Since its launch in 2016, Dead by Daylight has grown by leaps and bounds, introducing new cross-over and in-universe content to create a survival multiplayer experience that has something to offer for every horror fan. Now, Behaviour Interactive has released Dead by Daylight's Chapter 31 update: All Things Wicked. The patch adds Sable Ward, a new survivor with game-changing perks, the cinematic small-town Greenville Square map, and a terrifying new Killer called The Unknown.

Game ZXC had the opportunity to speak with Behaviour Interactive’s Creative director Dave Richard and Killer designer Nicolas Barrière-Kucharski about All Things Wicked ahead of its release. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

A New Kind of Horror

Q: What part of the All Things Wicked update are you most eager for players to experience?

Richard: Well, I think it’s kind of the whole package. We’ve had a lot of fun, internally, playing with analog horror as an inspiration and creating a Killer that is just genuinely scary in its powers, gameplay, and appearance. If I had to choose one thing, it would be the impact the Killer will have. He’s a very scary Killer.

Barrière-Kucharski: I would say, for me, it’s how much there is for players to explore. This is a chapter that is very cohesive within our own IP. There are a lot of great details for people to look forward to, including some really fun stuff that people haven’t discovered on PTB yet. I’m really looking forward to them exploring that.

Q: All Things Wicked bills itself as an Analog-Horror chapter. For the uninitiated, what is Analog-Horror? Can you provide some examples of other media that have portrayed the concept?

Richard: Yes, so analog horror has seen a lot of popularity as a sub-genre in the past ten years, with internet access to creepy-pasta and the ability for anyone to shoot their own horror movies with their phone. Analog horror tends to deal with really bizarre or cryptic types of horror that is also very visceral, even though this internet content and cinematic analog horror will hide a lot from you. You really feel the fear as a user, and it’s very intimate in how it’s presented.

That was truly inspiring to us because Dead by Daylight is not that type of horror at all. It’s very in-your-face and stressful. The Killer is ever-present and always chasing after you, so that type of fear is more about jump-scares and quick tension. With analog horror, we felt that there was a space there to give our players something new and interesting.

Q: Initially, there was a lot of speculation that The Unknown might be based on skinwalker lore. Is there any truth to that, or does the creature have other origins?

Richard: What’s very interesting about The Unknown and why it was named that is that it was one of our core pillars when creating the character: no truth would be accessible about this creature. And that’s what’s scary about analog horror creatures—we know they are there, we know they are dangerous, but we don’t know what they are or where they come from. Even as developers, we don’t know what it is—we only know how it affects gameplay. We know how it hunts, but we don’t know why. And we love seeing the community create their own theories about who the creature is.

Q: When designing The Unknown, did you start with a mechanical concept or mold the character’s abilities around its lore—or lack thereof?

Barrière-Kucharski: As Dave mentioned earlier, analog horror has such a root in sustained horror—something that envelopes you and permeates you. When we started development, something that struck me as super interesting was how analog horror relates to modernity. We have so much information and live in such an enlightened age, but analog horror forces us to reckon with the persistent unknowns and darkness around us. I think that’s fascinating.

So we knew early on that the starting point for prototyping this Killer was vision mechanics. How can we update the relationship between Killer and Survivors through vision? And how we ended up with the Killer that is now releasing has been a really long journey, and I think it will be interesting to see the road that we’ve taken and what players now have in their hands.

Q: What can you tell us about The Unknown’s hallucinogenic Husk ability? Any tips for using it effectively?

Barrière-Kucharski: Yeah! To sort of bounce on your previous question, it has a teleport ability, which allows the Killer to seem to be where you don’t want it to be. It leaves these hallucinations, these husks of itself around the map. The Killer doesn’t actually have that much control over the teleport, which allows the Survivors to get really close to the Killer in a really interesting proxy way, but since the Killer can teleport at almost any point, it’s like “Oh no! Surprise—he’s there. How are you gonna deal with that?”

I would say mechanically, what’s really fun about the hallucinations and teleport ability, is that players can't precisely locate the Killer, which allowed us to make the gameplay really fun and fast and responsive. Once players are able to perform at a proficient skill level, and then also play strategically—like, “I’m going to break a chase” or “I’m going to go to this corner of a map that has a hallucination which I know is going to appear soon,” that’s really the next step. Those are the big, long-term plays you can make if you want.

Scare Tactics

Q: Do you have any killer build recommendations for players trying out The Unknown for the first time?

Barrière-Kucharski: I like having fun, so I think you need to run Insidious. It’s the best Insidious Killer in the game because you can just stay idle and pretend to be one of your hallucinations. It’s just the best. It brings me joy, it brings me life.

The new generator perk, Unforeseen, that comes with this Killer allows you to put your terror radius on a generator you break. It’s super flavorful and it gives you undetectable for a really good duration. We saw some really exciting plays with Face the Darkness, which allows you to hear survivors scream across the map and gives you some really valuable information for teleporting. And I would say lastly, a chase perk like Lethal Pursuer from Xenomorph allows you to get a bit of haste. He’s a ranged Killer, he can teleport, and he has the top movement speed of our Killers. If you want, you can really specialize in speed or use your perk loadout to multitask in some very exciting ways.

Those would be my recommendations, but again, part of the fun of Dead by Daylight is experimenting with unique builds.

dead by daylight the unknown

Q: The new survivor, Sable Ward, travels into The Fog to find her missing friend, Mikaela Reid. What else can you tell us about Sable and Mikaela’s relationship?

Richard: Not much more than what has been presented so far. It may be something that we will explore later, now that we’ve created a good friend for Mikaela. That was part of the strategy—going back to one of our existing in-universe characters who has already proven herself popular and is much-loved by our community. When we created Mikaela, she was like a love letter to our community. She shared the same interests and represented our community in many ways, so her reception was really good. With Sable, we decided to go back to that universe. We wanted to offer something similar but also different at the same time, and creating Mikaela’s best friend was a good way to do that. That’s what inspired the character.

Q: Sable’s perks and gothy aesthetics give her a supernatural vibe. What other influences went into her design?

Richard: Yeah, Mikaela was a realistic reflection of our community. We wanted to make a character that we could relate to and recognize as a horror fan or horror-adjacent fan. With Sable, we wanted to create something similar, but we wanted to push things even further into a sort of fantasy land, like if we push that type of character even further. With a gothlike character, you are closer to a monster yourself—like a vampire, for example. You are closer to darkness in look and aesthetic, but still recognizably human. She's still a survivor, obviously, so that’s what influenced her design.

Q: Can you walk us through how Sable’s unique perks work?

Barrière-Kucharski: Sure! Her first perk is Invocation: Weaving Spiders, which is a new type of perk that allows people to collaborate in the basement, which is the longest interaction in the game that players can perform together. I think the full duration is a little less than two minutes, which is really long for our game. The joy of that is, when you start an invocation alone, people around the map can see you in the basement and then can join you, and it starts cutting time very significantly. If multiple people run Invocation, it goes even faster and the idea behind Invocations is that they give you effects that are team-wide and map-wide. It adds a new effect that permeates the game.

Invocation: Weaving Spiders reduces the total amount of charges you need to bring to a generator to repair it. That’s like progress, it’s something that the Killer cannot take away. The downside is, you are making a dark deal with something that is pretty somber and deadly. The person who initiates the Invocation will become permanently injured, so the question becomes, “Do we do this at the beginning of the match, the middle, or the very end?”

Her second perk, Strength is Shadows, is very simple. You can self-heal at about 70% effectiveness, but you have to be in the basement. That segues into her third perk, which is Wicked, which allows you to unhook in the basement. Did you get put in the worst part of the map? That’s great, you can unhook.

The trade-off is, if you do it immediately or too quickly, the Killer is going to figure out you have that perk and chase you down outside the basement. It's extremely advantageous, but you may not be able to do it for the entire match. A bonus is, if you unhook while you have the perk equipped, you can see the Killer’s aura for quite a long amount of time. All of Sable's perks kind of revolve around making the best out of the worst situation. Everything that she does with her perks is a double-edged sword.

A Cinematic Setting

Dead By Daylight Greenville Square

Q: What sort of unique killer encounters and horror experiences does Greenville Square enable?

Richard: The map is really great. First of all, there’s already a mood that is just perfect for this set-up. The fact that we are in a small town in America, which is a setting that we’ve seen in numerous movies and novels. We imagined it often, and it’s a map really close to the heart of a lot of our players. It’s a place we recognize that is really intimate, which again, is one of our pillars for the chapter—the analog horror that is really, really close to you.

There were many types of buildings that we considered exploring on our list, but we decided to go with the cinema for various reasons. The little theater is again a place we can recognize, a place we’ve all been to. We’ve managed to put a lot of interactivity in there, which adds moments or stories that could happen. As a part of the theater, there is a cinema room with a screen that will change as you repair the generators. It can change the mood and surprise people depending on when it happens.

There’s a classic arcade room from the 80s/90s era, with that carpet that we all know—it’s burned into our minds and memories when we think of a cinema or arcade. But there is some interactivity in that room with the arcade machines that can react to certain elements in the game. It’s an interesting place. And on top of all that, the cinema is placed in the middle of nowhere in the forest. It’s super bizarre and odd, which perfectly fits the scenario for our new Killer.

Nic, anything to add?

Barrière-Kucharski: Yeah, absolutely! I think one of the cool things about The Unknown is—because of its power either through placing the hallucinations around the map and trying to hide them or the fact that its unique projectile bounces—it redefines players’ relationship to the map in a really great way.

The thing I like about Greenville Square—especially from the Killer’s perspective—is that it has a lot of opportunities for you to hide around corners and bounce off shots that you physically cannot reach with other Killers. There are a few holes that you can curve a shot into, and I’ve seen a few people manage it on PTB. I teared up, it was beautiful. The one-in-a-million “Kobe!” shots that people have been doing are beyond my wildest expectations.

Q: Dave, you mentioned that small-town Americana is a very popular horror setting. Were there any specific books or movies that inspired the look and feel Greenville Square?

Richard: That’s also super interesting! We usually don’t talk a lot about precise inspirations, but I think we should give this to you: it’s the classic of classics. Derry. Derry is the small town, it just works so well, and it was part of the main inspiration very early on.

What’s interesting is that the first map—in DBD we have realms and numerous maps within the realms that reuse the assets but integrate them into new buildings—and when we first developed this small-town set for The Dredge chapter, the town had nothing to do with Derry. Which was fantastic! It was more of a southern town which you can recognize from the vegetation and architecture of the house. And for this, since we’re talking about Mikaela and Sable, we’re going back to the East Coast, more of a Derry-like town. All these assets work really well together. They really represent what the Nightmare entity is, stitching together all these areas into an amalgamation of a new place that never existed.

Q: How hard are the new Survivor and Killer to play?

Barrière-Kucharski: The Unknown is flagged as moderate. It’s rather straightforward to play. You press the button to shoot the projectile. The husks place themselves, and you press “control” to teleport to a hallucination. It’s getting to the extra steps after that which are the challenge. It’s knowing the map to predict your bounces. Being able to combine those factors in real-time. Mechanically, it’s just a couple of buttons, but the actual playstyle is mostly in your head.

Richard: We don’t flag Survivor difficulty, but if we had to rate Sable, I would say she’s moderate as well. It takes a little bit of game knowledge to use her perk out of the box.

Barrière-Kucharski: It’s very timing dependent. Deciding when to use the Invocation is a very strategic choice. Knowing when to stop what you are doing to go into the basement to heal is also timing-dependent because you won’t always have an ideal opportunity. You might have to travel across the map and meet the Killer along the way. Lastly, her perk Wicked—self-unhooking—is super powerful, but again, if you do it at the wrong time, the Killer knows you have that perk and they are not going to let you do that again.

Q: Is there anything else you would like readers to know?

Richard: No. I just can’t wait to see how everybody uses the new perks and abilities!

Barrière-Kucharski: I will say, for the future Unknown players: be creative. Think outside the box. This is a Killer that can be extremely customizable to your own playstyle. Have fun with it. If you want to play very directly, very indirectly—there’s a lot of space for you to enjoy this Killer.

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