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It can't be said that Dead by Daylight didn't come to PAX East 2025. Behaviour Interactive, the studio behind the asymmetrical horror game, took the Friday, May 9 panel as an opportunity to announce some massive updates coming to the game, including a collaboration with Five Nights at Freddy's. But the update that they chose to close the discussion with wasnt one of their famous collaborations with a different IP at all. It was an all new way for the Dead by Daylight community to enjoy the game: the Dead by Daylight Choose Your Own Chapter.

"It's a new, original chapter coming," said Dave Richards, Dead by Daylight's creative director, "With a new killer, new survivors... and that's kind of all we know. We don't know anything about this chapter because you have not created it yet."

Asked what he means by this (don't you usually have these ideas figured out before announcing them, Dave?), Richards had this to say:

"Obviously, we have an amazing community. They have a lot of creativity; we've seen it in homemade killers and some pictures online, everything. So we wanted to be able to create a chapter from scratch with all of you building every step from pre-production to the end of the process."

"But," he continues, "We don't want to just go, 'Let's get comments online and do something people suggest. We want to give you the ability to make choices so that we can build something extraordinary, something everyone will love. So we're using a Choose Your Own Adventure."

In case you didn't grow up with them, Choose Your Own Adventure books are a kind of interactive fiction popularized in the 80s and 90s. Readers were presented with choices at the end of each chapter, followed by a page they could turn to to continue the story with that action having been made. "We want to do something similar for building [stories]," Richards said, "That will bring you into the creation of the creature, killer, survivor, or whatever."

So how would that work? Richards teased it as follows, but really quickly - some important context: Some context for folks that don't have it: Dead by Daylight allows online players to choose a role of either 'killer' or 'survivor.' We'll let you figure out the purpose of those roles. Got it? Great, here's Dave:

"Let's take the killer, for example. We would start with what this character is, so we might ask players - 'Would you prefer to have a killer that is grounded into reality? Or would you prefer a supernatural character? An other-worldly character? Based on what people answer, we move on to define the character more precisely. If the character is supernatural, then maybe the next choice would be, 'Is the character an undead character? Is the character something with supernatural powers?' You define the narrative by the powers as well."

Richards claimed that the community's votes would be gathered and then applied to the gradual creation of the chapter regularly, like it sprawling fanbase all was selecting from titanic, omnipresent Choose Your Own adventure novel. And that's not even where the metaphor ends - just like in one of those famous works of interactive fiction, players will have the ability to "cheat."

"You can always peek at what's ahead [in a CYOA book]," said Richards, "To turn the page and get the thing you want. So, in our process, we're going to incorporate that. We will not only provide you with the choice people made, but we'll also provide you with the runner-up. You'll get to see all these different possibilities and maybe you'll make a different choice later."

As of this writing, no exact release date for the first Choose Your Own Chapter of Dead by Daylight has been announced, but Behaviour did confirm that it will be ready to go some time in 2026, when the game celebrates its 10th anniversary.

You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.