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I'm probably just a bitter L4D2 player and this game never would've lived up to my hype. -Turning the dialogue off because it's so bad is also bad because then there's very little feedback about the game state, and it gets even more boring. But I don't want to hear Hoffman's conspiracy theories or Mom getting someone drunk so she can gently caress them. -The machete would swing in a horizontal arc, the knife upgrade at a very specific point right in front of you, and the axe does a completely vertical swipe. Except the machete required 2-4 hits to kill a zombie, and also consumes stamina. -I died on the boat finale because I couldn't find the stairs after dropping down a hole to plant the bomb, and limited stamina meant I couldn't run enough once I did find them. -The maps are too dark, the zombies too numerous and quiet, the specials are boring and often you don't know they're there until they hit you, half the weapons felt bad to use, all the weapons except maybe the sawed off shotgun sounded muffled, having to stop in the middle of the game to figure out if the weapon you came across (that can be a different power level from another of the same weapon?) is better or not, same with attachments. -The Ogre may as well have not existed compared to a tank, I only died to it because I stayed out of the room you could shoot it from. -Are all the campaign type things eight maps long? It was way too long on Veteran. I was glad to be killed, because it meant I didn't have to play until someone found a closet to revive me. $60 is more than twice what I would consider paying, just to dick around with friends. The lack of a real Versus mode is also a killer, we spent thousands of hours playing Realism Versus, we are that 1.5% of the player base. A badly balanced time attack mode is a big swing and miss.
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Aug 13, 2021 11:52
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Admiral Joeslop posted:
It's an optimistic asking price, think it would do much better at $40/£30 like Vermintide 2 and World War Z both launched at.
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Aug 13, 2021 12:20
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The biggest issue IMHO is that, despite a full decade of technological evolution, it doesn't really do anything better than the game it's attempting to be a spiritual successor to, which kinda sucks when said game is $50 cheaper and has mod support.
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Aug 13, 2021 12:34
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I just downloaded and played L4D2 for a while to see if it was just rose-tinted glasses. The amount of personality was instantly apparent, we were in the hospital level and were getting bumrushed in tight corridoors with a huge horde. We cleared it, and a charger flew down and knocked us down like bowling pins and a booming waddled round and popped. It was a frenzy of slashing with a sword until someone threw a pipe bomb, resulting in limbs flying everywhere. There were zombies in hospital gowns and hazmat suits which was cool too.
henpod fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 13, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 15:07
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The 2 L4D games absolutely still hold up today. I managed to con a couple of friends to play them for the first time in years with me and we had a great time. I'm going to download this beta and see what's up but it really has a high bar to get over.
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Aug 13, 2021 15:48
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I found a box full of pills and when I pinged it the dude said "meds here," then I alt+F4'd and uninstalled.
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Aug 13, 2021 15:51
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Olympic Mathlete posted:The 2 L4D games absolutely still hold up today. I managed to con a couple of friends to play them for the first time in years with me and we had a great time. I'm going to download this beta and see what's up but it really has a high bar to get over. I don't want to be an Internet dogpiler, but I played for about 40 minutes and uninstalled. My team dropped out and were replaced by extremely stupid bots and that was the last straw. Game just wasn't...fun.
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Aug 13, 2021 16:21
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I like the game. I still don't think I would pay $60 for it, but I do like it. I think it's aggressively bad at onboarding new people (so far). It's funny because the survey they attached to it asks a lot of questions about, "is this confusing? what about this?" and the issue is not that things are *confusing*, it's that the game just doesn't tell you stuff. Take trauma, for instance. The game does not tell you that trauma exists. I was trying to be the group medic so I had to google it and there is contradictory information about what heals trauma (it turns, out, only wall-kits do, maybe there's a card for it later?) I've been playing almost exclusively with newbs for a few days and tons of people keep trying to heal because it isn't obvious to them that trauma is the reason their health is low, or where the trauma came from, or that they can't heal it. There's no reason for this to be unexplained, but it isn't hard to explain. It's not confusing. It just wasn't explained. I think they should have put a few build-defining cards into the starter pool instead of a bunch of mediocre catchall stuff. I think that would have prepared people better for how the game evolves. Specials are still dull, I agree with that, the fact that there is in essence only 3 of them contributes to that. I think they believed they found a cheap way to get six but really my brain is never going to parse it as more than three. There are some cards that affect them later and I could live with the three if the card mutators did more than give them more health and damage. I actually quite like the game's graphics and it plays nice enough for me. I don't think the guns feel bad, and I don't know if that's because I don't play enough shooters to appreciate good gunfeel or what. Levels also hold my interest, though it is clear the designers phoned it in whenever they had to connect two sections of map. The game doesn't offer you a lot of tools for dealing with the zombie chip damage problem, which is also going to be a major source of frustration for many players. The game's director is much more aggressive on Veteran/Nightmare and the long 'standing around' moments that happen on easy are less frequent there. You get hit and there's not a lot you can do about it. Vermintide had shove/block/dodge, L4D had it's shove, but there's no tool for self correction in B4B. I found punching at least twice modestly effective at getting zeds off of me but it still takes a second to come out and has no AOE to speak of. When we moved up to Veteran I just made it my job to run around clearing zombies off of my friends and that made things a lot easier. Overall I'd say the game is fun and I would play it, but not for $60 and I'd really want to see what kind of lifecycle these guys have in mind for this game. VT2 for instance is a great game almost in spite of itself, but its developers are notorious for just like, evaporating for 9 months with no word only to appear again with an expansion that has a 50/50 chance of being garbage. If the devs are going to be actively tinkering with the game I'm here for it, but I don't want to see them squeeze out a battlepass and then return to a hut in the mountains to meditate for another year because that's not worth the asking price.
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Aug 13, 2021 17:14
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Thinking about it more, one of the main issues with the game is that it's trying to be a complicated tacticool shooter with multiple damage types, stat-based weapons and a million gun mods, while at the same time trying to be the spiritual successor to a high paced arcade run-and-gun and the two systems are at constant odds with each other.
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Aug 13, 2021 17:27
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I have a big feeling that when I get the "you can now hip fire like in L4D", it won't actually be a good card. I already hip fire most of the time, I've just self selected the guns that seem best at it, handguns and the mini 14 or, in a pinch, the m14.
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Aug 13, 2021 17:37
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Some of the later cards (or maybe mid tier cards? I can't really tell how far in I am) are uh, kind of important, and it's pretty ridiculous how much the game buries the lead on some of them. I just unlocked the Clinic supply line for the first time. One of the cards makes you immune slash makes it so you don't deal friendly fire while crouched. Another one appears to heal you for 100% of what you healed someone else for. Like both of those are pretty build defining. I still have yet to find a way to heal someone else's trauma damage though.
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Aug 13, 2021 18:07
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The AA-12 was incredibly unsatisfying, burst weapons are always terrible, and I don't understand why there is a fully automatic pistol with 15 rounds or a double barrel shotgun secondary that fires both barrels automatically. Was there a Secondary Fire button that I missed? The sniper rifles in L4D2 were very good for taking out Specials and also had plenty of penetration to help with hordes, though typically you'd have a secondary melee weapon to take care of those. All three of the melee weapons I found (including the card that gives you a knife instead of a "shove") were horrible at actually killing anything unless you wanted to do one zombie at a time, while surrounded by them. It's honestly one of the biggest disappointments I've ever felt for a game I was interested in. I don't think it's fixable for me because their design philosophy is so far off what I'm interested in that they would almost have to make an entirely different game.
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Aug 13, 2021 18:22
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My guess is the baseball bat is viable once you get 2-3 melee damage cards. If you aren’t killing regular zombies in one hit it’s not great. That said both the tomahawk and fire axe are fantastic but don’t have a wide arc, they are great for kiting mobs through door ways while healing yourself, conserving ammo and even building temp health for teammates.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:04
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I will say that being able to reload while still using the bash/knife is pretty nice.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:08
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I like the idea of kitting out in safe rooms, though I'd prefer it be presented as a work bench and I'm picking up parts, not some neboulous idea that I'm engaged in barter.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:11
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The card system is incongruent with the game and is trying to artificially add a "grind" where there doesn't need to be one.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:13
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Hipfire accuracy on it's own isn't even that bad half the time so you can L4D it up if you want even without the card, it's jus that putting a scope on any gun is kind of unnecessary since it just slows you down and makes it harder to deal with crowds. Useful if you're the sniper guy trying to hit a special infected you somehow managed to notice out in the horde or is far away i guess.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:41
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I think they looked at a list of things they wanted to change/improve about L4D and then did all of them without first thinking about how those changes would then interact with each other. Like, the card system is maybe theoretically fine. But, the way you grind for cards is by doing runs. If you just added the card system into L4D right now, I think it would be fine. Runs are quick and casual, so it's no big deal to hammer out some levels for some upgrade currency. But then you look at the run system in B4B where games skew toward the very difficult side, and now grinding sounds like poo poo. That streamer group last night finally beat Act 1 at the seven hour mark. Like...I'm not playing the same four maps for seven hours in a row when failing a map doesn't give me any currency. Playing Survivor difficulty gives you almost nothing - I got maybe 35 mats for clearing three stages, so not even a single cards worth. So if you actually want any upgrades, which I'm going to say you absolutely need a kitted out deck to play Nightmare, you HAVE to spend a ton of time grinding out the slow maps of Veteran mode.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:46
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And L4D runs were already kind of a commitment and now it's even longer to get a full match and hope people don't quit.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:49
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:I think they looked at a list of things they wanted to change/improve about L4D and then did all of them without first thinking about how those changes would then interact with each other. I mean if you're doing runs for supply points you're not going to do them on Nightmare. And that sounds like a small amount of points I usually have like 100 even on easy after like 4 maps. I think speed running might tank points in some way but I'm not sure. I think most of the games grind will take place on vet once people get reasonably good.
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Aug 13, 2021 19:55
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I've never managed to clear the first three maps without someone quitting which then leaves us completely crippled for the fourth map, and if you die there it's like 100% that everyone leaves
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Aug 13, 2021 19:56
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Lucca Blight posted:I think the most surprising moment of the game so far is when Mom brags about committing rape back in the day. Not terribly sure who thought that was a good line to toss in the game in this day and age. Starting to think that one zombie growl wasn't actually two clips mixed together
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Aug 13, 2021 20:10
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:I've never managed to clear the first three maps without someone quitting which then leaves us completely crippled for the fourth map, and if you die there it's like 100% that everyone leaves On what difficulty? I can definitely see this being the case on vet, and nightmare is actively impossible with bots. Vet seems to get easier with more cards but still gets sorta bullshit some times. EDIT: In what is another questionable design choice, the optimal way to farm cards right now is to quickplay join easy matches and quit almost immediately after. If you're attempting to do a complete Act I run on Vet (or even Survivor) you're going to have this problem because most people don't have the two hours to run the act, and it's much more optimal to do short quickplay runs than it is to do a complete act. This will probably continue to be true until people get the cards they want, and you'll see more people playing the game for its own sake on Vet. This is basically the exact same behavior we see in VT2 every time there's an influx of new players, people quick joining games, rapidly finishing, and quitting. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Aug 13, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 20:17
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The quickplay option is terrible on any difficulty above lowest. Any game you join into has already been sunk by the terrible bots.
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Aug 13, 2021 20:56
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Do we really need to see our starter card every single map? The whole process with the cards could be sped up quite a bit, and they need to let you do your shopping once you're ready, instead of waiting for everyone.
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Aug 13, 2021 20:57
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Senethro posted:The quickplay option is terrible on any difficulty above lowest. Any game you join into has already been sunk by the terrible bots. Oh yeah absolutely. This is why everyone does the quickplay grind trick on easy. The bot AI seems like there's something fundamentally wrong with it and I can't tell if its complicated or simple. They almost always stand still when they fire, they don't know how to bust people out of spitter goop, they will stubbornly refuse to switch weapons if they run out of ammo (why is that even an option tbh, they should have infinite ammo), they can get stuck if they interact with something (which fortunately seems to only be deployed turrets, so don't deploy a turret if you have a bot in the game) and they sometimes don't trigger their catch-up teleport. They only saving grace is they don't seem to acquire trauma damage. They should just make the bots never run out of ammo and do other cheat-y things to make the game easier when they're with you, they're literally never going to be as good as a person, even mediocre scrubs are fine at this game. Actually now that I think about it, the only pub behavior that gets me killed is refusing to rush objectives during endless hoards, I don't even care if they startle birds or whatever. Pubs are always better than bots, that's probably a bad sign. Bardeh posted:Do we really need to see our starter card every single map? The whole process with the cards could be sped up quite a bit, and they need to let you do your shopping once you're ready, instead of waiting for everyone. Yeah I'm confused by this choice as well. It was helpful exactly once when I forgot which of my seven decks I have equipped, but it seems like that would be better served by just... showing you which one you have equipped.
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Aug 13, 2021 21:05
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RBX posted:And L4D runs were already kind of a commitment and now it's even longer to get a full match and hope people don't quit. Yeah, it definitely seems like it's intended more for friend play since they have a feature built in for you to save your campaign state and pick up where you left off if you play with the same group of people. Definitely agree with a lot of the criticism about the game being bland, it just doesn't have the same charm that L4D/L4D2 had. If it was cheaper I might consider picking it up to play with friends, but not $60.
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Aug 13, 2021 21:22
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Floodkiller posted:Yeah, it definitely seems like it's intended more for friend play since they have a feature built in for you to save your campaign state and pick up where you left off if you play with the same group of people. Yeah same. It feels like an excellent beer and pretzels game. Wish it was cheaper. EDIT: Theorcrafting, it seems like the two or three skills that heal trauma damage are kind of a trap. I have definitely been reduced to 40-60 health on harder runs but best case scenario you can get FA kits to heal 10 trauma and heal an additional 10 trauma at the start of the map. So at best if you pour all of your resources into one person, who also happens to have the latter card, they're healing 50 trauma, which is awesome but the cost is immense to do that. OTOH there are like 3-4 ways to grant team temp hp that are pretty easy to fulfill. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Aug 14, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 21:26
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The main issue with the bots is they have nothing telling them they should move away from the special infected slowly moving towards them with the 1 shot attack.
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Aug 14, 2021 01:39
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Most surprising part is it does not feel satisfying at all to mow down zombies. I shoot a zombie in the chest with a shotgun and they spend a second jerking around trying to decide what animation to do before ragdolling over. Or sometimes they randomly just fly up twenty feet into the air like I'm playing a Bethesda game or some poo poo. I throw a pipe bomb and zombies crowd around it and I'm expecting this really satisfying shower of gore but instead they just kinda all fall over in a circle. It's a zombie game, I wanna see limbs blown off and fountains of gore and holes in chests and poo poo.
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Aug 14, 2021 06:08
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I was SO disappointed the first time I used a pipebomb.
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Aug 14, 2021 06:28
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melee is completely useless prove me wrong.
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Aug 14, 2021 07:11
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The difficulty is strange. There seems to be easy, then hard. The difference between survivor and veteran is nuts and while it's not impossible or unfair, it's clearly missing a step between. Also, the bots are brain-dead. Totally loving brain-dead. They don't heal themselves from pickups, they don't even pick up items, they DON'T PICK UP AMMO, and they can run out of said ammo. They get stuck, run in front of you, teleport in front of you, shoot things to start events, and are basically just the worst AI I've seen. Even the guys in angels fall first would fix themselves. Cards seem like they could be cool, but I'm unsure about some key gameplay being behind them. Like the charge attack, or secondaries not using ammo. It also means that you're drastically weaker if you get far in, quit, and decide to come back, since the cards aren't stacked up anymore. Weapon accessories are a cool idea, except you can't drop them or put them on a new weapon. Why? If I pick up a machine gun with a 4x, why can't I drop that 4x for my sniper buddy? Why can't I strip an acog off of something? The different ammos seem odd, too. I understand it on one hand, having to care about what ammo you have and there being stretches where you don't find the ammo you want. Except you can't carry a real backup to switch off to, and the game doesn't want you to dump guns for other ones because accessories are permanent. So what's the point? Couldn't different weapons having different max ammo accomplish the same goal? It doesn't really bother me, but I kept wondering why it exists. 60 is way too much. There's not enough here, it's not polished enough, and it's not nearly revolutionary enough to warrant it. The card system are random talents you get as you play, which... well, is a lot like the Chaos Wastes. I kept looking for the things that make the game stand out and mostly coming up either with stuff other games already did or things that are annoyances. Like, you can sprint, but it comes at the cost of having a stamina bar that you use for melee. Which means that when the group has to run, melee characters can't contribute. People will also have different amounts of stamina, meaning that the game can't actually know how fast a group will be able to move, making it hard to make a run event that would be tight and fair. You unlock talents through cards, but you can't like... be sure you'll get them. There's different grades of guns, but that means that you not only have to find the gun you want, but find a good gun you want. There's no "aw poo poo, an AK, I'm good" or "hell yeah a katana" moments, cause you could always find something better, and there's also no "well I guess I'll grab the sniper for now" moments cause you're too attached to your gun cause you can't strip it to pick up something else for an event. It's fun, but... I don't see what it does that indicates that the people who made it learned anything about the genre or had anything they really wanted to add to it. It's a grim zombie game where you listen to people commit suicide and use modern guns to shoot mutated humans. The specials are even just worse versions of the L4D2 ones. Don't get it, man, I don't get what they were trying for here
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Aug 14, 2021 08:18
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Played some last night and if I wasn't aware it was supposed to be Left 4 Dead I probably would never have put 2 and 2 together just playing it. The special infected really don't have much to differentiate themselves from the regular ones. The boomer equivalent doesn't look like he's full of goop like the L4D one, he looks like he should be punching your face off. So when you shoot him and he explodes and not much happens except your screen goes goopy for a few seconds it's a little anticlimactic. The special infected in L4D were scary because they could gently caress you and your team right up even if it was just the AI that struck. When a hunter was about there was panic because that scream was nuts and you knew if you got leapt on you were going to take a whole bunch of damage before you got saved. This game's equivalent is the needler guy? I saw him hanging around on the side of a building but he didn't seem to do much else?! I'm wondering if the team actually played L4D because if they did they really don't seem to understand why it was (and still is!) so good. I know it's just a demo but it just doesn't feel good to play, even dropping you into the camp at the start, yeah it's a nice bit of world building but it's extra faff the game doesn't need. Everything L4D had to tell you it did so along the way during that first level, you learned so much about how it plays very quickly. That this one has a shooting range with a stack of different coloured guns and other assorted stuff suggests the team thinks more = more better. L4D was great because it was so simple. I suppose if I took anything away from the beta it was that I've no desire to give this any time because that first impression was so dull and overly frustrating. I think my favourite part of the game was when I was stood over one of those big gun cases, the case said it had a mini gun in it but it said I needed to unlock it. The case is plastic, has 4 little plastic latches on it and I'm stood holding a machete. This is after I had to punch down a wooden door. C'mon guys, at least be loving consistent. 
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Aug 14, 2021 08:40
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Chomposaur posted:Most surprising part is it does not feel satisfying at all to mow down zombies. I shoot a zombie in the chest with a shotgun and they spend a second jerking around trying to decide what animation to do before ragdolling over. Or sometimes they randomly just fly up twenty feet into the air like I'm playing a Bethesda game or some poo poo. I throw a pipe bomb and zombies crowd around it and I'm expecting this really satisfying shower of gore but instead they just kinda all fall over in a circle. It's a zombie game, I wanna see limbs blown off and fountains of gore and holes in chests and poo poo. Absolutely. And, when we killed the big ogre, I wanted to climb on the body in victory, but I just walked through it.
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Aug 14, 2021 09:04
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Wondering how much of L4D was thanks to valve's help. Or lots of the old devs left the studio since then.
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Aug 14, 2021 11:45
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RBX posted:Wondering how much of L4D was thanks to valve's help. Or lots of the old devs left the studio since then. It's one of those things I never got about game fans. Game X was amazing so game Y will be too, regardless of there being say, 5-10 year gaps in between them. I can only speak for regular software development but generally devs rotate to new jobs every 2-3 years.
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Aug 14, 2021 11:57
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I don't think it's that big a leap to think Studio who did Good Game 10 years ago that then announces they are making Spiritual Successor to Good Game to then think they might, you know, take lessons learned and build upon that with new leaps in technology to attempt to make something better then the original in -some- way, but I don't really go into these expecting it to always be better then the original blindly, but I also don't expect it to be majorly downgraded from that 10 year old Good Game. On another note, played L4D2 with a group of friends who all haven't touched it for 8+ years like me and we had a grand time. Ra Ra Rasputin fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Aug 14, 2021 |
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Aug 14, 2021 12:15
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RBX posted:Wondering how much of L4D was thanks to valve's help. Or lots of the old devs left the studio since then. I was willing to give Turtle Rock the benefit of the doubt with Evolve turning out to be a big piece of poo poo - maybe it was a fluke, or things didn't just pan out like they wanted, or there was undue publisher interference - but Back 4 Blood also turning out like this is really making me think that Valve's help was really important in making L4D what it was.
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Aug 14, 2021 12:22
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There's still a lot I find fun about B4B, it's just hampered by the other stuff. I'm also worried how much microtransaction bullshit is going to affect the full game.
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Aug 14, 2021 12:34
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