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I would like to take this moment to ask the devs exactly what the gently caress they expected anyone to do with a high powered scope?
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Oct 18, 2021 04:17
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SmallpoxJenkins posted:I would like to take this moment to ask the devs exactly what the gently caress they expected anyone to do with a high powered scope? Plink at regular zombies that are so far away shooting them is probably a net loss compared to dealing with anything else that isn't a thousand feet away?
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Oct 18, 2021 04:36
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Oxxidation posted:the web guys seem very poorly designed. smokers could only incapacitate one survivor at a time and were visually distinct in a way that required them to do it discreetly, otherwise the victim’s buddies could follow the enormous tongue back to its seven-foot tall emaciated source and fill it with daylight. web guys use a repeatable near-invisible projectile and are almost totally nondescript Yeah, you could have done that, or you could just Space Jam the team with a tallboy and break them like a oven dried matchstick
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Oct 18, 2021 04:39
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CuddleCryptid posted:It's a "survive the arena" kind of pvp, you get dropped into an area as the survivors and the other side gets to play as the special zeds, and the survivors try to hold out until the time runs down. That sounds really stupid and lovely. The crescendo events in L4D were literally "find the most meta spot to hold out until the door opens" so if it's like that but all the time...sounds like Steam sale material! Also, snipers were OP as poo poo in L4D if you were a decent shot. They actually had to limit the hunting rifle to 1 per team in competitive games because it was ridiculous. Focus fire from a team full of HR's would melt a tank insanely fast and you can stun-lock a witch with headshots with it until she died a shameful death. They eventually removed it from comp entirely because it was EZ-mode poo poo.
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Oct 18, 2021 04:57
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Most people can't aim for poo poo.
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Oct 18, 2021 05:10
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Black Sunshine posted:Also, snipers were OP as poo poo in L4D if you were a decent shot. They actually had to limit the hunting rifle to 1 per team in competitive games because it was ridiculous. Focus fire from a team full of HR's would melt a tank insanely fast and you can stun-lock a witch with headshots with it until she died a shameful death. They eventually removed it from comp entirely because it was EZ-mode poo poo. Seconding this. "Sniper" weapons in L4D are broken as gently caress. - No damage falloff - Perfect Accuracy - Infinite Range - Infinite Target Penetration (kill an entire hallway of zombies in 1 shot!) - Special Instant Kill property on Commons (even toe shots) - Scoping with no movement penalty - Probably more poo poo I forgot B4B seriously nerfs them into... a good spot. That breakdown post really shows they're still good, but not the ultimate god tier no-brainer all four people use the Military Sniper kinda broken good. Having one person with a good sniper a godsend against those webber assholes, the new jockey dude, and the new charger big arm guy. Being able to one shot them with a weakpoint shot from a sniper is the difference between a diaster spiral and no sweat.
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Oct 18, 2021 07:47
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I dunno if they low key tweaked the special infected again in the last day but we played with a group of three tonight and were just banging out levels on veteran. difficulty felt great actually. Pretty challenging but not stupidly so. Tbh playing with 3 players and one bot felt like the way to go with veteran to me. The bot AI is comically bad and they just stand around and do nothing offensive a lot of the time, but the free heals and ammo felt more valuable than another player and they are pretty tanky so you don't really have to worry about them much. It's like having a pure support class that never runs out of supplies.
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Oct 18, 2021 08:12
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I really like those Sleepers as baddies, I try to keep an eye out for them but always blame myself if they get the drop on me 
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Oct 18, 2021 08:19
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Oxxidation posted:the web guys seem very poorly designed. smokers could only incapacitate one survivor at a time and were visually distinct in a way that required them to do it discreetly, otherwise the victim’s buddies could follow the enormous tongue back to its seven-foot tall emaciated source and fill it with daylight. web guys use a repeatable near-invisible projectile and are almost totally nondescript none of them really engage or force players to adopt or re-adjust their tactics, or finely-honed foil for punishing certain tactics (sleeper is the main one that does that). about the only thing ive adjusted is just being dedicated juiced up 300% explosive damage frag grenade carrier to take out really bad tallboy spawns and bosses. Xaris fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 08:26
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I'm glad my post convinced some folks to try snipers, even if I was dead wrong about L4D. I don't remember them being good but none of us were comp-level players.
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Oct 18, 2021 08:43
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Jack B Nimble posted:If they aren't specifically the kind that sound the alarm no matter what, you can kill them before they shout, if you're careful. You can also just huck a nade at them, its an instant kill which is useful in a pinch. I truly think most teams should just have a dedicated hand nade dude. Pipe bombs are kind of overrated except for a couple of events but being able to go "ah gently caress, crusher" and just annihilate it on the spot is pretty nice. They really chunk down bosses too, solo'd a hag with some last night.
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Oct 18, 2021 10:11
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this is something from the beta that still happens, but there are instances where the solution is "you need to run away instead of fighting" or "you need to do thing instead of fighting" and we only realize that like two thirds of our resources in. i wish there was some clear like "this is an infinitely spawning situation and you need to do something else" UI element or something.
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Oct 18, 2021 10:33
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A lot of them have tons of foreshadowing and everyone just misses it. During the mine level it explicitly tells you to not get bogged down and keep moving because you won't be able to fight them all off. Everyone just ignores it. So yeah, a big flashing "RUN, YOU IDIOT" would be cool.
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Oct 18, 2021 10:59
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dogstile posted:You can also just huck a nade at them, its an instant kill which is useful in a pinch. but yeah frags are just stupidly good for deleting everything. in particular, if you know you're going into a boss having hoffman loaded up with 8 frags with +300% explosive damage takes short work of it with probably 4 left to spare. i've got a good build for it but I feel like I need to augment some better combat capabilities for it, it's rough with some of the penalties I've taken. I agree pipes are good but there's only a few areas where it's even that useful or where you REALLY need to them to die (bar level). Fire crackers are usually 100g cheaper and do basically the same thing and a guy with bullet pen can just knock out a cluster over the firecracker in half a clip anyways.
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Oct 18, 2021 11:01
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dogstile posted:You can also just huck a nade at them, its an instant kill which is useful in a pinch. Yeah, after you talked up nades I made a bomb chuckin build to use as Hoffman; I haven't unlocked any damage boosting cards but even just "find more grenades" and starting off with 3 slots is a noticeably powerful build and I becane the dedicated holder of hand grenades. Speaking of, I've notived that, as the slots increase, it becomes more important to have each player carry a type of item, because one person can carry, say, 4 bandages but not one bandage and one pill bottle. When I play a medic build I like to let other players carry pills, because it's the healing item they'd most need to use without me. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 13:40
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i played some of act 1 on gamepass and i dont see how anyone gets through this without the card that gives you health for melee kills. also it really feels like the game just spawns stuff directly behind you all the time and its kinda bullshit.
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Oct 18, 2021 13:42
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Agreed with the statements on pipe bombs, they don't draw zeds as hard as they did in L4D so they aren't super useful. Having area denial with a molotov or the ability to delete specials when you see a ton spawn in is much better. I got converted to the Church of Frag Grenade when I used one during the grain elevator scene where I saw two tallboys and a boomer moving up the stairs together like they were on goddamn parade. Say hello to my little friend.
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Oct 18, 2021 13:46
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good 30 seconds of "i wonder if this guy on the hot mic is still playing from the highway" and a surprise special spawn https://i.imgur.com/yGxYOOz.gifv oh and I dunno why but people love to just hang out in that house forever until they get pinned and we have no way to get them, they really need to have better waypoints after you finish an area moist turtleneck fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 14:15
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ASenileAnimal posted:i played some of act 1 on gamepass and i dont see how anyone gets through this without the card that gives you health for melee kills. also it really feels like the game just spawns stuff directly behind you all the time and its kinda bullshit. A lot of us have cards that give us temp health for stuff. Our dedicated melee has a card that gives everyone nearby (including her) temp health when she kills a zombie in melee, so we can usually afford to take a few hits.
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Oct 18, 2021 14:19
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CuddleCryptid posted:Agreed with the statements on pipe bombs, they don't draw zeds as hard as they did in L4D so they aren't super useful. Having area denial with a molotov or the ability to delete specials when you see a ton spawn in is much better. Do the difficulty levels make the pipe bombs less effective? On recruit they felt like they lasted ten seconds or more, and blew up every single zombie on them. I packed as many as I could and four of them trivialized a horde event.
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Oct 18, 2021 18:03
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I think my issue with pipe bombs is that I can do the same thing with four firecrackers, a bit of ammo and save myself like 800 copper. There's a couple exceptions, mine shaft pipe bombs can work in a pinch if you're out of hand grenades in a way that firecrackers can't.
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Oct 18, 2021 18:51
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Do the difficulty levels make the pipe bombs less effective? On recruit they felt like they lasted ten seconds or more, and blew up every single zombie on them. I packed as many as I could and four of them trivialized a horde event. It's less that there is poor draw and more that zeds tend to take forever to clamber over terrain in my experience. So you end up with the pipe lasting like ten seconds but all the zeds are too busy trying to figure out how to path their way around a truck to actually get caught in the blast. If you are in a relatively flat area it probably works better. Firecrackers are cool but I have a pathological need to bring a toolkit every run so that's just impossible.
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Oct 18, 2021 19:02
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I swore by pipe bombs as a hold over from l4d, but l4d has a lot more "run the gauntlet" type set pieces. When these still come up in B4B I like the pipebombs, but the real question in B4B isn't "what will you do about all these ridden", it's "what will you do about all these mutations".
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Oct 18, 2021 19:06
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Curious how the game will look in a month when everyone who cares has beaten all the acts on the hardest difficulty. Their version of VS. isn't going to keep people playing.
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Oct 18, 2021 19:22
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Curious how the game will look in a month when everyone who cares has beaten all the acts on the hardest difficulty. Their version of VS. isn't going to keep people playing. theyll release an even worse difficulty where every normal ridden is replaced with tallboys. also the items on the ground are now tallboys as well.
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Oct 18, 2021 19:27
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For funsies my group tried the first level on Nightmare. We wiped within the first minute when we immediately ran into a progression-blocking security door which when opened, spawned its usual wave of specials which destroyed us in those tight quarters without us dropping a single one. Fun, but not in the way the devs intended.
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Oct 18, 2021 19:35
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Curious how the game will look in a month when everyone who cares has beaten all the acts on the hardest difficulty. Their version of VS. isn't going to keep people playing. Vermintide put in all kinds of weird challenge poo poo to try and keep people into it, but at the same time a lot of people just played it because it was fun. I wouldn't be surprised if loot boxes or something come into it later, but once the bugs are fixed if they just go "if you build it they will come" and leave it as is then I don't think the entire game would immediately die.
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Oct 18, 2021 19:36
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Then in 12 months for GOTY they will release a Tallboy arm melee weapon skin, where the hitbox is the same as the bat but it obscures 84% of the screen. That said, I'm having fun with this so far. I was way 2 late for left 4 dead (which I happened to install for the first time a week before this came out and I wept at all the time i put into CSGO deathmatch when I should have been playing this) so I'm not comparing it much to L4D2. And I guess when this dies off, I can always go back to L4D2
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Oct 18, 2021 19:39
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TBH once I've had my fill of normal gameplay I'd probably try some kind of mode where you had to do your best to build a deck over time, like slay the spire.
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Oct 18, 2021 19:55
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Jack B Nimble posted:TBH once I've had my fill of normal gameplay I'd probably try some kind of mode where you had to do your best to build a deck over time, like slay the spire. Call of Duty zombies but you can make custom perks would probably sell a billion copies. Just make it so that you have to push a few bricks in the right order to get the really good guns and you'll take over YouTube in a week
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Oct 18, 2021 19:57
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If you look at the differences between the difficulties, it looks like recruit has a limited pool for the corruption cards and that there might be a bigger variation of them on the higher difficulties. That probably just means stronger and more varied specials and zombies for the most part, but that could easily be a way they continue to add variables to the game without needing to put out large content updates. We'll just have to see if they commit or if the game becomes abandoned in a month or two. Makes me wonder how much money they got for the game to be day one on game pass, whether that's just for them to take the check and disappear or they'll keep going
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Oct 18, 2021 20:21
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hrm, i hope they have some kind of ongoing development and a way to pay for it. how is it doing? i'll be honest i did not expect it had the budget for ace of spades and lolling conceptually at people accidentally streaming that
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Oct 18, 2021 20:23
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Xaris posted:tbf all the specials are generally very poorly designed... Couldn't stop thinking about this, because it's been bothering me for a while. Not that they're badly designed, but that they absolutely do appear badly designed on the surface. So many mechanics in this game seem so well thought out once dug into that I'm reluctant to condemn the enemy designs just yet. L4D casts a long shadow over B4B. Pretty much all of the complaints I have about the enemies are complaints about them not acting like L4D enemies. Most notably, L4D specials don't do easy chip damage. They'll murder a completely isolated player but are totally negated if taken out on the way in or if players are supporting each other. The ammo cost of killing them is usually irrelevant too, given that ammo piles offer infinite full refills and most specials die to a stiff breeze. B4B specials ain't like that at all. They're almost guaranteed to deal chip attrition. Tallboys drain ammo (an actual limited resource) or grenades (an even more limited resource), while retches and the stinger family will almost always get an initial hit in before being shot. Where the players have agency is not in avoiding attrition entirely but in limiting the damage. Stingers are the most obvious: their entire purpose is chip damage, and though their attack has a cooldown the ranged nature means they'll almost always get one shot off as they pop around an obstacle. Your goal is more to kill them before their attack cooldown runs out. I can't count the number of times I've staggered a retch out of their vomit animation, but it almost always gets off one "puddle" of barf. That's still a hell of a lot better than taking the entire attack. The implication is that B4B is a resource management game even when played extremely well at the tactical level. The more time you spend in the level, the more inevitable resource depletion you'll face. Punishment for loitering isn't new to the genre, but the degree of inevitability is. It wasn't uncommon to escape hordes or special attacks in L4D without a scratch; the director spawning more of them was certainly more chances to screw up and lose, but it never had inevitability. In B4B, your resources are always dropping. Ammo chests are substantial but not infinite, and specials can drain a lot of it. Healing items aren't simply mitigation for mistakes the way they are in other coop games, they're a chip damage timer that the game is balanced around. There's some breathing room for mistakes or loitering built in, but the margin gets narrower the later you go in the campaign and the higher the difficulty is. I'm also starting to notice that different corruption cards are best dealt with via different consumables, so you can extend your "timer" by buying accordingly at the start of the level (and hoo boy are you clearly meant to buy consumables of every type - trying to "eco round" a level is a colossal risk and probably the single most common fatal mistake for new players on veteran). More and more, I'm coming to believe that B4B's design flaw is how it handles player psychology. If you can accept that your resources are there to be burned through - even when playing well! - then the game feels much less punitive and you can start to see ways to take control over the outcome. An early mistake can put you behind the resource curve and kill you much later in the level in a way that (then) feels nearly impossible to avoid. Hell, failing to achieve a bonus objective can lead to a wipe in the following level due to consumable shortage. Thing is, that's not how prior games in this genre work at all. Flawless play is humanly possible and mistakes are punished immediately rather than on a dissociative delay. The potential playerbase has been taught to expect completely different things going in, and the developers tripled-down on that by emphasizing the past L4D connection (despite many statements of how B4B is it's own game and not L4D). Stick an old-school roguelike fan in front of B4B and they'd probably grasp the resource economy, and it's fatal delayed pitfalls, pretty quickly. Is that bad design? Sure, but it's not the sort of bad design that produces a broken game. It's the sort of bad design that unnecessarily steepens the learning curve and makes the game less accessible. (Also worth mentioning that any time I say L4D here, I could just as easily say Vermintide. Despite the huge thematic and mechanical differences, Vermintide's design philosophy is far more akin to L4D than B4B's design is.)
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Oct 18, 2021 21:08
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That's a good point about the consumables being necessary to use and burn through. One tip I've noticed is that the cards that spawn more support, offensive, ammo and copper usually feel like unnecessary extras in other games but they seem to make a pretty big difference here.
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Oct 18, 2021 21:18
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I really miss the Witches so much scarier than the cthulu light pole poo poo
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Oct 18, 2021 21:21
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I kind of scratch my head at the chip damage complaint because yeah, Left 4 Dead didn't have enemies that did a lot of chip damage, although debatably you could call a spitter a chip damage special even if you were fast on your feet. But L4D also didn't start you out with a power up that gives you health back for hitting enemies, or making resources more effective, or making them appear more often. Yeah you have enemies that do chip damage but you are given ways to be efficient at countering them in the lulls between fights. It's just a different form of game, like you kind of said.
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Oct 18, 2021 21:22
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Moonshine Rhyme posted:That's a good point about the consumables being necessary to use and burn through. One tip I've noticed is that the cards that spawn more support, offensive, ammo and copper usually feel like unnecessary extras in other games but they seem to make a pretty big difference here. I have two just in my own deck and we kind of expect everyone to have at least one.
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Oct 18, 2021 21:23
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yeah, I think corbeau’s post gets at the key thing that feels bad about B4B specials to me compared to L4D2 or vermintide 1 specials which is that those games’ specials normally only hurt if you screw up in some way, while most B4B specials hurt simply anytime they exist, either by feeling like basically unavoidable damage or by sponging up ammo. This makes the random spikes in spawns feel like an unusually severe middle finger in which avoiding damage almost necessarily means a bunch of resource attrition
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Oct 18, 2021 21:24
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Also the music in the diner level sucks. Midnight Riders was way better.
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Oct 18, 2021 21:29
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The exploders are especially bad, imo. With boomers you had a clear noise that you can hear from way off, they didn't do a ton of direct damage or throw you very far, and they didn't loving sprint at you with a ton of health. You also didn't have 4 of them spawn and then bumrush you one after the other until everyone is either down, severely injured, or dead from being tossed out of level bounds.
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Oct 18, 2021 21:30
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