Dead by Daylight Director Discusses the Creation of The Twins and Scrapped Ideas

Behaviour Interactive again reshaped what a Dead by Daylight Killer could look like with the release of The Twins in the "A Binding of Kin" Chapter. The Twins are a two-in-one Killer comprised of siblings Victor and Charlotte Deshayes, conjoined twins persecuted for their existence who can split off from one another to hunt Survivors in Dead by Daylight. It's a concept the game's creators have wanted to explore for a long time, game director Mathieu Côté said, and despite how morbid their backstory is, there were still some ideas that got cut because they were viewed as going "too far."

The Twins work by allowing players to primarily control Charlotte while using their special ability to shift control to Victor, a character much smaller than other Killers but also more vulnerable. Victor can pounce on Survivors or act as a sort of beacon to reveal nearby prey before players return to controlling Charlotte.

Making a smaller Killer character fit into Dead by Daylight was something Côté said the Dead by Daylight team discussed often. Those talks occasionally encompassed the topic of licensed characters as well, a prominent source of content for Dead by Daylight players on top of the original Chapters like A Binding of Kin.

"But when we were talking about things like, for instance, Leprechaun or Chucky or something like that, having a diminutive killer is something that we've asked ourselves, 'How should we do this? Would it be fun to be, literally, a meter tall and run in the grass and chase people?'" Côté said. "This came about because we had the bandwidth to try a few crazy things and we hit upon a recipe that was cool."

The result of those talks about smaller Killers and two-in-one concepts was ultimately The Twins. Côté said the team hopes the new Killer will help break some stagnant parts of the game and force players into new strategies as past Killers have.

"It's almost like you have a radar on the map while you're doing something else," Côté said. "And being able to do that jump, you have so many new tools at your disposal. Hopefully, it shakes up things a little."

As for The Twins' conjoined nature, their appearance, and their tragic story, they're gruesome Killers even by Dead by Daylight's standards. Victor sits in a cavity in Charlotte's chest and drops to the ground before growling and scraping his way towards Survivors. Côté said the team explored a couple different versions of this sort of symbiotic relationship with some of those potential outcomes viewed as "bad to put in there." He said some of them went "too far," and expanded on one of the ideas – a relationship between a pregnant woman and an unborn fetus – that didn't make the cut.

"So things, for instance, like a pregnant woman and her unborn fetus is a version of this that didn't make it," Côté said. "Because it's on a whole other level and it raises up a bunch of other questions that we didn't want to get into. It's creepy in a sense that this ... It didn't feel like the best way of doing this. So, there are many versions of that symbiotic relationship that could have been done."

Aliens were another possibility, Côté mentioned briefly, but those ideas were just two of the many Côté said the team discussed. The sibling relationship was decided on because they felt it struck the correct balance the team was looking for.

"There are many, many ways that this can happen, but this was what we thought had the right balance of it's almost realistic, but it's completely insane and crazy and creepy," Côté said.

The Twins and the new Survivor, Élodie Rakoto, are now available in Dead by Daylight as part of A Binding of Kin.