Dead by Daylight started in 2016 with a handful of original killers, one survivor pool, and predictions of 300,000 copies sold. Ten years and 70 million players later, Behaviour Interactive held a celebration in Montreal yesterday, and the scope of what they announced is about as far from a maintenance patch as you can get.
Behaviour’s 10th anniversary event on June 14 in Montreal was capped with a Year 10 Anniversary Broadcast that laid out the roadmap from now through 2027. The most immediately exciting reveal: Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th joins as a playable Killer today, June 16. It’s the fan-requested addition that’s been circling the DbD community for years, and landing it for the 10th anniversary is a statement of intent. Following Jason in the Chapter calendar: Art the Clown from the Terrifier franchise in November 2026, a community-designed Chapter called Chorus of Sin in August 2027, and a Chapter based on The Casting of Frank Stone, Behaviour’s own narrative spinoff game, also in 2027. Collaborative Collections announced include Iron Maiden, The Walking Dead (Glenn and Negan as Legendary outfits), Silent Hill, Scooby-Doo, and Diablo IV. The first Indigenous Survivor, Shane Wiigwaas, arrives via a new Survivor-focused Chapter called The Life Road on June 25.
The longer-term announcement that will matter more to the game’s future is the 2027 visual overhaul. Behaviour confirmed the entire game is receiving a ground-up visual rework: new character models with expanded animation capabilities and realistic facial animations, new voice lines for all original characters, completely overhauled map geometry and texturing, improved dynamic lighting and shading, and a weather system that will bring light rain, heavy rain, and storms to existing maps. The fog and mist system, one of DbD’s most iconic visual element, is also being rebuilt, along with the visual representation of the Entity’s presence on the map. Alongside the graphics push, Behaviour teased new game modes (a 1v1 format and a Zombie mode were mentioned), official sandboxed modding tools arriving in 2027, and a new player-requested map: The Mall.
CEO Rémi Racine noted that 2025 was Dead by Daylight’s most successful year on record: six million new players and record-setting performance for a game a decade old. Behaviour isn’t doing a nostalgia victory lap here: they’re announcing a roadmap that treats the next two years as a genuine rebuild of the game’s technical foundation. The visual overhaul in particular sounds closer to a second-generation release than a patch, and the modding tools could meaningfully extend community investment. For the PC gaming audience specifically, the question will be whether the UE-agnostic engine under the hood can deliver those improved visuals without the performance regressions that sometimes accompany major renderer updates.