Dead By Daylight is officially old: since its first release for PC on June 14, 2016, Behaviour Interactive has been bringing new killers, new maps, new perks, and a shockingly comprehensive interlocking metagame to this bloody 4v1 slasher simulator with flair. Five years later, Dead By Daylight remains one of the world's best multiplayer experiences, despite its flat textures, spartan environments, technical failures, and other sometimes unlovely elements.

Enter "The Realm Beyond," Behaviour Interactive's ongoing remaster project. The goal is to wipe away all the muddiness that makes Dead By Daylight look outdated when played on modern hardware. The team has already revamped 21 maps and many visual effects, and while they have now reached the halfway point of the project, they will not stop until they make the grisly murders in the void look as beautiful as possible.

Side-by-side comparisons are stunning. Take a look at Autohaven Wreckers (video below), a generic killbox set in a rusty junkyard. With just a few changes, such as dirty metal textures and a few fluorescent lights, this map is worthy of even the most sadistic serial killer. According to game director Mathieu Côté, now that Behaviour has the resources of a big-budget studio, the goal is to make everything in the game match the flair of Dead By Daylight's recent content updates.

"We shipped this game with 30 people. That was the limit of the team. No one else was working on this game. Today, there are about 300 people working on Dead By Daylight, and about 50 others are involved in some way," said game director Mathieu Coté.

"And game director Mathieu Cotet says, 'We have a lot of people working on it.'

Creative director Dave Richards says the change he is most proud of is the one already running on the servers. New, gloomy lighting fixtures have been installed in every torture arena in the game. I was fiddling around with the clown last night, and the way the full moon reflected off his ghostly makeup was an indelible threat. This is what makes "Dead By Daylight" so interesting. It's a game that clearly mimics classic horror films, yet it's hardly scary. And the new textures give the game an unsettling feel and an opportunity to immerse oneself in the role-playing.

"It was important to maintain the same gameplay as before while increasing the contrast of the lighting," says Richards. 'Our game is strange. The darker it is, the safer it is for the survivors. But it definitely increased the level of spookiness."

As for future new releases, both developers are excited about the revamped animation. A number of new facial expressions will be implemented so that a survivor stuck with a pyramid-headed broadsword will never be completely expressionless again, and Côté notes that the team is overhauling the visuals for healing." Right now, the character just does a general massage on the body. He says, "...

Otherwise, the team is concentrating on many important, but not headline-grabbing, quality-of-life things. A chat filter is in the works, and the team continues to work on technical hang-ups in the hopes of eliminating some of the strange anomalies that still linger in the netcode. We hope that after losing a Survivor to a strange freeze, we will no longer have to reach for Alt-F4.

One of the most important upcoming changes in The Realm Beyond has nothing to do with atmosphere or junk elements; Dead By Daylight is a game that has long relied on color-coded visual cues. Survivors can occasionally see the auras of distant enemies, while killers rely on the dark red scratch marks left by fleeing parties. This has consistently been a barrier to entry for the colorblind, a problem made worse by the game's new UI. Addressing these issues has been a top priority.

"We've been working on colorblind features for a while," said Richards. We want to make the game more inclusive," Richards said. 'There are so many different types of color blindness that it's hard to get feedback internally, so we're looking forward to releasing it to the public.' [And with Dead By Daylight about to enter its very second edition, proving that this strange little game (part Halloween pastime, part cat-and-mouse dungeon game) is here to stay. After five long years of solid work, Behaviour It's time to take a breather. But that is not the nature of this work. In the world of service games, there is always the next content update waiting in the wings. We never arrive at the promised land, and each day brings us a little closer.

"The last time we were satisfied with the game was right before launch. We said, 'This is the best thing we could have made. Let's launch it and see what people think. Since that day, we felt like, "Oh shit, we have to make sure it keeps getting better," and that feeling hasn't stopped since."