If you were to ask a Dead By Daylight player to list their top three changes that they want to see in the asymmetrical horror game, I’d wager good money that the Challenge system would be up there. In its current form, it’s super sluggish, outdated, and grindy. Well, change is finally afoot. During the latest developer stream, it was revealed that Challenges as you know them are getting binned, and in their place will be a more seamless and less annoying DBD Quests system.
While most eyes are fixed on the new killer arriving in today’s Dead By Daylight update – The Ghoul, Ken Kaneki – long-serving players will probably be just as excited to learn that an overhaul to the Challenge system is coming. This is part of an even wider change which sees The Archives ditched and all of the systems within it getting split out into new sections on the main menu. The brand new DBD Challenges system, which will be referred to as Quests going forward, will live in the Rift Pass section, according to mockups of the horror game’s future UI.
Players have grown tired of the Challenge system, largely because it requires manual opt-ins to pick the exact Challenge you want to take on, and it only lets you pursue one at a time. Behaviour Interactive is flipping that on its head with Quests. While the tasks you’re asked to perform will remain largely the same, you’ll automatically make progress towards all of the active Quests at once, without needing to manually pick them individually.
“You won’t need to select any quests anymore,” says DBD’s product manager, Brandon Silveira. “They’ll all be available at the same time right away and you’ll be able to complete as many as you want, as many as your heart desires, within a trial. So it’s a lot less hands-on management that the players need to do. It’s all happening automatically.”
This new system will split things out into a few different types of Quest. For example, Daily Rituals will now be renamed to Daily Quests, and will be active and progressable the moment they rotate in. They will also be somewhat easier objectives versus what you see now with Rituals. “You could knock out a daily or two within one trial without having to think about them,” Silveira says.
There will then be weekly Rift Pass Quests that contain more creative, character-specific objectives that tie into the current theme. With each week that passes, a new stack of Quests arrive, but they’ll remain available for you to complete throughout the duration of that Rift.
On top of all this, you’ll have Milestone Quests to work through as well. These challenges have different stages and are themed around specific mechanics and in-game actions. For example, there’s going to be a hook-themed quest where the first stage tasks you with hooking five survivors, then the second will require ten hooked survivors, and so on. These aren’t long-term, ‘career’ objectives though – they will reset at the end of each Rift.
Finally, event-themed objectives are also being pulled into this new system and will be known as Event Quests.
The new Quests system will arrive in Dead By Daylight around the launch of its next Tome, which is expected to arrive before the end of June 2025.
This is a pretty big and welcome shakeup to a part of DBD that’s been weighing heavy on players for a while. This will make things so much less grindy and give players more time to actually evade killers and hunt down survivors rather than traverse menus before each trial just to activate a quest.
For more, make sure you head over to our DBD codes guide to see if you can claim any freebies. Otherwise, check out some more brilliant multiplayer games.
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