Player Experience needs to be improved heavily.
- New Players should get access to a mini Blood Hunt to help ease them into the grind, 2x Bloodpoints just for a week that applies only to them goes a long way.
- Improving General/Universal Perks can help fill in the gap where Teachable Perks exist. New Players dont have access to regression perks or anti-tunnel perks when they NEED it.
- Better Accessibility Settings. It would be nice to change the color of Scratchmarks and Auras to make things more visible, as well as addressing other accessibility issues with the game such as Chucky's Footsteps on Ormand not being easily visible or cosmetics blending into the environment way too much.
Comments
I started DBD in May this year (2023), so was also pretty new, and by DBD standards now at near 800 hrs, I'm still pretty much a baby.
However the big issue really is that DBD is a complex game with a lot of subtle mechanics. It's the same thing as something like Counter Strike. You can learn the basic idea in 10 minutes, but to actually get to the point you're not getting 1-bulled the moment you turn a corner takes at least a couple of months.
What helped me more than anything was watching content creators for both killer and survivor side to understand key concepts/ideas quickly, such as: -
That said, I do sympathise with a lot of these issues. I'm making sure to tell everyone of the THANKYOUFOR60M code to get off the starting blocks. 1.2 million BP is a character level to unlock something, and the shards get you well on the way to a new character for the same pretty early.
In truth though my advice to any new player, seriously consider before you start if you'd be happy to buy the paid DLC, and factor that in to your decision to play it.
Licenses can be pulled any time (Stranger Things), and if you want to get the most out of the game you will likely consider buying the paid DLC anyway. So have a serious think, if this is the kind of game you'd likely enjoy, and actually consider putting the money into.
If the colorblind settings were good enough to help them I wouldnt have mentioned it.
The issue is there are a lot of things which really are not accessible. Chucky's Tiffany skin on Ormand was insanely difficult for them to see, it's white on white, and the footsteps blend in with the snowy map, something as basic as that should be considered when designing a Killer. That's just a single example, and there are dozens more that Im probably not even aware of.