Having played Back 4 Blood’s closed and open Beta, I’ve come to two conclusions: First is that the game can be fun with friends and satisfying to beat. The second is this is an annoying and in many ways poorly thought out game that will likely be Turtle Rock’s Avengers. And so instead of mentioning how glitchy it is or how unoriginal it is like everyone else does, this article aims to talk about the problems that can be or otherwise need to be addressed either in the remaining two months of development or with a relatively early update.
So, let’s not waste anymore time.
PROBLEM 1: DIFFICULTY
Now, this isn’t complaining that Recruit is too easy or that Veteran is too hard. Having lower difficulties for newcomers or those seeking a power fantasy is just fine, and don’t let the non-players known as Journalists turn you into a /v/-tard. Same basic logic applies to veteran being a challenge; why a game is difficult matters more to me than how difficult it is anyway. No, the problem is the in between – there is none.
There’s the obvious problem that those who want a mild but not easy experience are effectively locked out of Back 4 Blood if this isn’t changed, but then there’s the less obvious issue of practice. Let’s use Left 4 Dead 2 as an example real quick.
In Left 4 Dead, you can use the Easy mode to learn the map layout, learn how the various items and gun behave, and learn how enemies act and react in various situations. In other words, you can learn the constants. Normal introduces the ideas of friendly fire and attacks from the front dealing extra damage while boosting the damage output and health of special infected, making the player have to start keeping teamwork in mind. Advanced then ramps up these three aspects while making item spawn rates for health packs and grenades less generous (especially to players who breeze by). Each difficulty can prepare you for the next, except for Expert but that mode is more of a novelty.
Back 4 Blood, in Left 4 Dead terms, only has Easy, Advanced, and Expert as it stands. So if you’re not one to learn games through trial by fire, this just became a game that’s only really good for a power fantasy.
PROBLEM 2: AI
The obvious: the survivor AI is worthless half the time. Results seem to vary, as in my footage they didn’t do anything particularly stupid. But my friends reported the AI walking off cliffs, failing to ignore the fire of molotovs, and generally ignoring teammates being pinned.
However, if the single player campaign bots are this bad, then the solo experience is doomed. It’s bad enough in Left 4 Dead the AI couldn’t use grenades because it lacked the ability to figure out which ones to take and how to use them, but the Back 4 Blood Bots can’t even use tool kits or healing supplies, so the player has to heal them all themselves and is the only one who can divert the horde’s attention. They also won’t stock up at safe houses and have to be manually told to heal at medical cabinets. And to put the icing on the cake, the bots actually can cause friendly fire in Back 4 Blood.
In Left 4 Dead, you had to lead the bots in single player. In Back 4 Blood, you have to carry them. In a team of bots, you’re the only one with any inventory what-so-ever. Either some massive changes to the AI needs to be made, or the prices and rules for items and upgrades in single player need to be altered to account for the fact that the player has three glorified turrets running on Windows 98 for allies.
Not that the zombies fare much better. Sure, commoners will try to swarm around you once you close the distance, but that’s about as noteworthy as their tactics or general movement goes. And special infected, aside from the snitch and the spider zombies, just zerg rush you. Very rarely do zombies try to flank or ambush the survivors, and the only one that can is literally the Spiderman zombie who can just move wherever he wants.
PROBLEM 3: REPETITIVE COMBAT
Riddle me this, Back 4 Blood: why is it that if I don’t aim my gun down the sights, it develops ADHD and shoots everywhere BUT where I aim?
This isn’t an issue of realism, it’s a matter of functional use. Every gun, from the shotguns to the bolt-action rifles, are used the same way and to the same effect: stop moving, point, and then shoot to maximum aim.
For example, what if with the Shotguns and the Light Machine Guns, aiming down the sights didn’t magically cure bullet spread but instead allowed for a higher rate of fire by keeping recoil under control? This would allow the close-range shotguns to still have a hip-fire run-and-gun approach, and LMGs can focus on crowd control with hip fire. SMGs, Pistols, and Carbines can have better range for the type of damage they deal, and assault rifles can be a nice inbetween. Just a thought.
But it’s not just the guns, but the zombies that make combat repetitive.
How do you kill the common Ridden? You aim at the head – their weak spot – so you can kill them in 1 to 2 shots. How do you kill the mutated Ridden? You aim at their weak spot so you can kill them without wasting an entire clip. How do you kill the Ogre? You aim at their weak spot so you can kill them within this lifespan.
It gets worse – there’s never really a break in zombie combat. Since hordes are normally just 20 to 30 zombies, it makes little difference between a summoned horde and the zombies just walking around. And the game just spams the mutated infected non-stop the moment you leave the Survivor mode. So there’s never really the quiet moments in Left 4 Dead where you can look around for stuff, or just wonder where and when the next disaster will strike.
So combat is you using every gun the same way while you fight every zombie with identical strategy while the game makes no effort to pace combat. There’s a reason people call this game’s combat tiring.
PROBLEM 4: OVER COMPLICATION
In Left 4 Dead 2, you have 6 elements to keep track of:
- Your Primary Weapon (17 Options across 3 tiers)
- Your Secondary Weapon (16 options across 3 tiers, most are melee weapons)
- Your Backpack Item (4 Options)
- Your Medicine (2 Options)
- Your Grenade (3 Options)
- Your Pulse (Ya either have it or ya don’t)
Pretty simple. Compare this for Back 4 Blood:
- Your Primary (In pretend for a moment they fix the issues I mentioned with them being interchangeable, ya got 18 choices)
- The rarity of Your primary (Every gun comes in destiny style tiers, so the colorful glow of your gun means it does more damage for some reason)
- The Attachments to your Primary (I can’t find a reliable list, even on wiki, but over 20 attachments with 5 different possible slots)
- The Rarity of the attachment (5 tiers instead of just 4, and for literally every single type. Plus, broken attachments that lower stats exist)
- Your Secondary (9 Guns and 4 Melee Weapons)
- The Tier of your secondary (Same rules as Primary)
- The attachments to your secondary (Pistols have 4 slots generally)
- Rarity of the attachments (5 tiers again)
- Your Quick Slot Items (4 items to choose from)
- Your Offensive Items Slot (6 options to choose from)
- Your Support Items (3 Items)
- Your Copper (You use it to stock in the safe house because Capitalism has outlasted civilization)
- Your Ammo (Ammo piles are replaced with gun-specific ammo, 4 ammo types totals)
- Your Trauma Damage (We’ll get to that later)
- Your Cards (Max of 15 out of who knows how many to choose from)
- Which of those 15 cards is first?
- Your character’s abilities (8 Cleaners to choose from, probably more to come as DLC)
There’s other elements not brought up here – like how the rarity of the side items can be upgraded – but the general note here is that Back 4 Blood is not a game you can just pick up and play. It will take several playthroughs to get an idea of how to do everything efficiently.
One really bizarre thing is the game’s approach to attachments. The game gives you the ability to replace attachments, but you can never remove them. This is done with the intent of forcing it to be a harder choice of not just immediately upgrading to the better gun… but from what I’ve seen (both when playing and YouTube videos), players will either only care about the raw stats of the gun and treat attachments as a bonus fry in the McBag, or forgo any strange weapons in favor of constantly sticking with their attachments and their effects.
I think just having weapons come in better versions with attachments being just based on their effect would be an easy way to fix that, but I also don’t think the game needs any form of this pseudo-Destiny nonsense. Because as it stands, it’s basically a version of Division 2 where you constantly claw for the best version of your favorite weapon, except you have to start back at square one every mission.
The rarity system also just isn’t worth the items. Quick Items almost never get upgrades in the shop and I’m not sure what they even do beyond speeding them up a bit. The offensive items all suck until you get to purple tier, except for the Pipe Bomb making it the hands-down best one; the only other item consistently used is barbed wire and that’s because the game loves to spawn it on the map. Healing items manage to avoid this problem, but first aid kits and bandages are rendered worthless thanks to Trauma. Speaking of which…
PROBLEM 5: TRAUMA
This one gets its own section because it’s a deal killer, especially on Nightmare. So, suffering “Trauma” means that as you get hit, your maximum health keeps getting lower and lower, and you lose extra health when incapacitated (especially on Nightmare). Everyone who brings this mechanic up hates it, and I’m no exception. Aside from the medical cabinets that are often locked behind doors and needing a tool kit, there’s no way to recover Trauma damage on Veteran and Nightmare. So basically, most players are constantly going to have their max health lowered.
To properly illustrate my frustration, allow me to bring up some possible reasons to include this mechanic, and why I don’t think they’re a good idea.
Trauma is to punish players for taking too much damage.
Let’s say you take 2 damage per hit from the common zombies. If I get hit 20 times, why is taking 40 damage no longer enough punishment? Why all of the sudden is the balance they set for the enemy damage no longer balanced enough? My friend said that it was to make it so you can’t just keep absorbing damage, but isn’t that the point of a health meter in the first place? On top of that, the game also retains the incapacitation limit – and actually made it more strict than it was in Left 4 Dead at that time.
It’s to stop players from just healing all their damage away.
Isn’t that the point of making health recovery items finite? Even situations where you can buy health packs are limited by how money is finite and all items use the same currency, so if you spend money to heal up, that’s money not going to buying replacement equipment and team upgrades. It also is worth noting that it actually breaks the balancing of healing in the Beta. Because both first aid kits and bandages cannot exceed trauma damage but also don’t repair it, then the pain pills (whose temporary health can ignore trauma damage limitations) becomes the better option in the safe house and almost always the better option (especially for melee builds where damage is practically unavoidable).
The game needs to balance players being able to increase their maximum health.
I don’t think it does. Not like this, at least. Hear me out: if you increase your maximum health, it’s because you’re expecting to get hit and want more mistake allowance. If you are confident in your ability to deal with threats before they hit you, then health upgrades won’t appeal to you and you won’t devote slots to them in favor of abilities you will benefit from.
So in the case of players who take these health increases, the game incorporates a system that will further encourage them to do so because a higher max health means it takes longer for trauma damage to reach crippling lows. If the idea is to fight against players just increasing their max health, the system will currently create a loop of the player constantly doubling down on it to help minimize the effect of trauma damage on top of being able to take more hits before going down in the first place.
And for players who don’t want to, there’s now a very punishing mechanic that they have to deal with because some players choose to increase their max health. Why should my friend playing as Walker have to deal with a mechanic because players like me are trying to make a Berserker class who need to be able to tank damage to work, anyway?
So, is there anything they can do?
- Remove Trauma. I think I made it clear I don’t value this mechanic. The game is pretty difficult as it is on anything above survivor (fine by me), so lowering the player’s max health for taking damage is massive overkill.
- Allow First Aid Kits To Recover Trauma Health. A lot of my friends would like this option. Taking all their suggestions into mind, I’d have it be that a first aid kit would first health for 30 health, then recover 30% of trauma (making the effect more drastic as the player is in a bad situation). I don’t personally think the cost for one needs to be any higher since Veteran makes first aid kits so rare to find outside of the safehouse shop anyway.
- Beer. No, I’m not joking. If the first aid kit is not a viable option, why not a tall 16 ounce can of beer? It’s model gives it a unique silhouette, it’s function at remove trauma but not recovering health gives the team a reason to not stock up on these alone, and the game allowing all healing items to be used on teammates means you’re literally shoving booze down your teammates throat to get them to calm down. Ya can even call the beer “Cold 4 You” – it’s almost perfect.
There’s cards to reduce trauma damage. Why not use those?
About that…
PROBLEM 6: THE CARDS
Through this article, one might have thought “wait, there’s a card to fix that. Why not just use it?” Every card you pick is a card slot NOT going to adjust your character’s play style. So if you try to get cards to fight against mechanics you’re not enjoying, such as Trauma, then it means it’ll take longer and longer to reach the point where the cards you’ve selected are making a difference in how you play the game. Do you stack up the cards that adjust the core mechanics to your liking or try to alternate between playstyle and stat cards? Either way, you’re playing a waiting game.
That’s a problem with the cards in general: while you might be allowed to make a unique play style, the beta’s take on means you only get to spend about three or four levels with a sizable amount of cards, greatly limiting the effect of your own custom loadout. And if the level selection and the card system in the final game is represented accurately in the beta, that means nearly every playthrough of Evansburg is going to be identical, and only later campaigns will play differently.
The card system has some unintended side effects on the player’s gameplay. The first is how it actually ends up encouraging the player to play in a similar manner with each play through. It’s not designed to do that; the game clearly wants players to build multiple decks to account for character combinations. But from practice, most players build a single deck that suits their preferred playstyle, and will maybe build another deck for either the same character or the other character they play as. But very rarely in the beta footage were people building more than two different decks.
That leads to the other concern – selfishness. Now, Back 4 Blood is currently doing a good job with demanding – not just encouraging – teamwork, something most games can’t do because they shove too many players into a single match. But the card system is sadly achieving the opposite of encouraging – but thankfully not demanding – selfishness. There are only so many cards in the game that focus on teamwork, and only so many that do so in each area. Most cards are focused on benefitting you, the player, as an individual instead of as 25% of the team. I don’t think this is that big of a problem, though – this is more of just an observation I had after watching Act Man’s video on Left 4 Dead 2.
Another smaller issue, albeit larger than the one just mentioned, is the corruption cards. These serve to show the player what randomly selected challenges await them. From stronger ridden of every type to fog being on the stage to more alarmed doors, players will know what each level has in store. I don’t mind if the game can’t “catch the player off guard” like in Left 4 Dead, in any case the gameplay is too slow for that kind of ordeal to compliment it. No, my concern is that the corruption cards feel like a half-assed measure to replicate the AI Direct from Left 4 Dead 2, since the “Game Director” seems to have as much creative freedom as anyone working on a MCU movie. Besides, why make a director that can adjust the game on the fly when you can just pick a bunch of things the game will spawn and tell the player “good luck, see ya in the social space if ya fail” right?
Not even that’s the real issue I take with cards, though; the big problem with the cards is the grind. You start out with just 7 cards in the beta, but let’s assume that’s just a beta quirk and the full game will start you out with enough cards for at least 1 full deck with some options. Because the real problem is the supply lines and supply points.
Supply Lines are battle passes under any other name. Complete with the progress-padded crap that most battle passes come with. You see, you unlock items in order. Meaning if you want a card, you need every card, spray, and banner unlocked before it. And if there’s an expensive card beforehand you don’t have interest in, well too bad. Spend the coins like a good little pay pig and buy the gaudy sprays that no one outside of Overwatch stans will ever use so you can get the right to buy what you want. Oh, you finished the supply run and want a new one? Uh, no you didn’t finish it, you just got the last card you wanted. You need to buy that final 150 point banner for your profile before this supply line is closed and new items become available.
When you then consider that most supply lines in the beta take about 350-400 supply points to fully purchase, and a successful run on Veteran across all eight maps earns on average 300 supply runs, most runs are JUST out of reach of a single “normal mode” 1 hour. So treat every three supply runs as a 2-hour dedication. And that’s assuming you don’t wipe out too many times and get kicked out of the campaign.
This creates an annoying loop of playing the same few levels over and over again to constantly buy cards, sprays and banners I won’t use so I can eventually get the few cards I want so I can eventually develop a playstyle I’m invested or comfortable in. And that’s just not my idea of a good time: playing a game in the hopes it’ll eventually get better. At that point, I’d normally just stop and go play something else and the final release is boned if this is what the “progression” system is like – number of maps be damned. If Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled was done in by this mindset, you can bet the Dollar Store Left 4 Dead from the makers of Evolve – the game that sold primary color guns skins at a higher cost than Sakurai charges for Mii Costumes – will suffer.
PROBLEM 7: GAME MODES
Okay, so let’s break this down. Left 4 Dead 2 features the following gameplay modes on PC:
1. Campaign (With Single Player)
2. Versus
3. Realism
4. Realism Versus
5. Survival
6. Survival Versus
7. Mutation
8. Scavenge
Now, removing game modes added after updates, Left 4 Dead 2 launched with 5 modes. Back 4 Blood, if the beta is representative, only have 2: Campaign (which has elements of Mutation thanks to the card system as a whole) and survival versus. We also know that campaign versus won’t be happening (The Infected lack synergy and levels are too bottlenecked for this design to work anyway), and [Semi-]Realism is on in both modes by default. Mutation is rendered pointless thanks to the card systems (if anything, having a rebalanced side mode without cards is more likely as an update), and I really doubt a niche [and underrated] mode like Scavenge is going to get any representation here.
Survival might get a separate mode from the PVP, but even then that’s three modes. And if all of them need cards and a deck for them, that’s three modes you can’t just jump into and play. Now sure, Left 4 Dead 1 launched with only 2 game modes (Campaign and a half-finished versus), but Left 4 Dead wasn’t a $60 game with $100 versions and an annual pass costing who knows how much locking “free players” (aka people not willing to spend triple digits on one game) out of extra playable characters and cosmetics (and you can’t practice DLC campaigns since you need to play with someone who has the DLC) while then also having an anti-progression system design to make players squeeze the blood from the same handful of modes.
CONCLUSION
If this seemed a little less balanced than normal (I normally mention the things I enjoyed as well, like the character designs in these), but I think it’s fitting that an unfinished game gets an unfinished archive. I plan to try out the full game when it launches on GamePass. But all i can say is I’m glad it’s coming to GamePass because this does not strike me as a game worth paying for. Given this is made by the creators from Evolve, a game that was ultimately directionless and ruined by microtransactions, the confused elements of the beta and the promised monetization leaves me feeling very uncertain for this game’s future. But to be fair, the core gameplay is good and a good deal of issues can be fixed before launch or in a relatively quick patch.
Then again, a lot of people said the same thing about Evolve at launch…
The Squid Chamber 