Dead by Daylight is celebrating its ninth anniversary in June, and to celebrate, developer Behaviour Interactive attended PAX East in Boston to reveal all kinds of new content for the massively popular multiplayer horror game.
Ahead of the panel, MobileSyrup got to sit down with Behaviour for an exclusive preview of the update. Here’s what we learned.
Five Nights at Freddy’s
To start, the Montreal-based studio peeled back the curtain on a crossover with Scott Cawthorn’s beloved Five Nights at Freddy’s series. Headlining this new chapter is a new Killer, Springtrap, who players will recognize as the animatronic “big bad” of FNAF.
As Jason Guzzo, DBD game designer explains, this marks “the first time ever that players get to step into the suit and hunt down those survivors in a video game,” making it a particularly exciting collaboration. “We really worked hard to make sure that his power and perks are authentic — not only to Springtrap, specifically, but FNAF, in general. We really wanted to honour that universe as much as possible.”
He admits that the gameplay of FNAF is rather different from DBD, given that the former is much slower-paced. “It did take a little bit of work to figure out a way to marry those two things and make sure that we were doing justice by by FNAF.” It’s a full circle opportunity for him, he says, having once spent “every waking moment” watching the YouTuber Markiplier play FNAF.
“I’m so proud of what we’ve done because, once again, we’ve done things that we’ve never done before. We are trying things that at first when we said, ‘Hey, why don’t we do this?’ A lot of people on the team went, ‘I don’t know if we can do that.’ And we said, ‘Well, why don’t we try?’ And internal and external play tests have said we’ve nailed it thematically, we’ve nailed the feel.”
While he can’t yet reveal too much about how Springtrap plays, he elaborated on the overall design philosophy. “Obviously, this chapter needs to be like, ‘Oh, you get to step into the suit and you get to be the one wandering the halls of the restaurant. But we couldn’t really leave the survivors behind in terms of that experience,” he says. “So we added gameplay that kind of calls back to the Five Nights games, but in the context of DBD. So you’re not sitting at a chair and watching a battery metre and closing doors to make sure the killer can’t kill you.”
While Springtrap won’t get a corresponding FNAF Survivor, Behaviour is releasing a Legendary outfit for the Yellow Rabbit based on Matthew Lillard’s character from the Five Nights at Freddy‘s movie. On top of featuring his likeness, the skin will feature new lines recorded by Lillard himself.
And finally, it wouldn’t be a big DBD crossover without a new map: Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. “We took a lot of inspiration from the original Five Nights setting, a little bit of the movie, a little bit from here and there… But it’s really packed full of easter eggs and surprises and some fun scares that Survivors will get to experience as they are trying not to be murdered by a very large rabbit,” says Guzzo with a laugh.
“The layout of a fast food restaurant lends itself to the kind of gameplay that DBD has. And I know that sounds kind of strange, but hear me out. Imagine yourself as a kid at like a McDonald’s or a Burger King or whatever, and you are at a birthday party. You are running around chasing your friends, you are going around tables, you are hiding behind the counters. It’s really just that same thing — it’s just one of you doesn’t have a big knife,” quips Guzzo.
“It inherently builds that kind of space where there are sections to move, and there are sections where you can’t go through. Even the kitchen — if you’ve ever seen a fast food restaurant kitchen, but you have the food prep in the in the middle, and it becomes a loop, inherently. And so it’s really interesting — because I hadn’t even realized that until the level design team was putting it together — these spaces are DBD levels in some kind of strange fashion. And it’s really interesting to be able to explore that — leaning into it and making it more [DBD]. I hope your local McDonald’s doesn’t have pallets that you can drop on your friends!”
Alongside Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, Behaviour is also introducing a new quality-of-life feature for DBDÂ as a whole: map-specific queues. This means that you can look for matches exclusively for a given map, which will be useful when new ones drop and you want to try them out. The new queue system will be initially only be available for Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, but Behaviour says it will eventually expand to all maps.
Behaviour says the FNAF crossover is coming “summer 2025.”
New outfit collabs
Five Nights at Freddys isn’t the only crossover in DBD‘s latest chapter.
First, The Witcher is getting six outfits. Two Legendary ones will be based on hero Geralt of Rivia and the Lechen creature, with the former being voiced by none other than Doug Cockle from The Witcher games. On top of that, there will be outfits for supporting Witcher characters Ciri, Yennefer, Triss and Eredin, as well as a banner of the fan-favourite image of Geralt in his hot tub. This update will come on June 3.
Next up is new outfits for Tomb Raider‘s Lara Croft, which includes some of her classic missing looks, like the tactical gear. A Legendary outfit based on the titular character in The Casting of Frank Stone, the DBD spin-off developed in partnership with Supermassive Games, will also be added. And finally, there will be outfits based on the Boulet Brothers drag artists, as inspired by the DBD collaboration with their Dragula series, which will also be voiced by the siblings. No release date was given for the Lara Croft Collection, but the Boulet Brothers collab rolls out on July 8.
Mathieu CĂŽtĂ©, game director and head of partnerships on Dead by Daylight, elaborated on the decision to feature a variety of characters who aren’t from convention horror media.
“These characters are not purely horror — at least, these properties are not purely horror. But Geralt has lived horrific things, very much. Same with Lara Croft — she wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. There’s no doubt about that. She’s lived through some shit. So for us, it’s not a big stretch to have them be present in the nightmare world that we have created,” he says.
“But some of these do stretch the definition. I don’t think we would have done that five years ago, but today, the world that we’ve created is big enough and stable enough and strong enough and vast enough that we can have these sort of pockets of things that are not exactly horror, and it doesn’t dilute what we do. It doesn’t break anything.”
Choose your own Chapter
For the first time ever, Behaviour will allow fans to help create a new chapter. Set to release sometime in 2026, this new chapter will feature both a Killer and Survivor whose looks, lore and gameplay are all decided upon by the player through a “choose-your-own-adventure” style in-game narrative.
“Together, we will forge a new chapter for Dead by Daylight, which is which is going to be super fun, hopefully, for everybody,” says CĂŽtĂ©. “But also, it’s a way for us to give people a peek at our process. This is how we create chapters internally. These are the questions that we ask ourselves. These are the things that we sit around the table and discuss. And now, we’re inviting the community to sit with us at that table and decide what we’ll make next.”
To make this feel even more like a true collaboration, Behaviour says it won’t force players to stick to a certain choice, either. That’s all thanks to the “Change Your Fate” system, which will show players what a different option would have looked like so they can decide to switch to that instead. “We want to make sure that it doesn’t end up like the fear of missing out is real, and we want to make sure that people get what they want in the end,” says CĂŽtĂ©.
Massively popular, wholly Canadian
In the gaming space, any anniversary for an active title is pretty notable, especially in an age of multiplayer game cancellations. But DBD‘s ninth one is particularly noteworthy because it means Behaviour is fast approaching the big 10-year milestone in 2026. The fact that this was achieved by Canada’s largest independent developer is only more noteworthy.
Behaviour’s Montreal office.
“It feels pretty good to be Canadian right now, I can say that,” says CĂŽtĂ©.
“Montreal is a city that has been, more and more in the last 20 years, a turning point for video games. Even globally, there’s so many great big companies that are here, that come here, and the more they come here, the more schools are opening because they want to teach people and then form the next generation of game developers. And that yields to more companies opening and small, little indie studios because people want to make their own games. And all of this sort of snowballs into a vibrant community of game developers in Montreal, which is absolutely awesome.”
That said, he notes “most” of those big gaming companies in Montreal are not Canadian, citing the likes of Ubisoft (French), Warner Bros., Electronic Arts and Amazon (American) and NetEase (Chinese).
“There’s more and more of those gigantic studios from around the world, which is amazing because it yields a lot of really cool talent, and it makes people grow and it gives people jobs here. But it’s really, really cool to be part of one of the rare Canadian Quebec companies that is still, to this day, very much a Canadian company, and we’ve established ourselves as a force in the industry in a way that no other has been able to do.”
It’s a particular point of pride for CĂŽtĂ©, who’s been with Behaviour since the beginning of DBD. Looking back on nearly a decade of the game, he says he’s happy about the impact the game has had.
“The ‘me’ that’s 75-years-old and that’s thinking back on this time is probably going to be the most proud of the fact that we left a very significant mark on video game culture. Our game was able to create something — create a genre of gaming that didn’t really, that wasn’t part of the vernacular, at least until Dead by Daylight came on the scene. And we’ve managed to do something that is significant and that had an impact on many people’s life, a positive impact, on many, many people’s lives.”
But he adds that the collaborations aren’t bad, either.
“The ’15-year-old me’ that would be looking in the future and seeing this would go, ‘Oh, my God, you saw Nic Cage record VOs [voiceovers] for the game you’re working on? That’s insane! And yeah, Nic Cage recording voice lines for our game was batshit crazy!”
Dead by Daylight is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, PC, Android and iOS.
Image credit: Behaviour Interactive
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
