Dead by Daylight vs Evolve
A new asymmetric multiplayer game has hit the market. Dead by Daylight, a game by Behavior Digital Inc, is a 4v1 that pits survivors against a deranged killer. It manifests slasher films as a video game, and it is bloody brilliant.
Seeing this game appear on Youtube and Twitch reminded me of the last asymmetric multiplayer game that I played: Evolve. I played about 80 hours of Evolve, but I had a few problems with it. I have noticed that Dead by Daylight does not share the design missteps that Evolve made. In this article we will go through the problems that I had with Evolve, and observe how Dead by Daylight avoids the same errors.
My main critique of Evolve was related to its difficulty in playing as the character that you want to play. Evolve, on its surface, seems to have two roles: hunter and monster. In practice there are 5 roles: monster, assault, support, medic, and trapper. Due to only having one of these role slots in each game, it is more difficult than it should be to play as your intended role. Joining a server in Evolve was a roll of the dice. Often the mental conversation went like this: "How many people in this game want to play the same character I want to play? Aw shucks, looks like at least one other player did - and I got my forth preferred role. Better luck next time - in 20 minutes when this match is over..."
Dead by Daylight does away with this by only having two roles: survivor and killer. Each killer creates their own lobby - so players that join their lobby are only survivors. Each survivor can choose between all available survivor characters - so no one is locked out of their preferred choice. As a result, leveling up a character is very easy. "Blood Points" earned by playing can be used for any character, so you can play as one character and level up another character with your earned experience.
A small note on business practices between the two games: Evolve milked its player base by charging for day one dlc and further hunters and monsters. Right now, it appears that Dead by Daylight is releasing its next Killer, "The Crawler," for free.
Normally I don't believe that multiplayer-only games are worth the price, but at $20 Dead by Daylight is entirely worth the cost of admission. It is well designed to give players a terrific experience.
