|
Managed to squeeze in about half a run last night, and yeah it's basically L4D 3. Which is nice, since that's pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. They kept the core formula largely untouched and instead focused on making runs feel more varied, which I'd say is a solid move. The guns feel solid and I appreciate the added variety, and the cards do seem like they could make for interesting builds down the line. I already had a fun combo with the healing on melee kills and the one that turns your shove into a knife melee attack. My main complaint so far is mostly just that the specials feel a little visually indistinct. The Exploder and retch are big Greyish squares that look pretty similar, and the Stinger (?) is very nearly invisible next to regular infected.
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2021 10:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 18:51 |
|
|
Oof yeah, some of these special spawns are kinda hosed. We had like five Bruisers spawning on us back to back. Also not a huge fan of how the reduced max health persists between sections without a way to heal it even for currency in the starting area. Overall the PvE does seem quite solid though, and pretty replayable. Also played one (1) round of PvP and it was very bad.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2021 21:05
|
|
|
The Shame Boy posted:
Oh, those exist in the spawn room, too? We found them a couple of times in the locked special rooms, but I never thought to look in the spawn room, considering it's already got a healing option in the store right there.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2021 21:29
|
|
|
Bardeh posted:I just think it's a bit sad they've had a decade to think up how to build on and improve the formula since L4D2 and all they've come up with is weapon attachments and the card system (which are both fine as long as the card system isn't baked into microtransactions), and they've removed campaign versus. Like....couldn't they have been a bit more bold and imaginative? FWIW I think the game is just fine and will play it a bit thanks to Game Pass, but it feels like it could have been more than it is. On the other side of the spectrum, this could also have worked very well as basically L4D2++. If they'd basically made a near carbon copy but polished the gently caress out of it with everything tuned just so and incorporating lessons learned from the other games, that could've gone great. But it doesn't quite deliver that, either. It's not terribly janky, but certainly not particularly polished or evolved either. As it stands currently, the PvE side of things looks to end up pretty solidly 7/10. Not bad, but certainly far short of what could have been.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2021 10:50
|
|
|
Really what gets me how little purpose the specials seem to have. They pretty much always just boil down to "shoot this thing first", but without really influencing how you play the game overall. Take the exploder, for example, and compare it with L4D's boomer explosion. The Boomer only explodes when you actually kill him, but he's also very fragile. He likes to lurk right around corners or behind doors, too. Even when he's not there, this changes the way you play: don't just reflexively shoot anything that moves, check corners and side doors, keep a bit of distance among your group. When he is there, the best way to deal with a boomer is fairly deliberate: Shove him back, get some distance, make sure everybody else is at a safe distance, and only then take the shot. On the other hand, B4B's exploder: He explodes not only on death, but can also make himself explode more or less at will, and has a fair amount of hitpoints. He usually spawns fairly far away and sticks around in the open (cause anything else would be bullshit), so that doesn't really change how you move through a level. The game has no shove, the only thing you can really do is shoot him before he gets close. He doesn't change the way you play, he's just another thing to hold left click at.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2021 13:31
|
|
|
RBX posted:Can they not use the old versus mode due to a patent or something, I don't understand how this oversight happened. It's baffling. They claim it's about not just copying the old games and instead trying to move forward, which is pretty  considering how the PvE turned out. But in practice it seems most likely that it's a desperate measure to save work, since it'd be much more effort to balance the maps for PvP than it is to balance them solely for PvE.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2021 09:29
|
|
|
Grapplejack posted:GTFO is cool as gently caress but it expects a LOT out of you, and it expects you and your group to take it super seriously, and if you don't it's going to punish the gently caress out of you. Which is cool, I'm glad it exists, but i'm not who the game is for lmao We've had good fun with GTFO like half a year ago, but since then they've steadily pumped up the difficulty to the point where it became functionally unplayable. The issue is that if you want super hard difficulty, you also need to make sure that your gameplay is extremely tight and polished so that players have absolutely reliable tools to overcome that difficulty. Both B4B and GTFO are very much not that.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2021 08:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 18:51 |
|
|
Kanos posted: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. In the commentary tracks for L4D there is quite a bit of mention how they tweaked things in response to QA/player feedback, sometimes in very significant ways. Players didn't know where to go, they added bright light sources to offer an orientation point. Players were uncertain how to complete an objective, add big old onscreen prompt. Players didn't realize they could/should duck through low vents, make them crouch automatically when they get near it. The same sort of feedback-based design seems completely absent here. Upon launching the game, just about everyone will find one or several things that don't work well and have fairly obvious solutions. That shows pretty obviously that tester feedback was either underprioritized, done badly, or simply not gathered in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2021 13:45
|
|