Dead By Daylight Fans Aren't Happy With The New Character Portraits

Dead by Daylight's character portraits are getting their first refresh ever following the game's 7th year anniversary, and some players are not happy with the unexpected changes to the familiar killer and survivor icons. The updated portraits feature a new 3D style with each character taking on a post that is iconic to their personality, offering a fairly drastic change to the old, more uniform icons.

A post on the Dead by Daylight subreddit criticizing the new portraits garnered over 4,000 upvotes and counting and almost 1,000 comments.

"At least use the filter and color pallet of the originals," commenter Evil_Steven suggested. "I like (some) of the new poses but the colors are too bright and the 3D models vs the 2D art looks so shiny and cartoony."

Another commenter pointed out other aspects of the old portraits that they preferred and compared them to the new icons, calling the change a "downgrade."

"The [old portraits are] better because they're higher quality, actually properly centered(!), look menacing, dangerous, eerie. They're just all around superior and perfect, it should be obvious!?" Addan_Deith wrote. "New ones are awful. . .just one glance at this comparison should be enough to understand that this change is DOWNGRADE."

Still, while many players expressed their discontent with the new portraits, some fans were more than happy with the update.

 "I LOVE the new ones! Clearer and more personalized I feel," commented Raceface53.

Are Dead By Daylight Player Cards Coming?

While players discussed their opinions of the updated Dead by Daylight character portraits in the thread and the original poster even called the update "unnecessary," others speculated that there might be a reason behind the change: upcoming profile customization, player cards, and character portraits.

"My current theory is they talked about adding customization to profiles in the way of Player Cards earlier this year and with the increased size of the Portraits I'm thinking this may be related to those new customization features in some way," said lesbian-goddess in the Reddit thread. 

The Dead by Daylight Year 8 Roadmap lists 'player cards' under the quality of life section, meaning that they'll be added to the game sometime this year. Dvveet on Twitter suggested that the player cards will be coming this fall, with icons and more coming as October Rift rewards.

"I'm pretty sure these are here to prepare for character cards in a future update. They look like it to me at least," gamer_PLAYER23 added. 

While players seem to have mixed feelings about the character portrait updates, only time will tell if the community will come around to them, or if Behaviour will end up making another swap following fan feedback.