As an avid Dead by Daylight player for several years, my experience has been mostly confined to playing the game, and watching some popular YouTubers play the game much better than I could ever dream. That was until December, when YouTube kindly recommended a VOD of the grand finals match between Elysium and Calamity, on the DBD League YouTube channel.
Intrigued that people did in fact play Dead by Daylight competitively and that there was even a grand finals in the first place, I decided to take the leap and see what DBD esports had to offer.
The Matches
Immediately, there was a sense of charm to the VOD that I didn’t expect. While you could tell that the League was put on by volunteers, it almost felt more entertaining than the super high-budget and overproduced esports that I’m used to watching.
Just from the custom graphics and the knowledge of the game that the casters had, you could tell everyone involved has poured thousands of hours of passion into the scene just out of love for the game and the community.
After brief introductions for the two finalist teams, the match kicked off with Calamity’s killer player on Albert Wesker (the Mastermind) versus Elysium’s survivor team.
The first thing I noticed was the three scoring systems in the top left corner. Teams were graded on three criteria: generators completed, total hook stages, and first hook stages. Matches were played in sets, with each playing one round on survivor, and one round on the same killer.
This made the matches so much more interesting than expected. Even with a poor performance from Calamity in the first round, their survivor players could still come back and win the round by ensuring they completed all of the generators and Elysium got less than 5 hooks total.
Although they didn’t – and Elysium definitely was the better team throughout the entire match – the fact that even a terrible performance on survivor with no escapes wasn’t a lost cause as long as your killer sacrificed the enemy team with fewer generators completed – made each match very entertaining.
I especially appreciated that the first hook stage was included as one of the scoring metrics. I’d assumed that tunneling and camping a single player until it was a 3vs1 would be the most used tactic (as I often find in my survivor games).
This tactic certainly wasn’t absent, but the fact that hooking a fresh survivor (i.e. one who hadn’t been hooked yet) is twice as valuable numerically, definitely made the killer second guess this strategy, and you often saw killers leaving the hook to pursue new survivors.
As the grand finals progressed, the games got wackier with both sides choosing to play gimmicky – but far more entertaining – builds.
One set featured the killers playing Myers with the scratched mirror add-on, which gives you wallhacks but limits the killer to tier 1 (reduced lunge, can’t expose survivors, moves slower), versus survivors with no perks.
After this, there was a Spirit set where the survivors had to cleanse two Haunted Ground hexes (which causes every survivor to become exposed for 60 seconds) before they could complete a generator.
At first, I thought choosing such far-out and “silly” builds was a little unfair, especially for a grand final, but since both teams have to abide by the special ruleset, it really showcased which team was the most adaptable in different scenarios.
And, after watching the whole match, these two sets were by far the most enjoyable and memorable, and I definitely wouldn’t be as excited for the 2025 season if I had watched those rounds.
DBD League: 2025 and Beyond
Of course, since it was the grand finals, this match was the last of the year, leaving me hungry for more DBD esports over Christmas. Fortunately, the 2025 Winter Circuit has already begun – well at least the qualifiers have – featuring the returning champions Elysium and the runners-up Calamity.
8 teams have qualified already for February’s main stage, including the two finalists, but you can catch the qualification matches between 16 teams that are going on right now at Twitch and YouTube.
If you’re looking to get into some DBD League this year – as I am – I’d recommend joining the DBD League Discord, or following them on their socials, to keep up-to-date with the schedule and take a look through the competitive ruleset. It’s a little different than what you’d see in a typical DBD match, with lots of perks banned for various reasons, and a whole pick-and-ban system that decides which killers and maps are played.
