Dead By Daylight is getting a huge makeover, starting next week

The 1v4 multiplayer horrorshow Dead By Daylight is getting a new look, developers Behaviour have revealed, with a big graphical overhaul coming across a series of free updates. They're redrawing textures, rebuilding buildings, relighting lighting, tweaking animations, and generally making maps look more than actual places than the current loose scatterings and assemblies of garbage. It's looking pretty nice, as you can see in this before/after trailer.

"The ultimate goal is to improve the immersion tenfold, making the environments as realistic as a scary, disturbing nightmare," Behaviour explain. Tenfold immersion. Not ninefold, that would be insufficient. Yet sadly not elevenfold, which I guess is too ambitious. Tenfold will have to do. "The lighting and VFX will be vastly upgraded, as well as the modeling, textures and animations. More props will be added to the maps, and proper functions will be given to rooms to make them more identifiable."

Lead level artist Stephanie Hellin notes in another post, "Individual rooms will now be more distinct, with each serving a specific function. This allows players to better orient themselves in a Trial, while also filling the maps with environmental storytelling details for you to discover."

The new art does give the game a different look. The original textures have a strong kick of sharpening, noisy and high in contrast, and the new ones are quite smooth in comparison. And a lot of 'buildings' in the original are loose collections of scrap and garbage stacked in the size and shape of a structure, now becoming pretty real places. And a lot of places are lit in a warmer way. I'm usually a bit of a purist about remasters changing a game's style but I did not dig Dead By Daylight's original look so frankly I'm well up for this. You big hypocrite, Alice.

With "tens of thousands of assets" getting spruced up, the overhaul is due to come in a series of updates until autumn 2021, starting next Tuesday, the 8th of September. The first 'Realm Beyond' update will focus on the maps Springwood and Yamaoka Estate as well as "common items such as lockers, generators, palettes".

Behaviour also announced that on top of the cross-platform multiplayer added last month, they're adding "Cross-Progression" on select systems. Players on Steam, Switch, and Stadia will be able to link their accounts and carry progression, purchases (maybe except some licensed things), inventory, and such onto other systems. That's not supported on Xbox and PlayStation, mind.