Horror fans often act like every slasher film takes place within the same universe. That when Michael Myers is busy stalking babysitters, there are teenagers only a few states away guzzling coffee to avoid Freddy Krueger’s nightmare world. Unfortunately, it’s only a fantasy — no canonical through-line exits since most of these characters have different license holders. No, we won’t be mentioning Freddy vs Jason. Either way, a massive Avengers Endgame-like event movie can’t happen because suits in Hollywood hate fun.
Luckily, Behaviour Interactive is picking up the slack in Dead By Daylight.
For more than seven years, the 4v1 asymmetrical multiplayer phenomenon has been crossing over with every major horror franchise out there. Most recently, a second Resident Evil collaboration called Project W — something Dave Richard, creative director of Dead by Daylight, claims wasn’t in the cards even last year.
“It’s definitely not something we had planned for,” Richard tells GLHF. “But seeing reactions of the fanbase, both on the Resident Evil side and the Dead By Daylight side, it just made a lot of sense to go back.”
When work begins on Dead By Daylight‘s DLC chapters, the development team must analyze everything. The number of survivors, whether a killer’s abilities will break existing maps, or if a licensed character represents their respective franchise well enough. It’s a careful balancing act.
That’s why rumors of another Resident Evil chapter sent the community into a frenzy. Most everyone assumed that iconic stalker enemies like Lady Dimitrescu or Mr. X were shoo-ins. Behaviour Interactive heavily considered both options, but eventually went with the cool and collected series archvillain Albert Wesker. Nobody saw that choice coming, and his virus-infused skills would give the team creative wiggle room.
“We had done Nemesis one year ago, so we wanted to try something different,” Richard said. “Wesker is human, and we had to reflect his superpowered abilities in gameplay without falling into the monstrous aspect of [Resident Evil] while also making sure that he creates that same level of terror [as] the other killers. Going with his speed to catch survivors I think really worked.”
Wesker’s mortality was somewhat of a limitation, but Behaviour Interactive worked closely with Capcom to ensure the character’s backstory jived with gameplay. No matter how campy it may seem from a glance, Dead By Daylight has a skill ceiling that rivals League of Legends or Rainbow Six Siege. Sure, loads of people might want cosmic entities like Cthulhu to make an appearance, but godlike beings that can vaporize entire civilizations instantly would probably shatter any semblance of balance. Richard insists that the team can usually make it work, though.
“So there’s almost always a way to make [any] character fit into the metrics of research and development,” he explains. “It’s often a challenge when [there’s] characters with unique fantasies that we want to be well represented. If they break too many metrics, we can’t add them to the game.”
Of the 11 licensed killers currently in Dead By Daylight, Richard recalls one being tremendously difficult to adapt.
“Freddy Krueger,” he states. “Freddy can only appear while you’re sleeping – that’s the core fantasy. So creating [a] nightmare version of our world inside every map and mechanic was challenging.”
Behaviour Interactive trepidatiously walks this tightrope between staying true to someone’s lore and not breaking the game, which sometimes means giving up on clever ideas. Richard remembers joking about adding the ravenous Saint Bernard from Stephen King’s Cujo during early development streams. Sadly, a dog can’t shove people onto hooks, and bipedal creatures can easily break the line of sight. Anything that could shatter Dead By Daylight‘s fastidious looping-level design is out of the question too. Yes, that means the shark from JAWS isn’t happening — I asked.
While restrictions are in place regarding a killer’s size and shape, there isn’t necessarily an internal rule against toe-dipping out of the horror genre for collaborations.
“I always like to say that anything can be made into horror,” Richard says. “For instance, the [All-Kill chapter] with Trickster was a fun challenge: how can we make Kpop a slasher story and make it scary? I think we achieved that goal.”
He goes on to reveal that successful crossovers largely depend on how much artistic freedom a company or partner affords the team. Behaviour Interactive is willing to work with anyone, regardless of genre, so long as there’s leeway. Given that we live in an age where Ariana Grande can stab Goku with a lightsaber in Fortnite, it’s not too surprising that Richard is personally willing to push the cross-universe envelope pretty far. Even Thanos is possible, though incredibly unlikely.
“Never say never, I guess,” Richard says before bursting into laughter.
Plenty of legendary figures within horror have yet to debut in Dead By Daylight before we start seriously considering Marvel DLC, thankfully. Arguably no omission is more glaring than Chucky — the foul-mouthed homicidal doll that scared more 1980s kids than any other slasher villain. Unsurprisingly, Richard is personally open to adding the tiny crimson-haired menace.
“I would be interested,” he said. “Chucky is definitely an iconic horror character.”
The tricky part with Chucky is that he’s only about 29 inches tall, pushing that ever-so-delicate game balance boundary to its absolute limit. However, it wouldn’t be the first knee-high bad guy that Behaviour Interactive added.
“Look at Victor,” Richard explains. “[He’s] such a small character. There’s always a way to make it work.”
Earlier this year, Dead By Daylight surpassed more than 50 million players globally — an achievement that many believe is due to it becoming the “Smash Bros. of horror,” a nickname that its development team dared not dream of at one point.
“I couldn’t [have] imagined that. Before release, we knew we wanted to get crossovers in the game – it’s very freeform in how we can add characters from all sorts of universes,” Richard says while looking back. “But for me, it was three years in, we went to PAX, and [a] fan comes to our booth, and she shows me a tattoo on her arm that has Myers, Krueger, and Leatherface [surrounding] the Dead By Daylight logo. She was like, ‘it’s the horror hall of fame!’ I’m super grateful to work on such an amazing game.”
While we may never get that epic horror mashup film with every icon of the genre, Dead By Daylight might be one step better.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
