Deathgarden

» see deathgardengame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Deathgarden was built for people who already played Dead by Daylight and wanted a second one. I have never played the first, and by 2018 the multiplayer games I still opened were ones I had been logging into for years rather than ones carrying an early access tag.

Behaviour Interactive in Montreal made both. Dead by Daylight sets one killer against four survivors in a horror setting, and Deathgarden took that uneven shape and rebuilt it as a shooter. One Hunter, invincible, carrying the only gun in the match. Five Scavengers, called Runners at first, who had to capture control points to earn a way out and could not kill the Hunter at all.

The setting was post-apocalyptic and the Bloodharvest was the reason for it. The hunt was how a Scavenger earned a place in one of the walled Enclaves that were left standing. Polygon described the whole thing as The Hunger Games crossed with Judge Dredd, which is close enough that you can stop reading the lore there.

It went into Steam Early Access on 14 August 2018 and the players left within days.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

The problem was the one every game of this shape has, and it arrived faster here because guns are decisive in a way that hooks and bear traps are not. A skilled Hunter beat five Scavengers most of the time. The Scavengers were the more interesting side to play, so the queue that mattered was the one nobody wanted to sit in.

Executions made it worse. A downed Scavenger could be finished on the spot, and enough Hunters did it immediately that Behaviour had to add a mercy rule giving each Runner one knockdown and a respawn before the kill counted. Reviewers who liked the concept still called the maps generic, which for a game that reassembled its maps randomly every round is the harder criticism of the two.

~ what really happened ~

Behaviour did not cancel it. It spent close to a year rebuilding the game and relaunched on 30 May 2019 as Deathgarden: Bloodharvest, still in early access, at fourteen ninety-nine with a half-price opening week and a Terminator skin for the Hunter. That is a serious amount of work to put into a product that had already failed once in public.

It bought six months. On 25 November 2019 Behaviour announced that development had stopped and the game was going free, which is the move a studio makes when it has decided to stop paying for something but has not decided to switch it off. In July 2020 the official account posted the sunsetting notice. The servers closed on 12 August 2020, two days short of two years after the first release.

~ what replaced it ~

Dead by Daylight is still running, and has now outlived Deathgarden by more than twice Deathgarden's whole lifespan. The studio that could not get a second one off the ground kept the first one going instead, which is the sensible answer and also the one nobody wants to hear at the start of a project.

The wider category is a graveyard. Evolve tried it with monsters and died of balance. Friday the 13th tried it with a license and died of the license. The shape keeps attracting studios because it looks cheap, one large asset against four or five small ones, and it keeps killing them because a game where one side is more fun than the other cannot fill both queues.

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