Silent Hill is coming to Dead by Daylight and we spoke with the creative director to get a bit more insight into what’s next! From a look inside what it takes to get access to a license as guarded as Silent Hill is to what the team is most excited for players to see, there are a lot of reasons to dive back into the world of Dead by Daylight if you’ve been missing out!
Speaking with Prima Games, creative director Mathiew Côté explained a little bit more about the process of acquiring any license, much less one as big as Silent Hill. This game has seen some major heavy hitters crash into the Dead by Daylight-verse, but Silent Hill is the first horror adventure to make the game-ception jump!
Related: The official Dead by Daylight Silent Hill reveal and what you need to know
“There really isn’t a clear process but if I had to summarize, it would go a bit like this,” began the creative director when giving us a closer look at some of the work behind the scenes. “First, there’s a contact. Most of the time it’s us reaching out but it can happen the other way. We’ve been in business for 25+ years so we tend to have contacts in a lot of surprising places once we start looking. The first conversations will quickly tell if both sides are interested. If that’s the case, then there’s usually a bit of a pause while legal people fiddle with complicated paperwork. Lastly, we get to make the chapter. That’s where the fun collaborative work begins. For Silent Hill, specifically, the main difference was the fact that Konami is a game developer, which means we had a very productive first meeting where we could establish parameters and boundaries extensively and quickly since we both knew exactly what was needed.”
As a huge Silent Hill fan myself, I couldn’t just not ask about anything that might have been left on the cutting room floor, but alas – the creative director was prepared and didn’t spill the beans, though he did mention that there were a few excitable features that they were looking to potentially add that were eventually shut down by Konami: “We had a bunch of ideas for this chapter. Let’s say that the team was fired up and excited. That meant a few ideas got turned down by Konami for not being right for them. That’s fine, we had so much we wanted to do, it was necessary to cut somewhere anyway. But we’re happy that a few of our crazier ideas did make it in.”
For those that are Easter hunters like me, you’re in for a treat. While Côté was very careful not to reveal all of their secrets, he did add that the team went wild with adding less obvious nods to Silent Hill throughout the new expansion; little treasures for hardcore fans of the series to find and uncover in a new and exciting way. We know Cheryl, we know Pyramid Head, but what we don’t’ know is all of the little nuanced secrets the devs hid away within the game, secrets we are more than ready to uncover!
“As we like to say, every time we release a chapter, we want it to be our best chapter ever,” the creative director mentioned when talking about which expansion launch was his personal favorite. While it seemed like choosing a favorite was a bit like choosing a favored child, he couldn’t quite help but to suppress the pride of nailing such an incredible surprise with one of the most beloved horror franchises in gaming to-date. “In this case, I think we actually outdid ourselves. And if you consider that we managed to wrap this up and deliver it while transitioning to remote work, I’d call that an impressive achievement. As for the launch itself, I am writing this on the day before our announcement and I can barely believe that we managed to keep this a surprise. I can’t wait to see people react once we do our reveal!”
This game has over 20 million players across the globe taking part in each new expansion that the Dead by Daylight team brings in, making it an incredibly active playground for those that just love to get their fright on! From movies to TV and now other games, Dead by Daylight never fails to surprise and excite both new players and those that have been with this title since the beginning. As I’ve mentioned before: just don’t play with me, I’m a screamer.
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Dead by Daylight and the Silent Hill expansion arrives on the public test servers on Steam starting today with a full console and PC launch slated for June 16! Excited? Sound off with your thoughts on the latest Dead by Daylight expansion over on Twitter @PrimaGames!
