Dead by Daylight's progression system is overhauled... again - and it's looking good this time

I stopped playing Dead by Daylight just under a year ago. The grind was beyond belief whenever a new character came out, and these new characters appear constantly. Behaviour Interactive seems to have finally taken this into account, to an extent, in the latest overhaul to the game’s progression system.

Behaviour Interactive is no stranger to these overhauls, and has previously spent huge amounts of time determining whether Skill Based Match Making or a Match Making Rating is the better match-making system for the game. More recently, the team changed how ranks in the game work after having fully integrated SBMM: ranks became obsolete, and grades came in instead. I'm still not entirely sure how they work.

The main issue prevalent with Dead by Daylight right now is arguably how long it takes to level characters and collect all perks for them. After a single character reaches level 40, their signature perks are then unlocked in the bloodwebs (a perk tree, so to speak) of other characters. Players are somehow expected to do this for the 31 survivors and 28 killers in the game, with survivors and killers both having over 200 perks to unlock. 400 hours later and I managed to max out the level of most of my survivor characters, but this doesn't include prestiging them or acquiring every perk for them.

When a character hits their maximum level, 50, you can choose to prestige them. This will completely strip them of all their tools and perks, giving you a blank character to start over with. You can prestige a character up to three times and get a piece of bloodied gear for doing so. Frankly, I never saw the point in prestiging a character and it felt like a waste of my time.

In the latest overhaul to Dead by Daylight's progression system, shared via a Developer Update from Behaviour Interactive, the team acknowledge how important collecting perks can be to some players, and how long this can take.

"In order to unlock all the new perks on every character by the time next Chapter releases, you would need to play an estimated average of 4.1 hours every day. With this new system, that estimate decreases to an average of 1.01 hours each day – and that’s not even factoring in Bloodpoint bonuses from events, perks, or offerings."

This makes this overhaul the biggest change to the grind of Dead by Daylight yet, reducing the amount of time players need to commit to the game to level their characters and collect all perks. Previously, a player would have to level a character to level 40 to unlock all their teachable perks, and then you couldn't guarantee as to when you'd be able to unlock these for another survivor.

With this overhaul, which is currently only available in the Public Beta Test, perks are directly tied to prestiging a character. Behaviour Interactive explain that "Prestiging a character for the first time will instantly unlock the Tier 1 versions of their unique perks for all other Killers or Survivors, making them immediately available for use without ever opening the Bloodweb."

"Prestiging a character for the second and third time will unlock the Tier 2 & 3 versions of their unique perks. Alternatively, higher tier versions of their perks will appear randomly in Bloodwebs once the first Tier has been unlocked. "

Now for the most welcomed news of this entire overhaul: prestiging a character will no longer reset them. They will keep all their perks, items, add-ons, offerings etc. In light of this, further prestiging levels from four to nine have been introduced too, all offering their own rewards when attained.

With the grind for perks going, it might be about time that I return to Dead by Daylight. What do you think of the latest overhaul? If you're jumping back in anytime soon, don't forget to plug in these Bloodpoint codes!