Hero image: Dead by Daylight. Image: Behaviour Interactive
Dead by Daylight’s Survivors can now send each other messages mid-match — short, predefined ones, picked from a wheel. Behaviour Interactive posted the 10.2.0 Mid-Chapter patch notes on Steam at 1:33am AEDT on Wednesday, and the update leads with a new Survivor Intent System.
It also rewrites the rules for leaving a match early. There’s a new Surrender option, two new ways out for the Killer, and each one now has a stated effect on matchmaking.
The message wheel
The Intent System is a wheel of predefined text messages. On mouse, you hold the scroll button to open it. On a controller, it’s the right d-pad. You hover a message and release to send it.
There are eight messages on the wheel. Players can choose which ones appear in Settings, and the inputs can be rebound.
Messages show up for every Survivor, next to the sender’s information on the left of the screen. The Killer isn’t mentioned as a recipient anywhere in the notes.
Muting and opting out
Behaviour has built in the off switches. From Match Details, any player can mute any other player during a match — and the muted player isn’t told.
The whole system can also be switched off in a new Gameplay tab in Settings, under Messages. Anyone who opts out is marked with a “no” icon, so the rest of the team knows not to expect a reply.
Spam gets a cooldown. Send messages too fast and a one-second cooldown applies, rising to as much as five seconds if it keeps up. Waiting resets it to the shortest delay.
Abandon, Surrender and End Trial
The old Abandon option has been split three ways, and the developer note spells out what each one does to your MMR.
Abandon is for matches with too many bots. A lone human Survivor gets it when every other Survivor is a bot, and the Killer now gets it too when all remaining Survivors are bots and at least one isn’t dying. It “counts as an MMR draw”.
Surrender is the new name for the Survivor option when everyone is in the Dying State at once. The notes say it is for a result that is “inevitable and unfavourable”, and it “counts as an MMR loss”.
End Trial is the Killer’s version, available when every remaining Survivor is a bot and dying. All of those bots are Sacrificed, and “the MMR outcome depends on the total match results”.
Two older conditions are gone entirely — one for a Survivor who keeps recovering from being downed, and one for a Killer when no Generator has been worked on for a long stretch. Behaviour says both “could promote negative gameplay behaviours or cause players to leave prematurely”.
What else is in 10.2.0
The rest of the patch is a long pass over general perks, which the notes describe as “the perks new players gain access to when they begin their journey”. Dark Sense, for one, now includes the benefits of Windows of Opportunity, which Behaviour says is about teaching map layouts and pallet spawns.
It lands on top of the Borrowed Time revert and other PTB-to-live changes covered here on Tuesday. Taken together, the message wheel and the new exit rules are about the same thing — matches where players know what is going on, and a fair way out of the ones that can’t be saved.
Source: The Dead by Daylight Team (Steam) – 10.2.0 | Mid-Chapter, Steam – Dead by Daylight