Dead by Daylight, the asymmetrical multiplayer horror game experience developed by Behaviour Interactive, has been an incredible success for the studio. With its initial pitch centering around a board game, this horror juggernaut exploded on the gaming scene with its fully realized debut in 2015 at GDC, winning the hearts of many a horror fan. Now, ten years later, Dead by Daylight shows no signs of stopping, and at the center of it all is the love and passion the team has for the horror genre.
This is clear from the game’s simple setup. Trapped forever in a realm of cosmic evil by The Entity, players can either play as one of four determined Survivors or the bloodthirsty Killer hunting them. It’s a perpetual loop of killer tag, and you either kill or survive. There is no in-between, and that’s part of the winning formula that has propelled the game’s success all these years later.
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We spoke with Senior Creative Director Dave Richard and Head of Partnerships Mathieu Côté about how the story’s flexibility allows the team to explore the universe of Dead by Daylight through different mediums, including a Dead by Daylight film, which has recently found its director, and how horror allows the team (and really any creator) to push the limits of fear, even when one has become desensitized to the genre.
The Dead by Daylight team is constantly looking for ways to experiment with the horror genre in-game.
Horror is constantly being experimented with, allowing creators and fans alike to experience the genre in new ways. Even for a game like Dead by Daylight, which is rooted in the slasher genre, Behaviour Interactive is constantly finding ways to stretch and play with the boundaries and constraints placed on it by the genre. Part of the draw of the genre, however, is the creativity and malleability it and its many subgenres possess.
This flexibility in the genre continues to draw the team in on both a creative and a personal level. “It’s fun. It’s such a creative space. It’s part of why there’s a golden age of horror right now. It’s a place where rules are often optional,” Mathieu Côté explained. “Drama or comedy tend to have more strict ways of doing things, but you can really go nuts with horror and just invent things.”
The saying “necessity is the mother of invention” comes to mind when thinking of Dead by Daylight. Over the course of its ten years, the team has constantly been tinkering away at the game with the goal of improvement in mind. While the core premise of 1v4 has remained intact, the game has introduced new characters, brought IP horror faves into its universe, expanded the world, and, with the latest tenth-anniversary announcement, the team is planning even more updates to Dead by Daylight.
Tackling these changes is no easy feat, but the love of the genre and finding ways to engage with and entice fans – both new and old – into Dead by Daylight‘s realm of horror is one of the primary motivators for the team. “Now that we’ve been working on this for more than 10 years, it’s getting harder and harder to be scared and to do it, but it’s fun to think that you can scare people. You can make them live it,” shared Dave Richard.
One important tool that has allowed Dave Richard and the team to play around with the scare factor is storytelling. Each new Chapter players get to partake in introducing either a new villain, survivor, or both into the ever-expanding realm of the Entity. It’s the ultimate storytelling exercise, one that allows the team to tap into the well of their creative juices and see where they can take these characters and their involvement in the Fog.
Storytelling isn’t something many might think of when it comes to Dead by Daylight, given its straightforward gaming premise. As Richard and Côté explained, the story was barebones at the beginning of the game’s journey. “The characters didn’t speak,” shared Côté before Richard jumped in. “[There was] very little lore for the characters and about the universe, but always with the thought of, okay, we are creating this universe.”
Over the past ten years, Dead by Daylight has been building up its lore surrounding the Entity and its realm.
The premise of this living universe was something the team wanted to do. “The living universe [would] contain all of these pockets and different characters from different timelines and universes,” explained Richard. “We wanted to make sure that it was all open to be able to adopt all of these different storylines, so be as open as possible.” Rather than making major story changes at once, the team started small, adding subtle in-game details that would tie into a larger narrative within Dead by Daylight.
Flavor text for items was among the earliest additions designed to hint at a story, alongside other game components. “There’s a reason why all these things exist,” shared Richard. “There’s no one add-on for a Killer or an item for a Survivor that doesn’t have an explanation why it’s there, why it exists.” While these elements of storytelling might have been too subtle at the time of their release in Dead by Daylight, as the game grew in popularity, Behaviour Interactive brought on creative talent to fully invest in the game’s narrative and flesh out the stories we see.
Of course, these things take time to create and implement, and for a massive multiplayer game like Dead by Daylight, it often boils down to what the team has time for. “The challenge of being in game production is that ideas are not a problem,” explained Richard. “There are tons of things we can do, but there’s only so much time and bandwidth and money, so we have to choose.” This isn’t something the team regrets, however, because it ultimately means they have a source of ideas at their disposal for when the time is right. Or, as Richard puts it, “Our backlog is full of cool babies that are eventually going to get out.”
Some of these “babies” have manifested as the expansion of Dead by Daylight into other media. Over the years, Behaviour Interactive has relied on various mediums to expand and elaborate on the universe, the Entity, and the characters trapped within The Fog. From the comic books to the collaboration with Supermassive Games on The Casting of Frank Stone to the recently announced Dead by Daylight movie, the team is unafraid to take risks when exploring creative mediums for their IP.
“That’s the coolest thing about having a 10-year-old franchise. There are so many different mediums we can explore,” Richard shared. “We have characters [that] are established, we have multiple styles that we’ve explored and also cultures, and so it’s easy to imagine that we could transition a spirit or an oni or trickster, any character really, into an anime, movie, TV series, book, and comic books.” Sadly, there is no word yet on an anime series, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility, especially since the team has created anime-style trailers before.
When it comes to the Dead by Daylight movie, this experience is opening up a new opportunity for Behaviour Interactive to introduce the game to a whole new audience. The video game film adaptation genre has gone through some ups and downs. In recent years, there have been some huge wins in that genre space with the success of TV Shows like Fallout, but there have also been huge misses, like what happened with Until Dawn. Dave Richard and Mathieu Côté want to make sure the latter doesn’t happen with the Dead by Daylight movie.
With the Dead by Daylight movie, Behaviour Interactive hopes to showcase the game in a new light.
“One thing that we kept very important, and will not in any way walk from, is the fact that this needs to be a horror movie first and foremost,” explained Côté. “It needs to scare the shit out of people.” While this may seem like a simple enough ask, some video game horror adaptations have failed to address this challenge. Sometimes this can go as far as experimenting too much with a game’s lore, as with the Netflix Resident Evil adaptation, or failing to grasp the weighty thematic material, as with Return to Silent Hill.
“It would be absolutely heartbreaking, but we’d much rather can the project than release a movie we’re not proud of,” shared Côté. Behaviour Interactive will be on the sidelines to provide input on the Dead by Daylight film, making sure that they can assist Blumhouse-Atomic Monster in refining the finer details. “It’s important for us that anything that touches our universe respects the fans and respects the rules of this universe, while leaving a space for these creators to be the experts of the medium they use,” Richard added.
Ultimately, the goal of this storytelling venture is to showcase Dead by Daylight to fans in a new light and introduce the game to new people through a different lens. “The people we met, they know about Dead by Daylight, and they know what is important about Dead by Daylight,” shared Richard, making it clear that this adaptation was in good hands. And with Thordur Palsson, a longtime Dead by Daylight player, joining as director, the foundation for the film seems promising.
Dead by Daylight has been the scrappy indie engine that could. It’s had its ups and downs as the team has navigated their rapid growth and expansion over the past ten years to unprecedented levels. Through it all, though, the love for horror has shown every step of the way, and the team’s willingness to experiment and play around not just with the game’s mechanics and formula, but also in its approach to storytelling, has made Dead by Daylight one of the most fascinating horror game experiments to witness. May the next ten years push this multiplayer experience further, both creatively and through its scares.
Dead by Daylight is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo, and PC.
