How Dead by Daylight re-envisioned The Ring's Yoichi as an adult

Dead by Daylight's Sadako update inserts the Japanese horror icon from The Ring into the game as a new killer. But alongside her as a new survivor comes Yoichi Asakawa, the only person to survive Sadako's onslaught in the original films and novel. Yoichi was just a child in those works, but now he's all aged up for Dead by Daylight. Speaking to The Loadout, Behaviour Interactive's creative director David Richard discusses how the studio went about the transformation.

"First of all, I have to say how happy we were that Kadokawa allowed us to go on with this idea and create new lore that doesn't exist for this character," Richard says when asked about how he worked with the Ringu licence-holders, Kadokawa, to bring Yoichi to Dead by Daylight. "As with all licensed content, everything we do follows specific guidelines, and is approved by our partner. At the end of the day, our objective is that the content we create is truthful to their original IP, and represents their universe, in a Dead by Daylight way."

But how did Richard and the team go about creating the adult version of Yoichi when there wasn't a precedent for the character being any older than a child? "We wanted to ensure he was going to go into a science field just like his father," Richard explains. "Since he knows that Sadako might be living in water in the open sea on the coast, we thought that that's what oriented him towards studies related to the ocean."

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