Dead by Daylight: The Legion First Impressions

Dead by Daylight: The Legion First Impressions

The latest Dead by Daylight chapter – Darkness Among Us, released a couple of days ago, giving players the usual mixture of a new Killer and Survivor to play as. The Killer is The Legion, a multiple-personality killer with a Feral Frenzy attack that allows them to race forward at speed, vault pallets, and also give them a sense of where healthy Survivors are. Sounds pretty decent on the face of it, but as is often the case, things can be different in practice.

My first session spent playing as The Legion was purely designed to get used to him. (I`ll call The Legion him for laziness purposes from here onwards). I expected to lose, and lose hard, as I was comfortably in the red ranks when he released. It took a little while to get used to his “ice skater turning” when frenzying. It felt like a milder adjustment process than getting used to Hillbilly and his own turning arcs, but it wasn’t wholly dissimilar. I messed up a number of tight vaults due to this, but I soon settled to his eccentricities.

As far as his power, it was fun, but it didn’t do much to win me the match. I still felt like I was being looped for just as long as other Killers, even with pallet vaulting and deep wound timers ticking down on a number of the Survivors. If I’d formed my opinion after my first experience with The Legion, I would have likely branded him “A bit shit!”, even allowing for his newness to me. Thankfully the next session I played him, I did much, much better, and that was partially helped with finding some complementary perks for his play-style.

One of the main criticisms levelled at The Legion is how his ability takes so long to down a Survivor. He has been dubbed a “5 hit killer” and other labels like that. Married to this is his low general movement speed, and the way that even his normal M1 attacks deplete his power gauge if they connect. Not very sexy. To me though, The Legion is an ambusher/stalking Killer, maybe even more so than our friends The Shape or The Pig. The Legion needs to get his licks in, then hold back, circling for the chance to end things later. Perks that aid this play-style make this a lot easier.

I’ve been making great use of BBQ & Chilli, Monitor and Abuse, Enduring and Bloodhound. The two that started making a big difference were M&A and Bloodhound. M&A lets me get closer to the Survivors on gens before they know I’m approaching, which is just generally helpful. The expansion in terror radius when in a chase also aids my Survivor locating power, so it gives in two ways. Bloodhound proved most effective for me though, and even at level one, the boost in tracking ability it gave me was immense. Certain maps have very bad scratch-marks right now, and even the ones that don’t, they can often send me the wrong way. Glowing blood puddles though.. much easier to track, and blood shows when you are running in frenzy, whereas scratchmarks don't. I’ve seen others use Stridor and say that it serves them well, but I’ve yet to unlock that for The Legion.

As I said above, I found The Legion to me most effective as an ambusher/stalker. I get my feral frenzy off, hit as many people as I can if others are clustered, or get two hits on one person. I then let myself fall back far enough that the chase breaks. Some streamers have been advocating the “turning away and following them backwards” gimmick. Fair play if they can do it but I don’t bother, it feels pretty cheap to me, but that’s just my opinion. Once I’ve broken the chase by dropping back or going in a different direction, I can then follow the injured Survivor at leisure, following their glowing blood and pressuring them at distance while they need to Mend. If I don’t lose them, there is little they can do. They are going down, either to another attack from me, or their timer running out. Since adopting this play-style, I have 3 and 4 K’d quite consistently as The Legion, with the odd narrow loss thrown in here and there. The enjoyment I’ve gained playing in this way is substantial, even in those losses.

It is very early days with The Legion, with both Survivors and Killers still getting to grips with him, so it’s hard to know what he’ll be like once people are more experienced, and he gets his inevitable patches to tinker with his stats over time. People worry about how viable Killers are at the higher ranks, and where Legion will fit into this, but in my experience, all Killers can do decently well at Rank 1, even Freddy, it’s just a matter of tactics, RNG and who you are facing. You can’t win every game. The Legion doesn’t feel over powered at the moment, nor terrible. I’m just hoping to carry on having fun with him for as long as I can.

3 Ways That Rage Quitters Hurt Themselves The Most

3 Ways That Rage Quitters Hurt Themselves The Most

By Casey Douglass

Image used freely from the excellent Gratisography.

The game is barely minutes old, a blank canvas on which the victor will eventually write their dominance. Someone falls. A sound chimes, and an icon appears with a line through it. That person has disconnected. Your heart sinks. Your task is much harder now. Like dominoes, your teammates begin to fall. Another disconnects. The game seems already lost. You sigh.

If you’ve played any online competitive video-game, the previous scene will likely be familiar to you. Any game which sees people play against others runs the risk of being blighted by drop-outs, disconnections, and rage quits. Not everyone who leaves will do so in a rage, or even become a serial rage quitter. Sometimes games crash, and at other times, life gets in the way. It’s the serial rage quitters that I want to focus on here, someone who likely has no idea of the ways in which they are compounding their own misery.

A “satisfying” rage quit seems to involve a number of elements, but each contains a seed of misery that will eventually bite the quitter in the backside:

Hollow Victories

First is the idea that you are getting one over on your inept teammates or the other side, somehow depriving them of something or punishing them for a perceived misdeed. While this maybe true, they might actually come away from that game having had one of the best games of their lives. In my own experience on a variety of games, a rage quit on the team doesn’t mean the end of the game. It might make for a harder game, a game in which the odds of you winning are reduced, but there is still fun to be had in trying to turn things around. And if you succeed... you’ll probably be so satisfied that you’ll be beaming from ear to ear. This is an experience a rage quitter will likely never encounter.

Hair-Trigger Emotions

Another element to a rage quit is the changing of feelings in the quitter. Whichever emotion might have been slowly (or thunderously) building, such as anger, frustration or hopelessness, it will be replaced by the above mentioned feeling of smug satisfaction at “getting one over” on the remaining players. Okay, congratulations Mr or Mrs R. Quitter, you’ve just lowered your tolerance for any “unpleasant” emotion going forward, and set the trigger in your brain to engage at even milder situations.

Having worked through Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I know a fair amount about thoughts, feelings, and the actions we take to alter them. One of the first things I mastered was the idea that if we give into one thought, one time, the chances are higher that we will do it a second time. This is due to all kinds of stuff like neural plasticity, habit forming and reward mechanisms etc. which is a really interesting Google Expedition if you fancy it at some point.

As far as gaming and rage quitting, if you rage quit after a certain thing happening, maybe you die to friendly fire in a first person shooter, the chances are reasonably good that this will trigger you again more easily next time it happens. While you are in this “games have to go my way” frame of mind, you will slowly expand your “Conditions in which I Quit” list, and if you don’t find some degree of self-awareness beforehand, you'll find that what you need to happen in a game to have fun will become an increasingly narrow band of possibility. Basically, rage quitters, by escalating their quitting behaviour, reduce the chances of finding any fun or enjoyment in a game that they really want to enjoy.

No Chance of Improvement

Finally, a rage quitter might justify their leaving as “I can get into a fun game more quickly” or something similar. Yes, this might be true, but even if this new game meets your growing criteria for fun, have you improved as a gamer? In so many competitive events, whether games, sports or even a quiz night at the pub, it is often possible to learn far more from losing a game than from winning. A rage quitter, by leaving the game early, kills dead any chance of improving their skills, tactics, or mindset, and simply lock themselves into the cycle of continuous annoyance at the game and the other people that play it.

Turning It Around

Is any of this what we want from our gaming hobby? To reduce our chances of enjoyment? To not grow or improve as gamers or even as people, to stunt our ability to be civil and to enjoy competition with others in a healthy way? That sounds like a very sad reflection of what gaming should be.

We can’t control how other players decide to play a game. We can control how we play and react to it. Gaming isn’t always fun and joyous. You can’t win every game, or even have fun every game, but what you can do is take the losses and the frustrations as part of the whole package, learn what you can from them, and enjoy the games that you can. 

If you see someone rage quit during a game, beyond the irritation and annoyance, see if there is a little sadness in your heart for someone who could soon find themselves adrift from their favourite game. 

If you are a rage quitter yourself, as an experiment, the next time you feel the urge to leave a game, stick it out and see what happens. You might come out of the experience pleasantly surprised, even if it is just at the way that your feelings may have changed or mellowed as the likely defeat played out. Who knows.

Thanks for reading :).

Turning Online Gamers’ Tantrums into a Wall of Saltiness

Turning Online Gamers’ Tantrums into a Wall of Saltiness

By Casey Douglass

The end screen on Dead by Daylight when you wipe the floor with the survivor scum. That was said in character, obviously. I'm sure they are lovely people just having a hard time of things, and my axe was the cure. Ha ha ha.

‘Camper.’

The word flashes up in the after-game chat and I fist-pump the air.

I’ve been playing Behaviour Digital’s multi-player horror game Dead by Daylight, a game that sees four survivors and one killer trapped on a map, one side needing to escape, one side needing to bathe in the blood of the ones that don’t. It’s very good fun but my word, there are certainly some very toxic people playing it. To be fair, a lot of games have their share of tantrum throwing keyboard bashers, but there is something about the Killers vs. Survivors setup of DBD that throws fuel on those fires. Just check out the game's forum on Steam for a taster.

The problem, as with many games, comes down to people having different views on how you should play the game. I remember playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and seeing the vehement condemnation of anyone that sat in a corner or used cover for more than a second. ‘Camper!’ was a frequent insult thrown around, more than likely by people who felt you should play every first person shooter as if it was Quake or Unreal Tournament. Add into the mix people who seemingly have no idea what camping actually means, or with differing opinions on what camping is, and arguments fly with regularity.

Of course, this type of thing isn’t just limited to camping. In Battlefield 3 I was accused of being a Kill:Death ratio player, just because I was having a good game and had something like 21 kills, 5 deaths. It was whined at me by someone in a tank who couldn’t get it through his or her head that a big tank can be hit from many different angles, and just because you can’t see me doesn’t mean I can’t see you. I think I was called a coward for firing and ducking back into cover again too. I obviously didn’t fit into their view of how my character should be dying easily at their hands, rather than serving up a punishing arse kicking that they were squarely on the end of.

In Battlefield 4, I played as a sniper quite regularly. Oh the cries of ‘Camper!” as I made someone’s head spray red. I could have pointed out that I wasn’t camping as I barely stayed still the whole match. If I did stop, it was only until I got a kill and then I changed position, as snipers are vulnerable if people know where they are and can get up close and personal with them. Instead I took the high road and said something like ‘Booooo hooooo!’ That’s not to say I’m down on campers either, it’s a valid tactic in many video-games, particularly war-based ones. You can bet your backside that if I was being shot at in real life, I wouldn’t be running in circles tea-bagging in open ground, and nor would even the most zealous anti-camper.

By way of a slight trip down memory lane, we come back to Dead by Daylight, a game in which both killers and survivors tend to bitch and moan about how the other side plays. There are lovely people playing too of course, but for the purposes of this post, I’m focussing on the screen-lickers who give fiery verbal at the end of a game.

I play both sides of the divide, as the game lets you have a separate Killer and Survivor Rank, but my heart lies on the Killer side. As a killer, it really does seem that however you play, it isn’t the right way for some survivors. If you hook a survivor on one of the many hooks around the level (your main goal), you have to absolutely run away as fast as possible or you will be accused of camping the hook. Even if you see their three teammates skulking around behind it. You have to practice a kind of unthinking and unseeing that Orwell’s 1984 would be most impressed by. There are other whiny things that get dragged out by both sides, but the crux of the matter is, I was finally called a camper last night, having not even camped, and I always feel accepted by a game community once I’ve had my first cry-baby chat message. What took you soo long DBD?

I’ve decided I’m going to write down any insults that come my way from now on (not who said them, I mean, who cares?) and I will try to collect enough to make a nice image, maybe with one of the DBD characters in the middle, the sniveling words of dejection ghosted behind it. Something like that anyway. I will call it my Wall of Saltiness and it will be tremendous to look at and think of all the gaming experiences I’ve ‘ruined’ for a host of bad losers. I particularly look forward to the really bad ones like ‘get cancer’ and ‘die.’

I don’t mean to say that I will play in a way that will troll people or piss them off. I will just play how I usually do, in a balanced, sporting way, and see what barbs will be flung at me after the match is over. I’m quite looking forward to it, and as my killer ranks up, I’ve been reliably informed that the saltiness after games increases muchly. Tremendous!

If you play any online multi-player games, maybe you could create a Wall of Saltiness too, something to remember your past victories with. Good luck if you do. I will post my own when it is complete. I don’t know how long it will take, but it will be worth the wait I think.

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