Arguments for/suggestions for a workable offline mode
Hi there,
How's it going? I just wanted to post some feedback regarding DBD in general. I really love the concept and given that it's a nearly impossible job to balance a game like this, I think it's very fair to say that Behavior has done an admirable job of keeping things in check. I love the format of the game and all of the horror elements to it, but every time I come back to this game, I end up deleting it from my hard drive again within about a month's time. The reason isn't so much anything in the game itself - it's the game's online players. I play both killer and survivor on PS4 and it's gotten to the point where I have disabled messages and friend requests. On a bit of a comical note, since I only had messages disabled at one point, I had a player send me a friend request with a message attached calling me a racial epithet. The juxtaposition of the two things made me laugh but it's generally exhausting to play these games purely due to how the other players react. I should note that this was after a game where I played killer and literally everyone escaped because I went out of my way to not camp and not tunnel.
When playing killer, if you're not getting hate messages, you're still having roughly 2/3 of survivors teabagging, taunting with emotes, taunting with a flashlight etc. Playing as survivor, you'll have killers that face-camp and hit you repeatedly while on a hook, along with other obnoxious behavior. That's a problem with the game's community - I don't blame the developers for that because I don't think there's necessarily any way they could weed out that problem without effectively destroying the player base (if all the offenders were removed, there would be a lot less people to play with). There's no shortage of toxic players playing either available role.
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So, with all of this said, I know that Behavior has said that they'll never look into any offline mode involving bots, but I just wanted to ask about that again and bring up some counter points. If it makes no difference, no harm done. For players like me who love the concept of the game but absolutely cannot stand playing against the most players online, and offline mode would be positive in the following ways:
- Allows players running a new killer or different builds to have a much easier time on an offline mode where you don't have to worry about being humiliated throughout the game and/or receiving hate mail if you don't play well (and don't have to worry about receiving hate mail if you DO play well, because it's probably coming regardless)
- Allows players to have an easier, more relaxing game offline against bots. Sometimes, it's more fun to play against near braindead opponents
- MUCH less brutal introduction to the game than playing online. The "no de-ranking past rank 15" was an excellent idea and I agree that it made a huge impact, but all the same, this game still does not feel all that beginner friendly due to the player base
- Allows players to play the game in the absence of a good/stable internet connection
- For players like me, there will be increased revenue from new killer/survivor purchases. I absolutely cannot stand the online mode, so I would not be making these purchases if there wasn't an offline mode I could play where I can actually enjoy the game. I am sure that I'm not alone there
- In fact, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I'd be very very willing to pay separately for an offline mode. The amount of sanity I would save by not playing online would be well worth the cost of admission
- In my opinion, in comparison to Friday the 13th game, DBD feels much more polished and superior in virtually every aspect, yet F13 does have an offline mode that works quite well
I'd like to offer some counter-arguments to the usual arguments against an online mode:
1.) If you could earn bloodpoints by playing offline, why wouldn't people just play solely the offline mode?
That's an excellent point. For Honor does this but I agree that it would be more of an issue for DBD because perks have a much heavier impact on gameplay in DBD than they do in For Honor. However, using a separate character progression system for offline/online would solve this problem. By that I mean - you could level up characters and earn bloodpoints offline, but those ONLY affect your offline characters, and vice versa for online players. So there's a complete separation of church and state there. No one can grind offline mode to gain a competitive edge in the PVP online mode. This would also add some further replayability - longtime users that want to grind in offline mode can rank up fresh characters there. It would effectively double the timesink of the game.
An alternative would be to only make bloodpoints available in online mode, then use the same characters everywhere else. I would also love this, as I've pretty much upgraded all of my characters as much as I ever wanted to, so I'd be fine to play offline mode while never touching PVP again. Or, you could make bloodpoints earned at a dramatically reduced rate. For instance, you can only earn 50% bloodpoints from offline games or something similar. Seems like there are multiple solutions here that would work to solve that problem
2.) Bots would be too easy to play against
I think most players would enjoy this more than hate it. If they want a soul crushing challenge, they can play PVP at high ranks. I think you could very reasonably make the argument that a lot of players would stop purposely de-ranking in order to play easier opponents if they could play against bots, which would make this kill two birds with one stone. All that being said, a few different difficulty settings for the bots would be ideal but any bot mode would be a breath of fresh air
3.) Due to randomized maps, it would be extremely difficult to program the bots
Very good point - doesn't seem like there's a simple solution there. Unless, much like mentioned above, there's a separation of church and state for offline/online modes. Could have non-randomized maps purely for the offline mode. In other words, each map only has one fixed iteration of itself. This would mean that there would effectively be a fixed number of maps to program around, and I should think that would make it a much more manageable task to create bots there. Worst case scenario, I don't think any reasonable person is going to be upset if the bots are not functioning all that well at first, and I don't think any reasonable person would be upset about non-randomized maps in an offline mode either
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Thank you for hearing me out! I can certainly appreciate if an offline mode is simply not in the cards but I wanted to chime in regardless. I love the bulk of this game and genuinely appreciate all the work that Behavior has put into it, I just can't handle dealing with the online mode. Have a good one!
Edit: Sorry for the bold text. I'm new to these forums so I'm unsure what happened there but I didn't intend for those lines to be emphasized
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