Left 4 Dead’s Bill Added to Dead By Daylight
Dead by Daylight, a game produced by Starbreeze Studios of Payday 2 fame, has announced a Left 4 Dead 2 crossover DLC that adds veteran zombie-fighter Bill Overbeck as a playable character!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EFS8HEDzdU
Dead By Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer game where four players assume the role of survivors trapped in a hellish forestscape, looking desperately for an escape while a fifth player controls a deranged killer hunting them down and sacrificing them to a chthonic entity. According to the lore, Bill woke up in this otherwordly purgatory after sacrificing himself in Left 4 Dead 2‘s ‘The Sacrifice’ campaign, and immediately dedicated his life to rescuing a new team of survivors. To that end, his character perks emphasize his survivability and sheer determination to endure.
The eight survivors from the Left 4 Dead franchise have a pretty healthy career of being ported over to other franchises to fight zombie hordes of all shapes and sizes. One of the most famous crossovers came with Resident Evil 6, where the survivors from the second game received their own exclusive “No Mercy” version of the Mercenaries survival game mode. I always remember thinking Capcom got the raw end of that deal because they added a whole new game mode complete with special Tank and Witch bad guys and music etc. whereas in exchange Valve just uploaded some RE6 mods to the Steam Workshop. Nowadays there isn’t even a popup or anything telling people to go download them in game.
Zombie Army Trilogy took things to the next level by porting all eight survivors into their lineup, letting you mix and match your team’s roster to a degree even Valve doesn’t allow. They even included a comic explaining how the modern-day octet wound up in Nazi Germany, though I remember the comic having dumb stuff to install before you could read it and hopefully they don’t mind me just linking to a Steam guide that has the whole thing. And of course, no mention of Left 4 Dead character cameos would come complete without mentioning Bill’s awesome cameo in Payday the Heist‘s promotional ‘No Mercy’ heist. Did you know that the Witch actually appears in this heist as well? Next time you reactivate the lights, check the locked closet near the reception room.
Last but not least, LMFAO included Louis (or at least a direct homage to him) as the character who explains to the recently-awaken pop stars how to survive the zombie dance-pocalype that their new single has infected the world with.
If zombie-fighting was a job, the Left 4 Dead survivors would have a lot of different apocalypses to put on their resume. But nobody’s portfolio would look as good as Bill’s. From the Vietnam War to the Payday gang’s assault on Mercy Hospital, to the zombie apocalypse, to his resurrection in an eternal torturer’s playground, the poor guy just can’t catch a break.