MONTREAL — Players of “Dead by Daylight” have been forced to reexamine the 8-year-old game’s entire competitive meta on the discovery that many of the playable Killers are vulnerable to simply being beaten with sticks.
“We were joking about how the Nemesis actually ate a pretty fat nerf on his transition into DbD,” said DbD streamer KittyMachete in a recent livestream. “In ‘Resident Evil 3,’ he could soak up a couple of anti-tank rockets before he got knocked unconscious. Now in DbD, you slap him with a wooden pallet and he gets dizzy for a second. It’s like he just got done giving blood. That’s when I realized the game might be even easier if you just picked up the shattered fragments of those pallets and used them as a melee weapon. It turns out that you can do that if you play as Lara Croft. You just have to be careful, since there’s a random chance that the sticks can get fetishistically stuck in her body.”
DbD players immediately went to work, quickly finding that many of DbD’s guest characters have similar hidden abilities that allow them to fight Killers directly.
“We’ve been waiting for players to discover this secret,” said Rémi Racine, president of DbD developer Behaviour Interactive. “For years, critics have said that it’s strange to have a game that brings together many of the most competent, powerful characters in horror, then makes them helpless victims of a malevolent cosmic force. Well, surprise.”
“I know that we set DbD in an alternate horror dimension where the Entity controls every facet of reality and makes it pointless to fight back,” Racine continued. “But on the other hand, we’re the ones who put Ash Williams in the game. He’s too stupid to know that what he’s doing is impossible. From there, the rest fell into place.”
After Racine’s comments, some players discovered that Ash can summon his trademark Oldsmobile Delta 88, which causes massive damage if it lands on a Killer’s head.
Other survivors with secret anti-Killer perks include Leon Kennedy, who can escape a Killer’s clutches by flip-kicking him in the face; Cheryl Mason’s ability to transform into Princess Heart, complete with the powerful Sexy Beam; and Nicolas Cage, who can inflict the Frightened condition on a Killer by changing into his outfit from “Mandy.”
“Look, I feed on fear and hopelessness,” said the Entity, speaking via Skype from its lair outside reality. “I don’t really care who’s afraid or despairing as long as Daddy gets a taste. If the Killers are scared, that’s fine too.”
Upon learning that the Entity is real enough to offer comment, Racine immediately ended our interview.
