The Casting of Frank Stone is poised to bring a new audience to the Dead By Daylight world

With The Casting of Frank Stone, developers Behaviour Interactive and Supermassive Games are opening up the world of Behaviour's multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight with a totally new story. The two development studios are also hoping the story will reach a new audience—one that might be interested in the frightening horror universe of Dead By Daylight but hasn’t yet experienced it.

Dead By Daylight pits a team of four players, the survivors, against a fifth player in the role of a vicious killer. It’s a classic slasher movie setup, which is why so many slasher villains like Michael Myers of Halloween or Chucky of Child’s Play wind up becoming playable in the game. Dead By Daylight’s premise shares some DNA with Supermassive’s oeuvre, which includes Until Dawn, The Quarry, and The Dark Pictures Anthology, all of which are single-player games that tell the stories of survivors stalked by something deadly and often supernatural.

The collaboration between the two studios has Supermassive creating a game in its usual style—a cinematic horror story where a player’s choices, successes, and failures determine which characters live and die—but set within and expanding on the universe of Dead By Daylight. 

Behaviour and Supermassive recently released the first in a series of behind-the-scenes videos detailing how The Casting of Frank Stone came together. As Mathieu Côté, Behaviour’s head of partnerships, told the Epic Game Store in an interview, one goal of the collaboration was to make the world of Dead By Daylight accessible to people who might not be looking for the multiplayer experience—or who might not be familiar with the game at all. 
 

“Something super important, at least for us—one of the objectives in this—is to reach the people who are familiar with Dead By Daylight but not necessarily active players,” Côté said. 

Supermassive Director Steve Goss expanded on the notion that The Casting of Frank Stone can serve as an entry point into the series while still being compelling to play on its own.  

“Part of what we’re doing is deeply Dead By Daylight,” Goss said. “It was very, very important that what we did can be accessed by a Dead By Daylight fan. But also we wanted to make sure someone who didn’t understand Dead By Daylight, or perhaps likes the idea of Dead By Daylight but didn’t want to play a multiplayer game, or all the other angles that people can come at the idea from, we were trying to serve a whole bunch of different kinds of entry points to it.

“One of the things about our games is they’re, by and large, pretty accessible,” he continued. “We don’t ask you to be good on [control] sticks, we ask you to suspend your disbelief and roll with a story. That was always going to be important to us.”

When developing The Casting of Frank Stone, the idea of creating a new and unusual story within the Dead By Daylight framework extended beyond just the style of gameplay. In Dead By Daylight, characters are pulled from different timelines and parallel universes by a malevolent supernatural force called the Entity, which is endlessly forcing them to take part in the Trials—a hunt in which the killers attempt to sacrifice the survivors. Côté said it was important to Behaviour that Supermassive tell a story that didn’t take place in the Trials or the Realm of the Entity, but that it expanded on the underlying fiction in different ways. That allowed Behaviour to encourage Supermassive to tell pretty much any story they found exciting, as long as it was connected to Dead By Daylight. 

The Casting of Frank Stone has a lot of Supermassive’s usual elements, including a group of young people who find themselves being picked off by a deadly adversary. But Goss said Dead By Daylight’s cosmic horror elements provided some enticing new avenues for Supermassive to explore too.

“We just thought, oh, cosmic horror, we’ve not walked that path—that could be interesting,” Goss explained. “What story would we tell, and how will we ground it and connect it to themes and tropes [common to Supermassive games]? In the material you’ve seen, you’ve got the classic Supermassive group—you’ve got a group of kids doing something, and there’s going to be terrible consequences. ...You know, that’s Until Dawn, that’s The Quarry, that's a theme we love to pull on. But it was the fact that there was a different doorway here, and that doorway was something we hadn’t ever gone down.”

The Dead By Daylight framework also opened up another aspect of the story for Supermassive. An essential element of Dead By Daylight is that the killer characters are just as big a part of the player experience as the survivors. The eponymous Frank Stone is, in fact, the game’s killer antagonist.

“There was a structure in Dead by Daylight, which is absolutely inherent: survivors and killers,” Goss said. “And that was an absolute jumping off point for us. In terms of the core narrative, we often have strong antagonist characters, but they tend to be supernatural, they tend to be other, they tend to be very much a classic horror trope of a plot-driven antagonist. His role is very, very central to the story, as much as any of the other characters, and we didn’t want to create a classic kind of Supermassive narrative. We wanted to lean into the opportunity that Dead By Daylight gave us to have a different kind of story structure around an antagonist character. And we have a lot of fun with that.

“We wrote a very, very, very extensive backstory for Frank, I mean, a painfully extensive backstory because we needed to give him authenticity,” he continued. “We didn’t want him to be just a trope hanger for a classic kind of horror. No, no, he’s got motivation. He’s got causality. He’s got reasoning, he’s got an arc, he is very authentic. And tragic, because I think that’s the other important thing. We wanted to kind of give him a real sense of three-dimensionality. So for us, it was just a great opportunity because that is the way that Dead By Daylight treats those types of characters, and we haven’t had that opportunity, perhaps, in the games that we’ve created, to have as much [of] that.”

Côté said this approach of giving a new perspective on Dead By Daylight and its underlying lore created a balancing act for the developers. On the one hand, The Casting of Frank Stone has to satisfy players who are fans of Supermassive games while also possibly having no clue what Dead By Daylight is. On the other hand, it also needs to satiate those hardcore DBD players who are fascinated by the game’s lore.

There will be things in The Casting of Frank Stone for those lore hounds to discover, although nothing with an unfathomable force like the Entity can ever be straightforward.

“In terms of establishing truths, we’re very nervous about that,” Côté said. “We very rarely want to clearly state that this is how the world works, especially when it comes to the Entity and its intentions, if any, right? But we often have extremely knowledgeable characters who you trust for being extremely insightful. And then they are absolutely certain that they figured it out and explained it to you. But there’s always a layer removed—you’re not doing the scientific experiments and deciphering it yourself. You’re hearing someone say that they are sure this is the truth. And that’s usually as far as it goes. But yes, there are things in there that we as devs feel are true, but will never tell you which ones are and which ones are made up.”

The Casting of Frank Stone will release soon on the Epic Games Store.