The multiplayer survival horror game Dead by Daylight (opens in new tab) recently tried out a new healing system. However, this experiment proved to be about as popular as getting a meat hook stuck in your chest, and after receiving considerable negative feedback, developer Behaviour Interactive reverted to the original system.

Behaviour's reasons for making this change are described in a blog post last month (opens in new tab). Basically, Behaviour believed that the current healing system gave survivors too much of an advantage to get out of tricky situations. 'Easy access to quick and plentiful heals can cause problems, especially for highly skilled survivors who can evade killers for quite some time. For the killer, this means that a chase that doesn't end with a hook (hooking a fallen foe on a meat hook), even if it does damage the survivor, will have him completely undone in a matter of seconds."

However, as outlined in a more recent blog post (opens in new tab), the Dead By Daylight community disagreed. Behaviour Interactive said, "Changing a fundamental part of the game is a very sensitive issue, so we were very careful about what the consequences of this change would be." After reviewing player feedback, we found that many agreed that the speed of recovering others was already in good shape before the update."

The developers also said the changes would have a "knock-on effect" on other parts of the game. It will make effects like "Mangled" and "Hemorrhage" stronger and "Slugging" (leaving a survivor in a near-death state) more effective.

However, Behavior has not completely restored the healing system to its original state and has made other changes based on various feedback. In particular, "We found a lot of support for tuning down the Med-Kits, which allowed survivors to heal themselves as often as they wanted at any convenient time, while their teammates had the generators at their disposal.

Thus, Behaviour decided to "shift the emphasis to Med-Kits through a series of changes. These changes include limiting the number of Med-Kit charges to 24, giving Med-Kits a recovery speed bonus when recovering other survivors, and slowing the self-healing rate by 33%. The combination of these changes would reduce the power of the medkit when used for self-healing, but instead increase its power when used to heal teammates."

Other changes mentioned in the developer update include changes to hillbillies (which were also reverted), adjustments to various perks, and changes to the autoheaven wreckers map. The full developer update can be read here (opens in a new tab); no mention is made of the "Dead by Daylight" movie (opens in a new tab), which was announced in early March.