Dead by Daylight is a game that you need to play with others, that’s just how it has been designed. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to spend all of your time playing with random strangers.
In fact, we’re going to tell you exactly how to play with friends in Dead by Daylight. This should make it easy for you to set up a party and enjoy every minute you spend in the game just a little bit more.
Dead by Daylight: How to play with friends
Local Co-op
Unfortunately there is no local or couch co-op in Dead by Daylight. The developers may eventually implement this in the game, but for now it simply isn’t something that’s there. It would also defeat the point of the game in some cases.
For example, if you had a killer and survivor playing on the same screen, they could see each other very easily. Unless you go back to the old-fashioned ways of separating the screen, sitting close to it and sellotaping cardboard in the middle, you’re not going to have a fair game.
Online Multiplayer
The true answer to ‘how to play with friends in Dead by Daylight’ is actually quite simple. There’s even an in-game prompt for it.
If you want to play with friends and have everyone playing as a survivor, then simply select the ‘Survive With Friends’ option when looking for a game.
Once you’ve selected this option, you’ll be able to open up a lobby. You can invite your friends to this lobby, as long as they’re in your friends list on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, or whatever platform you’re currently playing on.
Once you’ve invited all of your friends, and everyone has selected the ‘Ready’ prompt, then the game will match you with as many other players as are required for a full match, including a killer.
Consistency
If you and your friends want to play more than one game together, then you’ll need to put some work in.
Once a match has been completed, with the killer getting everyone, all the survivors escaping, or a mixture of both, then everyone will be kicked out to the main menu.
At this point you’ll need to set up another game and invite all of your friends to it once more. Right now there is no way to keep a group of friends together through multiple matches.
This is most likely because the game wants to split everyone up, ensuring that you’re not paired with the same people too often.
This helps to avoid you being punished by extremely skilled players too often as well.
Kill Your Friends
If you thought that it would be just as easy to hook up with friends as a killer in Dead by Daylight, then you’re completely right.
When looking for a game, you can select the ‘Kill Your Friends’ option, and then invite as many friends as will fit into the lobby for you to hunt and kill.
Bear in mind that in this feature of the game, you can’t fill empty spaces with matchmaking.
You need to fill all the spots for survivors, or just be happy with those you have in the lobby.
This mechanic is in place because generally this form of playing the game is best with those who know each other, and wouldn’t be much fun with random players.
What is quite fun about the Kill Your Friends games is that you can define the specific settings for each match.
This enables you to completely customise loadouts for both survivors and killers, making for some extremely interesting scenarios.
Dead by Daylight Mobile
Dead by Daylight Mobile is a very different version of the game. It’s also quite new, and is lacking a lot of features.
Right now, there’s just one way to meet up with friends in the game. You can add your friends based on their username, but it’s an incredibly finicky system that doesn’t work that well.
This may never be a full feature in the game, because it would require each mobile device to have a built-in friends list.
Maybe this will come with time, as Android and iOS updates are released, but for now it’s just not possible to play with friends in Dead by Daylight Mobile.
The Best Place to Play
The best platform to play Dead by Daylight with friends on is PC. Both the Steam and Windows versions of the game are compatible, and the game runs best on PC as well.
It’s much easier to set up custom games on this version of Dead by Daylight, and providing everyone has decent internet speeds, you should see a vast improvement over every other platform when playing together.
That’s everything you need to know about how to play with friends in Dead by Daylight. If we’ve missed anything that you think is vitally important, please do let us know in the comments.