How accurately does Dead by Daylight’s hit detection match what is shown on screen?
This poll is about attacks that appear to miss visually but still register as hits, including basic attacks, projectiles, attacks near pallets or windows, and hits affected by latency.
Regardless of whether the cause is survivor hitboxes, weapon or projectile hitboxes, animation desynchronization, or latency compensation, do you think the current hit detection accurately reflects what players see on screen?
Comments
You should specify which side you're talking about. In my experience it's most of the time accurate for killerside on their screen but not as much for survivor. Generally I would say they need to look at it and make it consistent on both sides, but the real issue is the view of the survivor.
That’s a fair distinction. I was mainly referring to the survivor’s perspective—situations where an attack visibly misses on the survivor’s screen but is still registered because it appeared to connect on the killer’s screen.
Even if the hit looks accurate from the killer’s perspective, I don’t think the system can be considered accurate overall when both players are shown significantly different events. In a multiplayer game, the visual information presented to both sides should correspond reasonably closely to the actual result.
So I agree that consistency between both perspectives is the main issue, particularly how the attack and hit are displayed to the survivor. I’ll clarify that the poll is primarily about the survivor-side experience.
If you compare it to another pvp genre like shooter its basically a fundamental different sphere. Hit boxes of legit everything are wonky, hit detection is abysmal unreasonable and servers are literal trash.
I think some of it has to do with the overly simplified hitboxes in DBD, but a lot of it has to do with the absolutely terrible net code. The reason everything looks mostly okay on the killer side is because the killer's actions are prioritized, which is why when the killer has extremely high ping it's actually an advantage when it comes to hit detection.
I mean, the true answer is it depends on multiple factors. You'd have to go back into DBDS history to see why that is, back in the day there were zero dedicated servers and the game was entirely P2P(peer to peer). In that case someone has to be the "brain" of the game and BHVR chose the killer for that role. Meaning if the killer got a hit on his screen, even if you escaped on your screen you were gonna get hit. Bhvr eventually stood up dedicated servers but did not really change the underlying code outside of 2 specific events, pallet stuns and dead hard. were given server side validation such that if the survivors "thing"(throwing a pallet/dead harding) got to the server first, even if the killer hit you on their screen, you would "win" and not lose the health state. As far as I know other than those two events its pretty much still the same way it was many many years ago. Which to go back to my original point it depends on your ping as well as the killers ping as the bigger the difference is between those two numbers the bigger the "BS" to one side or the other(its typically survivors in todays world).
Edit: I guess technically there is a third event which I forgot to describe which is the killer grabbing the survivor off of a gen. BHVR changed it so that if the survivor started running first, but the killer got a grab then the killer goes from grabbing → an auto M1 swing. It's super janky and feels bad as the killer, and usually lets the survivor get away AND punishes you with a whiff cooldown but that's technically another change they made in regard to the "event" system.