Dark mist, bloody meat hooks, and one, lonely killer — these are the sinister ingredients for Dead by Daylight, Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetrical survival horror game.
Since releasing in 2016, the popular multiplayer has repeatedly elaborated on this basic formula by mixing in great horror IP, like by recently adding ’80s murder doll Chucky to its killer roster and Alien’s unshakeable Ellen Ripley to its bank of survivors. It pushed open the doors to its dreadful universe by creating a half-joking dating sim and comic book series, but it’s never expanded its mythology as ambitiously as it plans to with Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games. After teasing a collaboration earlier this year, Behaviour announced plans at The Game Awards on December 7 to release spin-off game The Casting of Frank Stone in 2024.
To learn more about the interactive drama, IGN spoke to Dead by Daylight senior creative director Dave Richard, Behaviour’s head of partnerships Mathieu Cote, and Supermassive director Steve Goss in an exclusive interview. Though the studio leads warn that, like a powdery mummy, many of the game’s details are under wraps, they’re confident this is the game superfans have been waiting for.
“Some people really wanted […] to be able to live [Dead by Daylight’s] story more,” Cote said. “We’ve done that with comic books, we’ve done that in other ways. But a single player narrative game where you could literally lose yourself in a story that takes part in the same world as Dead by Daylight was always something we were hoping to do at some point.”
Naive players should also find plenty of reasons to get goosebumps, Goss says, because his studio decided “we’re just really going to mess with you” in gameplay.
“We’re going to take you where you don’t expect to go,” he continues.
Read on for our full interview with Behaviour and Supermassive, and to find ominous screenshots revealing never-before-seen bits of The Casting of Frank Stone.
Where did the idea for The Casting of Frank Stone come from?
Mathieu Cote, Head of Partnerships: The Dead by Daylight storyline and the lore progressed quite a lot from when we launched the game, now almost eight years ago, and the story in there was mostly told through the flavor text on add-ons, and offerings, and things like that.
As things progressed, we were able to tell quite a lot more of the backstory, but it’s always been a question we were asking ourselves: “How do we tell those really deep stories, the very personal stories? How else can we tell stories of the Dead by Daylight universe?”
Some people really wanted to be able to live those stories more. And so we decided to try a different medium. We’ve done that with comic books, we’ve done that in other ways, but a single-player narrative game where you could literally lose yourself in a story that takes part in the same world as Dead by Daylight was always sort of something we were hoping to do at some point.
And, so, when it came to putting that into reality. We looked at our options. And the first [team] we reached out to was Supermassive. If you’re going to do a narrative, single-player experience, there is sort of no other choice.
How many years in the making is this game?
Steve Goss, Supermassive director: I think we’re two years in now.
For Supermassive, what was most intriguing about this project?
SG: Well, I think we always look for really good, interesting opportunities to tell the kinds of stories we’d like to tell. This just…it fit together. It was, like, okay, you’ve got a deep, rich lore [in Dead by Daylight]. A really interesting world, a really interesting take on horror. And that was really apparent.
Then, we were asked what kind of story we’d like to write, so we had a whole bunch of freedom there. [We had the opportunity to add] other things we’d like to explore that perhaps don’t fit into some of the things we’ve done previously. So it was just a really nice opportunity.
How familiar with Dead by Daylight should players be to receive what you’d call the “full experience” of the game?
SG: I don’t think you need to know anything about Dead by Daylight to really enjoy the game. But I think if you like Dead by Daylight […], you will find the deeper resonances we’ve embedded into the story. So it should work for both types of players.
It’s a good story with terrible, terrible, terrible outcomes.
Dave Richard, Behaviour senior creative director: I’d like to add something really quick here, which I think is important, too, for our community. We have a lot of fans of the Dead by Daylight universe that are not Dead by Daylight players because they maybe don’t feel like going into an intense multiplayer horror setting is their thing. [This] will be their chance — they will be able to go to their own rhythm with a single-player experience.
Why did you choose to feature a new cast of survivors and, maybe, a killer instead of using existing Dead by Daylight characters?
SG: From my point of view, it’s the freedom to tell a story. It’s the freedom to not have to explain how that ties in necessarily with long-standing and existing character narratives, nor does it undercut them or devalue them by giving them elements which aren’t what the community, fans, and players have already built up.
There’s also an element of being able to explore things that, because we’re not tied to an existing character, we can take some of the resonances of the deep lore of Dead by Daylight, and we can play with that in a more interesting way than [just] an interesting character design or structure. What is the story of the characters coming in contact with the truth of Dead by Daylight, you know? That’s a story which perhaps hasn’t been told as directly as we’re trying to tell it with The Casting of Frank Stone.
Now we’re in the year of Alan Wake, and I’m curious, what did you want to communicate by putting your main character’s name in the title, Frank Stone?
SG: I don’t know if I’m going to answer that directly right now. I mean, the story hinges and pivots on Frank. Frank is the center of everything that the story will deal with, but I don’t want to tell you quite how that will play out because there are a lot of layers in that story.
Let’s just put it this way: He is sadistic. He is a killer, he is… maybe irredeemable. Maybe we don’t truly understand him. But it is the story of Frank Stone and the lives and the town that his crime touches.
Would you call Frank Stone an origin story?
SG: Yes, at a certain point, this is very much an origin story. It’s very much about characters coming in contact with the truth and the underlying horror of [godlike DbD trial conductor] The Entity.
[But] I don’t think it’s an origin story for Dead by Daylight, I think it’s a gateway into that universe. After all, it’s just called “The Casting of Frank Stone.” It does tell you quite a bit about Frank.
Can Dead by Daylight fans expect a cameo from The Entity?
MC: It’s tough to be in the world of Dead by Daylight without The Entity having its say. I think I should stop there.
I’ll take what I can get. How different will gameplay be to the typical DbD experience?
MC: A better question would be, “How different is it gonna be to the other Supermassive games?”
SG: If you’ve played our games, you’re familiar with the style of gameplay that we do. And we’ve taken that and all of the values around the experience of playing Dead by Daylight and tried to bring those two together.
Frank Stone is not an online multiplayer, asymmetrical game, that’s not what it is. But I think when you play it, you’ll see a lot of the resonances of the way that Dead by Daylight allows the player to have agency within the world. And we’ve adjusted the way we want our characters to be controlled and the way we present choices to kind of dovetail into that.
It should feel familiar to a Dead by Daylight player on one level, it should feel familiar to a Supermassive game player on another level, but it should also be satisfying for both of those perspectives.
For newcomers, is there any benefit to starting with Frank Stone as either their first DbD experience or first Supermassive game?
SG: From the Supermassive point-of-view, this game completely stands alone. It doesn’t require you to have any experience of the Supermassive style — it has some of the elements of accessibility that our games are known for, but it stands on its own. And it tells a story which you probably wouldn’t structurally and tonally wouldn’t necessarily sit alongside Until Dawn or The Quarry.
Do you think Frank Stone takes the horror genre in an unexpected direction? Or is it following tradition, and, if so, what tradition?
SG: I think it will be unexpected. I think. One of the things we try to do often when we tell our stories is to subvert horror values. I think this is probably a slightly more of-its-age narrative than some of our other games, which tend to lean into key standards and tropes of horror. I’d like to say we mess with that more here.
What are you most excited about people experiencing?
SG: I’m most excited about the things I can’t tell you. There’s a lot under the hood, a lot hidden away. They’re gonna have the group of friends in Cedar Hills, in Oregon, that kind of is a very relatable, classic set-up for a horror story, and everyone’s going to understand that. And then we’re just going to really mess with you. We’re going to take you where you don’t expect to go.
MC: I love seeing the theorists, like, the people who speculate on what this could mean and, “Oh, that’s probably a sign that this is happening in Dead by Daylight. Oh, it finally explains why this, and that.” A lot of them are wrong, but some of them are right once in a while, and they’re always super entertaining. And I always see it as a beautiful symptom of the passion. People are so engrossed in our story, it’s like the classic wall of bits and bobs with red string all around, trying to connect the dots. […] I love this, I can’t wait.
DR: The whole project as a whole is a fantastic new endeavor for the Dead by Daylight universe. So, usually, when we introduce a character in Dead by Daylight, we have a title, we have a trailer that lasts for 30 seconds, a minute. And then, potentially later, we’ll add an archive entry that explores a little bit more of the story through text. But, this time, we introduce new characters in a fully playable setting, and I can’t wait to see the reaction from our fans.
Ashley Bardhan is a freelance writer at IGN.