The popular horror game Dead by Daylight is receiving a new accessibility update, replacing the original hook struggling event with a skill check system that eliminates the need for button-mashing. Dead by Daylight is a massively popular 4v1 multiplayer game that pits both iconic and original horror villains against a team of survivors in a bloody game of cat-and-mouse. Originally released in 2016, the game has managed to pull far ahead in the asymmetrical multiplayer genre, succeeding where many similar games have failed and maintaining a large and diverse player base. Dead by Daylight recently saw the launch of a new killer and survivor pair which made waves across the internet, but it appears that Behaviour Interactive has no intention of taking a breather after this big release.
This news of this accessibility update comes after the game's addition of colorblind features, a big step toward accessibility for disabled players. These updates seem to stem from a controversial live stream in January, in which one of the developers at Behaviour negatively responded to criticisms about the game's lack of colorblind options. Accessibility has been a growing topic not just in Dead by Daylight, but in the gaming industry as a whole. New games like The Last of Us 2 and Marvel's Spider-Man released with a plethora of options that let disabled players more easily access the games, setting a new standard which disabled players had been fighting for years to institute.
The next Player Test Build will changes the way survivors struggle on hooks. Currently, survivors who have reached the second hook state have to rapidly press the action button until either a teammate saves them or the timer runs out and they die. With the new changes announced on the Dead by Daylight Twitter page and enumerated in the game's patch notes, survivors will no longer have to worry about this, as the interaction is being replaced with the game's more standard skill check feature.
With this change, players that are physically unable to repeatedly press buttons will have more access to the survivor side of the game, as the new system only forces one button press every several seconds, and failure will no longer be an instant kill. The only other instance which requires rapid button presses is the wiggle action one must perform while being carried by a killer. It's currently unknown whether changes will be made to this action, but fans have been vocal about a change for that as well. Those who take up the role of killer won't be seeing any major changes with this new option, given that they don't have to complete any form of skill checks.
Game developers across the industry have started to adapt to the needs of disabled gamers. It wasn't always this easy to discuss accessibility in the industry, though, as the people who've needed these changes the most have had their arguments ignored or pushed to the side for almost as long as video games have existed. It's taken more than four years just to add colorblind options to a game as successful as Dead by Daylight despite repeated requests from gamers, locking people out of the game and stopping potential sales. The advancements for disabled gamers in the past year alone have shown just how much of a positive impact these kinds of changes can have, and hopefully, they're an indicator of further progress yet to come.
Sources: DeadByBHVR, Dead by Daylight Patch Notes
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