Since Dead By Daylight originally launched in 2016 on PC (soon followed by Xbox One and PlayStation 4) one of the most requested features from the game’s ever-growing community has been bots.
Developed by Behaviour Interactive, Dead By Daylight is an asymmetrical horror game in which one team of four survivors must outsmart a lone killer, all five participants controlled by human players.
However, there has always been an appetite for AI bots to be thrown into the mix, as well as some kind of singleplayer component to Dead By Daylight. Despite being less popular and available on fewer formats, rival horror hit Friday the 13th: The Game managed it.
The main reason for adding bots would be as a learning tool for both new and experienced players. When starting out, Dead By Daylight can be fairly intimidating as you gradually get a feel of the ropes and the layer of hidden tricks built into the game’s mechanics.
There’s an argument to be made that AI controlled characters would struggle to emulate the adaptable behaviour of human players though it would be a worthwhile feature nonetheless. Right now, queues to join online matches as a killer can take several minutes, even with cross-play enabled. Playing as a survivor is fun, sure, though not quite as satisfying as hunting them down and offering them up as sacrifice for The Entity.
As such, if you’ve unlocked a new killer and want to learn their unique powers and experiment with loadouts you’ll need to do so in public matches. So, when can we expect bots (if at all)?
Interestingly, Behaviour Interactive have already included them in the mobile version of Dead By Daylight. Whenever a player disconnects from a match, they are replaced by an AI controlled counterpart. When asked by ComicBook if this feature would make its way into the PC and console versions of the game, this is what game director Matheiu Cote had to say earlier this year:
Well, the idea for us is the try to maximize what we get out of the work that we create for ourselves. So if we create something specifically for mobile and it ends up being something really, really cool that people get excited about, we’ll of course try to find a way to put that on every platform if it makes sense for the platform.
In fact, if we look closer at DBD Mobile, there are a number of desirable features unique to this version, such as being able to share items across characters as well as trying locked characters for a limited time without paying.
Having just kicked off their latest season as well as the recent addition of cross-play (not to mention confirmation of a free next-gen upgrade), Behaviour Interactive continue to go from strength to strength. While AI bots for PC and consoles have yet to be officially confirmed, we’d be surprised if they didn’t eventually make their way into these versions. If not bot matches, then we’d expect enhanced tutorials as well as a testing ground for killers to perform some player-free bloodletting.