“It’s so awesome and surreal to finally see this actually happening in the game,” Behaviour’s Head of Partnerships Mathieu Cote says during a press preview. “We’ve made no secret of the fact that we’ve wanted Jason in the game since day one; he’s always had a standing invitation. He’s now finally ready to join.” The Friday the 13th icon joins The Fog in celebration of Dead by Daylight‘s tenth anniversary, which perfectly coincides with Jason Universe’s 45th anniversary. It’s something that Senior Creative Director Dave Richard stresses was just a coincidence, but, either way, it’s an unholy matrimony made in hell.
You probably caught the sneaky little teaser trailer from May 23, but I got a closer look at Friday the 13th’s iconic villain ahead of his official reveal. Cote says that the partnership’s flexibility allows for “new stories” with Jason, with Behaviour being given some serious creative license over the horror game’s version of his persona.
Jason’s Designer, Janick Neveu, acknowledges that, while The Trapper, perhaps the most well-known of the original Dead by Daylight killers, is a “homage” to Jason, the real Jason will feel “very special and unique.” He notes that, throughout the course of the character’s history, he’s grown somewhat “supernatural,” so the team has tried to explore those elements in a little more depth. Combining those ideas with ensuring he has a solid map presence, Neveu and the team landed on a two-part power: Omnipresent Evil, and Improvised Carnage.
The first leans into the more supernatural elements and, as the headline says, allows him to effectively go invisible. He can move around the map at speed, but in order to reappear he has to target key environmental features, like palettes, vault points, and windows. Neveu calls it a “jump scare,” and that feeling of panic and unknowing is exactly what Jason embodies. If there are Survivors in the area when he reappears, he can track them with his own unique Killer effect and cause them to scream; I mean, I don’t exactly blame them.
On paper, that sounds overpowered as hell. But, Neveu highlights that, while the Survivors can’t see Jason when he’s in this mode, he can’t see them, either, and is reliant upon ethereal footsteps or red fog markers that indicate if a player is on an objective. It’s not as horrible as it first sounds, then, but is still absolutely terrifying.
Jason’s second power is Improvised Carnage, which somewhat does what it says on the tin. We’ve seen Jason wield all manner of random objects in the films, with Richard stating that the team really wanted to “recreate” those classic moments. As he roams the map, Jason will uncover different containers, which each contain various dismantled bits of key DBD items. This can be anything from shattered palettes or bits of generators, to the Entity’s hooks themselves. These can then be lobbed at unsuspecting Survivors, and if the Survivor is injured and close to a wall, they’ll be pinned up there until Jason chooses to deliver them to their respective hook. There are also two mini-moris to look out for, too.
Note that you can only equip one weapon at a time, and the containers will remain empty until you reuse Omnipresent Evil. This should hopefully stop players from just constantly spamming throwables and causing chaos.
Dead By Daylight’s Jason chapter will be available on the PTB from Tuesday, May 26, but launches on live servers on Tuesday June 16. Note that this is a Killer-only chapter.
There will also be three outfits dropping alongside the new chapter. Backwoods Terror swaps out Jason’s signature jacket for some flannel and his machete for an axe, Death Forsaken throws in some unnatural decay, with exposed bones and a shovel for a weapon, and Depths of Despair, as the name suggests, reimagines Jason as a terror from the deep, covered in barnacles, coral, and wielding a copper-corroded sword. That last one is my absolute favorite.
So there you have it: Jason is finally coming to DBD. The ten-year anniversary is shaping up to be absolutely amazing, and I’m excited to see what other mysteries DBD has in store for us.