When I first saw Dead by Daylight’s latest creation, The Unknown, in its full beauty, I was taken aback. As someone who casually enjoys horror, I’m no stranger to the uncomfortable feeling that horror genres try to achieve. But even glancing at The Unknown makes me genuinely uncomfortable in all the best ways. It leans strongly toward the analog horror genre, and the development team at Behaviour Interactive did a tremendous job of bringing an original horror creature to life while making it visually upsetting in the upcoming Dead by Daylight chapter, All Things Wicked.
I had the extraordinary opportunity to speak with Behaviour Interactive’s senior creative director on Dead by Daylight, Dave Richard, and killer designer Nicolas Barrière. We talked about making The Unknown a beautiful (and disturbing) reality, how they worked on creating the Survivor foil, Sable Ward, and the many inspirations for developing the latest map, Greenville Square.
Dot Esports: The Unknown disturbs me in the best way possible. There’s a visceral emotion when looking at this thing and everything it embodies. What was the driving force behind the All Things Wicked chapter and creating The Unknown? It creates a good amount of unsettling emotions.
Richard: Our main inspiration was analog horror. Something alluring to me, and many of us on the project, is that this horror sub-genre is very cryptic and weird and deals with unfathomable fear you don’t see but is super visual. It’s you versus the fear.
We don’t see that too much in Dead by Daylight, and we wanted to tackle it. It’s different from the typical gameplay we usually get. Analog horror is all about sustained fear. A fear stretched to its limits. Those were the pillars given to the gameplay team. We wanted to try and replicate that intimacy between you and the fear. The sustained horror plays with perception and vision.
Barrière: With the focus on intimacy, this clued us in early on that this would be a Killer that cared about being far, and then close, to Survivors. They play with Survivor perceptions. We did a lot of prototyping around speed, vision, and teleporting. We ended up with this combination of a Killer that asks the Survivor to get extremely close.
For example, The Unknown can apply an effect called Weaken on Survivors, and Survivors have to look at the Killer to eliminate the effect. There’s no other way to get rid of it. You can run away, but you still have this effect. You’re linked to the Killer, and they’ve made you more vulnerable, making you afraid The Unknown could reappear. At the same time, there are hallucinations The Unknown can create throughout the map, making them more powerful over time. The only way to get rid of these hallucinations is for Survivors to walk up to them and “face their fears” by staring into them.
Dot Esports: How did the team develop a grotesque and beautifully gross character design for The Unknown?
Barrière: I have amazing teammates who are excellent at their craft. I work with them to ensure the gameplay and art are always aligned. It’s really a collaboration. You have to make sure you’re clear when sharing the requirements for gameplay, focusing on what’s important and what matters about a Killer’s design. This way, other artists, animators, sound designers, musicians, and voice directors can take it and run with it. It’s the best feeling when you create a design that leaves space for others because you get to be surprised and proud of working with amazing people.
Richard: We were aiming for two things early on when creating The Unknown. The first is in the image of analog horror creatures. We didn’t want any truth about the character, or at least as little as possible, that the game would allow us. We don’t know exactly what it is.
That’s been well respected. The other is that it needs to have a physical appearance, and there needs to be some customization around the character. The only truth is that it needed to do some human mimicry for its hunting. That guided a lot of the decisions we made. The human mimicry had to be super wrong. It tries to fool you, but it’s awful at it.
Barrière: It’s an aspect I really like about the character. It understands what a human being is. Then, it produces this. You can’t understand what it sees in us and why it wants to look like us.
Dot Esports: Let’s talk about Sable Ward. What made her a suitable Survivor to serve as the foil to The Unknown?
Richard: Sable was very fun to design. In the lore, she’s attached to Mikaela’s universe. When we created Mikaela, it was a love letter to our fanbase. This character was a representation of our players and who they are. She loves the same things they do, and the reception to her has been great.
We tried to recreate the effort and make a character similar but different to Mikaela. Sable is a bit darker. The main difference between the characters is how she’s linked to Mikaela’s disappearance in the world of the Entity and how she’s taken. It’s an interesting thing about her that translates into her gameplay.
Barrière: A lot of things about The Unknown are indescribable, and that’s great because, in contrast, Sable’s gameplay mechanics and perks tell you about what type of character she is. She entered The Entity’s realm willingly to look for Mikaela. We understand she’s comfortable at home with darker environments, and she and Mikaela share a lot in common, but they are very distinct.
The idea that Sable is at home with The Entity reflects that all her starting perks have to do with the Basement. The most sinister area in the game, and trying to make good out of the worst situation. Her perks put her at risk but provide a huge opportunity against the Killer, basically facing the darkness.
Dot Esports: On the reception of having The Unknown and Sable in Dead by Daylight’s PTB, have you seen anything interesting that you didn’t expect from players using the Killer’s or Sable’s abilities? How have players been responding to them?
Barrière: To give a concrete example, one of the elements of The Unknown’s power, the core projectile, bounces. What’s interesting is that we have a lot of maps in Dead by Daylight and a lot of surfaces, both vertical and horizontal, and we’ve introduced a physics-based projectile that ricochets. It’s unique and is always a part of The Unknown.
You can’t remove it. It makes it so that every chase feels new again. When playing as the Killer, you’re trying to catch Survivors off-guard, and what’s better than a projectile that you can predict and be surprised with. It brings spice to the whole experience. As a Survivor, it keeps you on your toes. Where’s the Killer going to aim? How is the projectile going to bounce? Where am I being surrounded by? These are great questions to ask yourself as a Survivor, making the relationship between how Killers utilize maps feel fresh again.
Dot Esports: With Sable and The Unknown coming to Dead by Daylight, how did they affect the creation of the Greenville Square map? What are the origins of this new location?
Richard: The map is great. There are a lot of important themes for us to explore as developers. The first one is to revisit a theme we started with the Dredge. It doesn’t look like it when you immediately see the map because it differs from the Withered Out map. Both of these maps are in the same realm. What we wanted to create with this realm is an amalgamation of America’s suburbs and little towns.
It’s a setting we know and love from many movies and books in horror mediums, especially analog horror. We returned to this setup and cranked the dial up to 11. It’s a movie theater, but it’s located in the middle of the woods. There’s no logic in this map. There are assets lingering here and there that make it super creepy, like a popcorn machine with bowels. Mikaela and Sable come from one of these little American towns, and it was impossible to explore this sub-universe with The Dredge, but now we can show a representation of where they come from.
Barrière: I love the map. The theater is 10 out of 10. We’ve all been to a small-town theater, and it recreates that so much. I was born in ‘87, and seeing the carpet in the arcade brought me back to those memories. Like any good horror movie, you bring your experiences to the setting, which completes that connection for us as players in Dead by Daylight. You can’t reminiscence. You have to run and escape the Killer.
Dot Esports: What was a favorite aspect when creating The Unknown, and what was a challenging roadblock you had to overcome during development?
Barrière: My favorite was that we knew that to get the feeling of sustained horror, we had to get something domineering about The Unknown. We had to create this feeling that you were always about to run into it, which intuited our style of teleporting for them. We had a crazy idea about what would happen if you had no control over where you put your teleport spots. That allowed us to make the teleport extremely fast and satisfying.
For Survivors to dispel it, they have to look at these hallucinations, and it’s scary because the creature can show up at any point. Survivors can’t move the camera during this point, and it’s disempowering. What was a difficulty was nailing down the vision mechanics. We had so many prototypes about how vision would work with The Unknown, making something compelling that met our creative goals and was also fun mechanically
Richard: We knew going in this was a tough challenge to put into gameplay, and creating an analog horror chapter was the challenge. What I liked the most was the effort, to be frank. Everything is very lovely about this chapter. It shows when you see the reaction from the fans. If I had to pick something specific, it was our marketing campaign.
I will throw this flower to the out-of-the-game people who created the hype for the All Things Wicked chapter. They’ve done a marvelous job with the analogy horror style, seeding very cryptic ideas to the fans who were already theorycrafting and making fan art before the character was revealed.
