Dead by Daylight's Chaos Shuffle Should Be A Permanent Mode

Dead by Daylight's new Chaos Shuffle mode is switching things up for the better in the popular 4v1.

If you've been playing Dead by Daylight for a while, you likely understand how the gameplay loop can eventually get a bit stale at times. Perks are meant to prevent that by letting you switch up your strategies and your approach each match, but the game's meta doesn't always allow for that flexibility. Some perks are just objectively worse than others on both sides, and, though they might be fun to run, there's just never a reason to pick them up - so you're left running the same set of four perks every time you play. Enter Chaos Shuffle, a mode where your perks are entirely randomized, so there's no pressure to pick the best ones in the game.

In Chaos Shuffle, every perk in the game is in rotation; nothing's off the table, even ones you don't own. This does make things more than a little chaotic, as the mode's name implies - but it also makes things a lot more fun.

While playing this mode, I've encountered perks that I haven't seen used by others once in my four years of playing Dead by Daylight. Survivors are encouraged to make plays with lesser-used but extremely fun perks like Red Herring or Deception, while going without the usual fundamentals like Windows of Opportunity and Exhaustion perks. Killers end up trying to figure out how to use perks like Insidious and Coup de Grâce to their advantage, all while without relentlessly blowing up all the map's generators with the guaranteed help of Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance.

Chaos Shuffle doesn't rid Dead by Daylight of bad matches; you're bound to get stuck with a set of perks you don't like, or ones that synergize so poorly that it's comical (No Mither and Self Care, anyone?). But it does make most matches a lot more fun no matter what loadout you end up with, since, if you're anything like me, you'll find yourself focusing on how to make the best of what you've got rather than missing your perfectly optimized meta build.

Most DBD game modes are suited for week-long event - while My Little Oni and Lights Out were fun, I couldn't see them drawing in a daily player base like the base game. But Chaos Shuffle is different; it isn't just a mode that'll suck you in for a few matches before you find yourself wanting to swap back to the normal gameplay loop. Instead, Chaos Shuffle breathes fresh air into the game, bringing all of the hundreds of killer and survivor perks into rotation and offering countless opportunities for new plays and perk combos. This variety is healthy for the game in the long-term, and would make Chaos Shuffle the perfect first permanent game mode.