Dead by Daylight kills its new healing system after blowback from players
Multiplayer survival horror game Dead by Daylight has been experimenting with a new healing system lately, whereby health regeneration was slowed from 16 to 24 seconds. That experiment has proved about as popular as having a meathook shoved through your chest, however, and after receiving substantial negative feedback, developer Behaviour Interactive has reverted to the original system.
Behaviour's reasoning for the change was laid out in a blog post last month. Basically, Behaviour thought that the current healing system gave Survivors too much of an advantage for getting out of sticky situations. "Having easy access to quick and plentiful heals can cause problems, particularly for highly skilled Survivors who can evade the Killer for quite some time," the devs wrote in March. "For Killers, this means that any chase that doesn’t end with a hook [trapping downed enemies on a meathook]—even if they managed to damage a Survivor- can be completely undone in a matter of seconds."
As outlined in a more recent blog post, however, the Dead By Daylight community did not agree. "Changing such a fundamental part of the game is a very touchy subject, so we kept an extra close eye on this change to see how it would play out," Behaviour Interactive said. "After reviewing player feedback, we found that many of you agreed that the speed which you heal others was already in a good spot prior to the update."
The developers also said that the change had "knock-on effects" for other parts of the game "making effects like Mangled and Hemorrhage stronger and making 'slugging' (leaving Survivors in the dying state) even more effective."
Behaviour hasn't completely restored the healing system to its original state, however, making other changes based on different feedback. "We found there was a lot of support for tuning down Med-Kits in particular. Med-Kits allowed Survivors to heal themselves multiple times whenever it was convenient to them, leaving their teammates free to work on Generators while they do so."
Hence, Behaviour has decided "to shift our focus to Med-Kits with a series of changes." These changes include limiting the number of Med-Kit charges to 24, giving healing speed bonuses to Med-Kits when healing other Survivors, and slowing down self-healing by 33%. "Combined, these changes will decrease the power of Med-Kits when used for self healing, but increase their power when used for healing teammates in return."
Other changes mentioned in the developer update include changes to the Hillbilly (which also got reverted), tweaks to various perks, and alterations to the Autohaven Wreckers map. You can read the full developer update here. No mention was made of the upcoming Dead by Daylight movie, which was announced early in March.