The Witcher 3

The Witcher 3

Geralt of Nazareth

ELDEN RING

Y'all gotta stop touching grace

Dead by Daylights most addicting feature isn’t its gameplay

When I spend hours on end running around various abandoned buildings fixing generators I escape feeling satisfied. I can go on my day having had a good time, but I can easily rip myself away from the game once its over. That is until I realize I am just one killer stun away from completing a mission and getting more bloodpoints to level up my character. This desire to constantly upgrade your character is by far the most addicting thing about Dead by Daylight, and it isn’t even it’s primary game play. 

The collection of various perks and items is a long and costly task, something that players will pursue constantly. At the end of every game, each player is given bloodpoints based off of their performance in their role, survivors for surviving and killers for killing. This currency is used in a procedurally generated upgrade tree called the bloodweb. This web is directly connected to each character and each character’s progression is separate from one another (with one exception that I’ll get into later). This web grants a character essential means to do well in the game. Though the game can totally be played without ever leveling up, many players prefer to grow their chances of winning especially when there is no benefit of not doing so. The web grants 3 main types of benefits to the players; Perks, Addons, and Offerings, each that effect gameplay in different ways.

How perks get you to play longer

First and fore most, perks are the most important thing obtained from leveling up. These are permanent buffs to your character that can give you effects from being able to pick yourself up from dying once a game, to be enabled to create a totem that will aid you and your teammates. Each character starts with three unique perks, and only one perk slot. As they level they gain more slots up to four at level 15, and as the continue on they can upgrade any perk up to three times. Besides their unique perks, there is a pool of generic perks that are available to all characters that can be obtained initially from the blood web. Additionally, each character can make their perks available to other characters after reaching a certain level for each perk (30,35,40) then that perk becomes available to other characters just like the generic ones.

Perks are one of the strongest feature to both killers and survivors, and of course some perks are more sought out than others. For example, some of the most popular perks, Dead Hard (an evasion move), Decisive Strike (and anti-hook perk) are seen on almost every survivor at high levels of play. But to get to this point, you need to level up various characters to earn their perks for others to use, meaning a huge time commitment gaining enough bloodpoints to level the character that has the perk, and the character you desire to play.

Lets say you make around 20,000 blood points each match, and each thing you can purchase on the bloodweb costs anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000 bloodpoints each, that’s only going to buy you around 4 things before you need to go play another match. Also, bloodwebs get bigger as your character levels up so that means it costs more and more with each level. So lets say you want dead hard, okay that is David Kings level 35 sharable perk, so if each level has anywhere from 5-20 things to purchase at each level, you can see how long this is going to take. Truth be told this use to be a lot worse years ago, so today’s bloodweb is much more manageable in comparison. Additionally, because the bloodweb is completely random, there is no telling when your desired character would even get access to the perk you acquired. For example, one of my killers, the trickster, still doesn’t even have the level 3 version of one of his unique perks at level 49.

Speaking of high levels, that is another way the progression keeps you playing. The bloodweb can’t get infinitely big, so it maxes out at level 50. Now this doesn’t mean you cant level past that, you actually have two choices. You can either keep clearing the web and gaining another level 50 web to purchase from, or you can completely reset your characters level for a level of prestige. Well it’s not really a big prestige prize, its just cosmetics. But free cosmetics, especially ones that can show others how serious you are about your characters is enough to entice players to climb to 50 the max 4 times. 

The grind

Of course there are other ways to get more blood points, and one of those ways is through one of the other things available on the bloodweb, offerings. offerings are one time use items that can give various different buffs, the most important being ones that give you more bloodpoints. In fact I would say those are the only good offerings at all, other offerings are either weak or can make the game kind of toxic (cough mori cough cough). These can help speed up the process but suffer from the same problem as searching for perks do, they cost blood points. 

Another great way of making bloodpoints is through daily challenges and archives, each give you specific goals such as use a killers ability so many times, escape as a certain survivor, do so many of X task is usually the basis of it. These tasks can double the amount of blood points you get from a match by rewarding any where from 15,000 to 50,0000 bloodpoints upon completion. And I must admit, some times I find my self going for another match, not because I want to play more, but because I am one away from completing an archive and getting closer to leveling my character up. This secondary system of the game is carrying so much of why so many people come back to this game on its shoulders. It isn’t until hundreds of hours later and dozens of dollars probably spent that you’d even get close to having everything. And by the point you do have everything, the game has probably become such a normal thing to you that you can’t back away now. 

While other things like rank and cosmetics definitely play into why people play, Ranks reset monthly, and most cosmetics are only earned through real currency purchases. So they really don’t hold up to the behemoth of an addicting game loop that the bloodweb is. 

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