Dead By Daylight New Killer: Technical Debt

I've been playing Dead by Daylight off and on for the better part of a year and a half now.  I usually play it with my brothers as a team but I occasionally play solo as a killer.  I've never really done a solo Survivor game because working with other people in the video game is something I hate doing.  Most people are idiots, after all.

In the past year or so, starting with their 5th annivesary of the game going live, there has been a lot of problems with the game.  To say that the past year for DBD players has been a good one is a lie.  Behavior, the company behind the game, has been fumbling along with their patch releases, most of which have required serious hotfix patches once they have been released.

This is not a good sign for the product overall.  Yes, you do expect to have to roll out the occasional hotfix in your software product because we're only human and even the best of development teams will release a defective version from time to time.  It happens to the best of us.

But it happens too often to the worst of us.  If you release a patch for your game and then have to shutdown perks, characters, and whole maps because you royally screwed up on the patch release, then you're not doing a good job.

Or something worse has happened and it's come back to bite you in the ass.  And that thing is the dreaded technical debt.

In the software development world, technical debt is when you've made so many changes to your code base that the whole product begins to malfunction and you find yourself struggling to keep the product working while maintaining all the new features.

Technical debt usually occurs because the original release of your software product was built on unstructured and unreadable code with little to no unit testing set up to verify that the code at least works as expected.  Instead, you just assume that everything is working great because you were able to load it into the test environment and everything worked fine there when the developers ran through their tests.

This is where Behavior is at with Dead by Daylight.  Their codebase lacks any sense of decoupling, so that anytime they release an update, it is more than likely going to break something that should be completely unrelated to said update, and they have no unit tests to verify that the code works as expected, at least in the preliminary sense.

Worse still, because of their technical debt issues, they will be unable to properly address problems like the massive hacking community that currently exists.  All it takes is proper server-side validations and you'll see 90% of the hackers go away very quickly.  But such a solution is impossible if your codebase is a mess.

Look, I know about product-focused development versus code-focuse development (I think those are the right terms).  Yes, you do have a product deadline to meet.  That doesn't mean you use your prototype as the starting point and build from there.  That's incredibly foolish and short-sighted.

If the bones of the product are solid then the rest of the product can be developed where adding new things doesn't necessarily break the old things in a way that requires your dev team to work weekends to fix it.

While I have no insider knowledge of what Behavior's dev team is dealing with, having been a software developer myself for nearly two decades, I can make an educated guess as to what is happening.

If I were the lead developer there, I would draw up a plan to address all the outstanding issues with the code, create a timeline for getting it all done, then ask the upper management to put all new features on hold for a reasonable timeframe in order to address those problems.  Obviously, planning for new features can be done in that timeframe, but no new development should be done.

If Behavior is worried about losing its players, they can simply say that they are working on fixing many of the issues the game currently has and give an ETA on it.  There are plenty of features currently in the game that should make the game worth playing for a time and when the fixes are released, they'll see an uptick in players.

There is some hope that this is what is going to happen moving forward.  Their last major stream announced many improvements to the gameplay, besides upcoming features, which should prove to make the game more viable moving forward.  But if the technical debt issues are not addressed properly, then none of these things will matter in the long term.

The Straightening of Skyrim

There was a bit of an uproar within the Skyrim modding community recently.  It all started with on Nexus Mods, the premier place to download mods for Skyrim, among many other game titles, but Skyrim has always been their largest draw.

It all started when a modder uploaded a "gay marriage only" mod on the Nexus.  Now, in Skyrim, you have a marriage mechanic where your character can marry an NPC and gender isn't a factor.  So if you were a male character, you could marry a male NPC or a female NPC, given certain conditions.

A couple of other modders responded by uploading their own "straight marriage only" mods.  On top of that, one of those modders uploaded a "Straight Hrodulf" mod.  Basically, a dead NPC found in the Dragonborn DLC who was most likely in a gay relationship with another dead NPC.  This mod changed Hrodulf's lover to a dead female NPC.

And naturally, the outrage from the LGBTQ+pedo side of the Internet was immediate and loud.  Now, not all homosexual players cared about this.  In fact, I suspect most didn't care.

But you all know how this goes.  In our post-post-post-modern culture of "enlightened" morality, the group that is both the most insane and the loudest is usually the group that gets their way.

And so, in response to a small group of keyboard warriors who took time away from crystal meth and bug-chasing, Nexus Mods removed all of the "offending" mods.  The marriage mods, both gay and straight, and the Hrodulf mod, and probably a bunch of other related mods.

So nobody "won" in the end.  Except a lot of idiots with a lot of time took to the Internet to post articles about how horrible it was that someone "limited" Skyrim to straight marriages only.

Here's the thing: the whole point of modding Skyrim is that you are transforming the game into something that resembles what you want in the game.  By default, the RPG elements of Skyrim are very weak, if not non-existent.

When Bethesda implement the marriage feature of Skyrim, I'm almost positive that they had straight marriages in mind but decided to make your player character to be bisexual by default in order to avoid minority-insano fan backlash.  I say this because you have two genders in the game and there are perks and blessing which only work on characters of the opposite sex.

If they really cared about LGBTQ+pedo rights, they would've made the game less of an RPG than it already was.  And, again, the RPG elements of Skyrim were pretty thin as it was.

And I guess that's what makes all this Woke culture nonsense so detrimental to gaming in general.  It results in major gaming companies having to make generic, bland garbage with almost no player choice in how he or she or xe can play their game.  Because allowing a straight white man to play Skyrim as a straight white man is a cardinal sin.  Also, if he plays as a lesbian black vampire, he's some kind of weird pervert.

I mean, he is, but that is the essence of role-playing.

For now, I'm glad that Nexus Mods decided to just ban both and not take sides.  While it's not the perfect solution, it's doesn't favor either side and tells the mod community that they won't tolerate mods that cause them headaches.

I'm sure these mods are available somewhere on the Internet, and I personally would like to find the straight ones because, as a straight, white, Christian man whose pronoun is Lord Sexual Tyrannosaurus, I want to purify my Skyrim experience.

Because I'm not into dudes.  That's gay.

Convergence at Behavior

 A little over a year ago, I bought the video game Dead by Daylight at the recommendation of my brother.  Both of my brothers had this game and since it had cross-play support, we could all play the game together.

For those who don’t know, Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game where you play as either a survivor, whose main objective is to escape, or a killer, whose main objective is to sacrifice the survivors to the Entity, a Lovecraftian-like being that feeds on despair.

The Killers are unique and follow slasher-movie styles, with many coming from licensed properties, like Freddy Kruger or Michael Myers.  But there are plenty of original killers as well.

The survivors are basically just skins who come with unique perks that can be taught to other survivors.  So ultimately, it doesn’t matter what survivor you pick since you can have one with all the abilities you could ever want.

Each game round features four survivors and one killer.  It’s a pretty basic game, with each side having its own advantages and disadvantages.

But lately, there has been a lot of discontent with the DBD community.  Behavior, the company behind the game, recently revamped the match-making system for players that nearly everyone disliked.  Now, instead of being matched based on rank, which has a lot of factors, you are matched based on escape history, if you’re a survivor, and kills, if you’re a killer.  Effectively, this caused a lot of players to change their strategies to resort to methods that encourage fewer chases by the killers and less altruistic survivors.

But it gets better.  Many killers got their powers nerfed and the next patch is going to nerf some more.

Essentially, it looks like Behavior doesn’t care about games being fun unless you’re a casual player who mainly plays as a survivor.

To top things off, there is a serious hacker problem within the game as well and very little that regular players can do about it.  Behavior will ban the offenders, eventually, but the offenders simply buy Steam accounts on the cheap from foreigners and resume cheating again.  And these are the big cheaters.  The subtle usually never get caught because most players aren’t sure if they are cheating, to begin with.

Rather than deal with the problem properly, Behavior just bans all discussions involving cheating.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Unfortunately, it appears that Behavior has been overrun with Convergence and is unable to perform their primary duties anymore.  It started back in June of 2021 when they offered a Pride charm for all characters.  This charm could be obtained through a redemption code and doesn’t expire.

Next, their more recent original character additions have quite the cringe backstories.  The new killer, the Artist, was originally a communist poet and painter in South America somewhere.  The country isn’t specified, but I’m thinking it's supposed to be Chile and that she had her hands and tongue cut out by Pinochet’s goons.  I guess the helicopters were out of order that day.

Jonah, a new survivor, was a Deep State operative who fought for the poor in his off-hours.

Mikaela is a witch survivor who worked as a barista when she wasn’t casting spells and who came with serious game-changing, overpowered perks.  They may as well have named her “Snowflake” and given her the ability to open all escape gates before all the generators are repaired.

And now we come to another indication of the convergence infection: they’ve decided to remove Leatherface’s masks because one of them is for a black woman and that would be racist.  It’s not that he’s a cannibal killer who uses a chainsaw to murder people, it’s that he’s a racist because he skins a black person and puts that skin on his face.

The fact is, Behavior has full-blown Convergence AIDS right now.  They have a ton of technical debt in their code, a lot of broken mechanics, and they’re more concerned with racism and Pride than providing a good and enjoyable experience for all players.

This is usually what happens with many companies, though.  As they get comfortable, they get lazy and they let a lot of things slide.  In the end, they find themselves with an inferior product and not a lot of support from their customers.

So they virtue signal instead to compensate and try to keep idiots happy.  But that only works for so long before even the idiots notice things are off.