Awful Archives: Back 4 Blood [Retail Release]

It takes a good deal to get me to quit a game, especially for the Archives. Several of my all-time favorite games are heavily flawed, but the strengths keep me invested. That’s just the kind of critic I am: if there’s something to enjoy, I typically will enjoy them while playing it. A game being boring might make me hesitate to pick it up and play it, but it won’t stop me once I start playing it – especially if I enjoy parts of it. This is actually why the Pokemon Sword and Shield Archive hasn’t come out yet – I find Pokemon as a series quite dull, but when I do pick up Sword and Shield I actually have a good deal of fun with it.

For me to actively swear off a game before I finished it, it’s typically one of two things. The first is a general lack of positive traits. This actually stopped me from properly reaching the last story in Shadow The Hedgehog before reviewing it (I didn’t bring this up because it was irrelevant to the points made in that archive). The second is when the negative aspects there are so bad that not even the parts I enjoy can keep me in. This ultimately happened with Back 4 Blood thanks to the November update.

Yeah, I didn’t properly finish this one, but having played the game for 40+ hours, on top of playing and reviewing the Beta already, I’m confident in my assessment. I wasn’t planning on doing an archive on this game until this very month, but not because I didn’t finish it. I simply don’t like to do these archives for live service games; at any given moment, an update can launch for a live service where even a basic change to a core mechanic can have a trickling effect on the game. So for example, let’s say I think only the assault rifles are worth using and spend 3 paragraphs explaining the knock-on effect that has. But then the game gets updated and makes shotguns OP while nerfing automatic weapons across the board. Now, that’s a chuck of the archive no longer really of any use nor accurate to the game these days. Sure, in the era of patches this could happen to any game, but live services are designed for these kinds of adjustments from day one while receiving them way more often.

Between that and how the game ended up encouraging me to not really experiment with gameplay (more on that later), I’m instead going to use this as a quasi-follow-up to the Back 4 Blood Beta Awful Archive. First I’ll go over something I like (and the problems the game adds to it) then address the first four core problems I had with the beta, then another thing I like alongside its issues, then address the last four core issues.

Characters

The story of Back 4 Blood is fairly simple. A year after what’s known as the collapse, some survivors are making an off-the-record delivery to a friend of weapons and supplies, when suddenly the Ridden (zombies, which I shall refer to as infected moving forward) appear for the first time in months. With their friend quickly dying and their commander not being happy when they radio in about what they did, they soon find themselves fighting for their lives while not exactly being in the good graces of mission control.

There is a continuing story that takes a bit more of the forefront than Left 4 Dead, but it doesn’t accomplish anything more (if anything, it accomplishes less) but it’s clear the survivors are meant to be the main attraction. When it comes to said characters, both in terms of design and personality, I like them at their core but Turtle rock made a lot of annoying choices that leave me refusing to give either any high praise. For both the character designs and personalities, I’ll go over the design choices at large and then use my favorite character (Holly) as a more precise example

The cast of Back 4 Blood follow a design rule of color schemes, and so each of the eight characters has a piece of clothing with that color (Holly’s yellow sweater, Doc’s white lab coat, Kaylee’s purple shirt, hair dye, and the black leather jacket, and Jim’s orange hunting jacket). The other four characters share some basic colors, (Walker and Eevee are both blue, and Hoffmann and “Mom” are both green) but have different silhouettes to remain identifiable.

Unfortunately, this only applies to the default costumes, as players can unlock costumes. This isn’t as big of a deal as I feared it would be in terms of telling who’s who – honestly everyone seems to just use the names above players to identify each other. No, the problem is that the customization sucks. There are costumes and outfits. Costumes are preset and outfits are mixed and matched. This means that there are (at least currently) no “outfit” pieces to make use of the default designs. You want to play as Holly in the yellow sweater and leggings but with her hair down? Too bad, the hair down is an outfit piece, so now you’re in a white shirt and sweatpants. There are only 4 types of costumes shared among all characters: default, recolor, militia (only the five characters from the Beta even have this one… conveniently when the season pass that unlocks it immediately went on sale), and a SWAT outfit. And the outfits? Only a total of three pieces across three slots. Combine that with how ugly some of those outfit pieces are, and you have one of the weakest cosmetic systems I’ve seen in a game.

Okay, why does this matter? Well, for three reasons:

1. Dead Rising 3, a game from 2013, handled this way better while having more cosmetics than all eight characters in B4B combined have with more diverse costumes to boot.
2. You have to see everyone’s outfits. I don’t care for Kaylee’s default design, but all of her costumes and especially outfits suck. So the friend I played this game with – we’ll call him Mr. Copper (no relation to “Mr. Pro”) – decided to dress her up in obnoxious bright purple with black jeans, making her look like a 4chan “missing texture-chan”, I have to see this eye-sore. I know this is standard for multiplayer games and L4D2 was the exception, but it still doesn’t change that I hate how characters look 90% of the time because it seems I’m the ONLY one who likes the default designs, and instead of breaking from the model and applying L4D2’s approach to modes to the unlockable costumes, forced players to see how everyone else wanted to look because of FOMO.
3. As an extension of the previous point, this means players can only customize the character they play as, which they’ll rarely see because it’s a first-person game.
4. There’s actually a fourth problem, but we’ll get to that later.

I like the designs the game has but not the designs everyone else tends to rock. So how about the characters themselves? Well… they can be good, but also annoying. Characters have two types of dialogue: gameplay and narrative. Gameplay dialogue is just the characters’ referencing the gameplay events: from a horde spawning to spotting a boss-tier infected to looting a car. Narrative dialogue is when the characters talk to each other, often about the story thus far or their own personal lives/outlook on the situation.

The gameplay dialogue is easily the worst of the two, as this is where most of the cringe-worthy lines are. From Holly having more than one joke relating to her having to pee (thanks, totally needed that) to her in every single level hoping that the car she’s looting would have a jar of pickles to make her millennium, the phrase “windbag” came to mind with all eight of these characters. Expect your character to talk almost every time they can. You get to hear the same six lines of dialogue for each type of interaction across the run with the added bonus of characters sometimes talking over each other when hordes show up (although this happened less and less so they may have fixed that part). Even then, I learned to savor whenever they actually stopped talking.

That’s a shame, too; the narrative dialogue fares much better. Holly even has my favorite line in the whole game, where she laments how after spending a year rebuilding society to some passing-resemblance of normal, only for it all to fall apart overnight. She then tells Walker she’s done talking when he mentions it’s not like her to be like this. This moment of implying that Holly’s humor is a coping mechanism instead of her just being wacky is greatly appreciated, and every character has moments like this. But it’s just that – moments. This is not a defining aspect of Holly’s character, nor do these moments ever carry on for other characters either. Each character’s dialogue for the story can make them feel like a separate character from their gameplay quips.

Of course, the humor being better would work wonders. Let’s use my least favorite joke in the game (thanks to Holly) to explain the various reasons why “the funny” isn’t here. In the chapter 3 finale, if both Holly and Walker are present, she’ll ask the team at large where the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” comes from. Walker is the only one who answers her, not believing her theory before eventually saying he’d rather fight the infected instead of listening any further. This isn’t a bad joke if you ask me on paper, it’s the details that kill this joke.

First is that the location is inappropriate for this. That’s supposed to be part of the joke, but it doesn’t stop it from removing a lot of tension from the finale of this particular[ly short] campaign. Compare this to Ellis’ stories; regardless if it’s about Keith, Jimmy Gibs, Kiddie Land, or just something weird he thinks, the game saves it for downtimes. L4D2 has a lot of algorithms (known as the AI Director) that can (among several other things) measure the stress levels of the survivors and use that to determine when the game is in “downtime” and if Ellis and the team would be in the mood for one of his stories. This is on top of most of his stories being saved for safe rooms to begin with, and the only thing his buddy Keith hasn’t done yet is kill the mood.

This leads to the other two problems: repetition and variety. Both Left 4 Dead games had response lines that may or may not play, and [usually] each of the four survivors had at least a few lines for each situation. This meant that you could play a map and get different lines each time. Back 4 Blood instead just has it be that each location as a single major line of dialogue between a character and a few others, with some extra follow-up lines if the right playable character is present. So if Holly and Walker are present at the finale, you will hear the shooting fish in a barrel line. Every time. In its entirety. At most, Kaylee might add a few lines at the end if she’s there. It’s worth mentioning that some characters will reference a playable character not present in these locations if no one selected them, like with Hoffman during chapter 4-1. Even then, this hurts the dialogue as a whole while making even the good jokes lose their luster, especially since the game (unintentionally) encourages the player to not experiment with other characters by tying certain abilities to each one.

Finally, it’s rather unprompted in this case. Literally just here because it’s been too long since something funny was said. It’s not like Walker yells that if he kills an infected without missing, or maybe the restaurant sign offering to sell cooked fish or something. An underrated part of Ellis’ stories is how each of them relates to the location; it makes it more natural and ties into Ellis’ character better: he doesn’t quite appreciate the danger he’s in and is instead asking stupid questions or thinking back to old times.

If anyone who reads this is interested, I can do a future article going into my thoughts on each character, but in general these are my issues: the character’s default designs are fine with a customization system that makes it so I can only decide how the character I will almost never see looks, rendering the default designs almost mute, and the characters themselves have repetitive one-liners that often aren’t even funny the first time while failing to tie into what is actually meant to be their defining character traits.

Okay, enough talking about digital people. How did my thoughts on the Beta’s gameplay translate to the full game?

Difficulty

Recruit was made harder in the full game in order to make it so those who want to play on the lowest difficulty don’t have a brainless experience. And to be clear, that is a good thing: as one of my issues was the Recruit being too easy and effortless. However, that also wasn’t my big issue with the difficulty. First, although I didn’t voice it, I did think Veteran was too hard, if anything it’s only harder, but the lack of an inbetween of Recruit and Veteran was far more damning than the former being too easy or the latter being too hard. It made the jump between them too high and made the only way to get good at Veteran was trial by fire. That’s all still true. However, I didn’t explain how difficulty actually works in that old article. So allow me to remedy that and show how the difficulties have the big gaps they do.

Difficulty in B4B has two sides. On one side is the player’s stats. Veteran is treated as the normal mode, as Recruit (Easy) offers inherent damage resistance, removes friendly fire, and offers trauma resistance (trauma damage is the player’s max health lower after taking large amounts of damage) while Nightmare mode (hard) makes the player extra extra trauma damage when they go down and also doubles friendly fire. There are other elements such as the game-making medical cabinets costing copper (in-game currency) to use, but these stats are what matters. More accurately, it’s that trauma damage resistance being lost on top of taking extra damage that makes the jump too big. Since max health loss is connected to how much damage you take at a time, you’ll take more damage on top of losing that trauma resistance to begin with, so you’re actually taking 3 times the trauma damage instead of twice; assume on Veteran that you’ll only be able to recover half your health at any given moment.

Of course, friendly fire being turned on can’t be ignored, either. A big reason Recruit fails to prepare players for Veteran is that a lot of builds become far more dangerous when friendly fire is an option. In fact, most horde-clearing builds require you to be away from your team to safely attack since attacking quickly and indiscriminately is crucial to leveling the horde before you take too much damage. However, when you’re away from the team, the special infected can easily pounce you. Sure, only 3 of them can even grab you, but it only takes one pin and a few zombies to wreck your health bar. And on Veteran, that then translates to lost max health. Only medical cabinets (not even first aid kits) can recover trauma without a card effect, and on Veteran medical Cabinets only heal once for free and then cost 400 copper (making it cost more than 90% of what the shops in safehouses offer). So on this mode from stats alone, it’s very easy for a single mistake to snowball into a terrible situation just because enough things went wrong.

Then there are the corruption cards. These determine what threats will be encountered over the course of the level. Not counting the finale cards (which are really just the game telling you the objective for the finale), most of these cards simply added challenges to the level. Examples include but are not limited to:

• Extra traps like alarms and crow gatherings that summons hordes if activated/startled
• Riot zombies that take extra damage
• Frenzied zombies that deal extra damage
• Fire zombies that deal damage by just being close enough
• Toxic zombies that leave a pool of acid upon death
• All special zombies can have armor that covers their weak points, making them take more than a full clip to put down
• Spawning extra boss-tier zombies on a map
• Buffing the “Snitch” (Screamer) to always summon a horde when attacked even if killed before it screams
• Making the entire place dark and/or covered in fog.
• Auto summoning hordes every 3 minutes

It’s worth mentioning some cards always appear in certain levels for story reasons (like Riot zombies at the police station). Beyond that, Recruit has 1 to 3 randomly drawn cards, Veteran is truly randomized, and Nightmare maxes the draws. Since I’ve never had a run of Veteran where I got less than 4 extra cards, you’ll have to always be dealing with a lot more variables and ways the game can counter you. Probably the most manageable aspect of the jump between Recruit and Veteran, though.

Finally, there’s the continue system. Universal across all difficulties, the team gets one continue per run. Just one. If at any point in the 10-12 levels of the run your team wipes a second time, everyone is kicked back to the social space, and the run gets locked down. You’re only option is to start new. Sure, you can pick a level to retry from (although not every level at launch was an option on Veteran to start a new run at) and the game even lets you draw enough cards along with a bit of copper to buy some stuff, but keep in mind that you won’t have any weapon attachments, supplies, extra cards or team upgrades (those are really important). Given those elements can often make or break a run, most players will elect to just restart regardless of the difficulty.

The thing is, my original recommendation for an in-between difficulty – “Survivor” – would still be a welcome middle ground. Here’s what I’d go with:

• Players lose their damage resistance but maintain the trauma resistance
• Medical cabinets offer two free heals instead of four, allowing players to recover but forcing them to decide who needs it more
• 1 extra corruption card than recruit
• 15% friendly fire

Based on the last two updates, I’m not holding my breath that making a mode that isn’t as difficult is not on their agenda, though…

A.I.

Okay, this one is easy. I’m happy to say most of the crucial issues with the A.I. were fixed in the full version, but I’m disappointed in how they were fixed. The general issue appears to be pathfinding and uneven terrain. Survivor bots simply teleport whenever they get stuck, which still happens. That said, I haven’t seen anyone just mindlessly walk off as they did in the Beta, and while the infected can struggle to find the survivors (the Hag is really bad about this), it’s far more playable.

They also made it so the Bots can heal for free at medical cabinets without counting against free uses, but a player must alert them to the cabinet’s existence for each time. Survivor bots also have infinite supplies that operate on cooldowns. I think these cooldowns get longer on higher difficulties, but I don’t actually know.

Both of these changes fix some of the player frustrations but don’t actually address the core problems (A.I. can’t traverse the maps very well, and can’t judge situations enough to use even basic healing supplies). I believe these two problems to have long-term effects on the game, but I’ll get to that later; the moment-to-moment gameplay is improved in this regard.

Annoying Combat

In the original article, I talked about the combat being repetitive, and to be honest I’m just going to take the L on that one. That doesn’t mean they fixed the combat, I’m saying I shouldn’t have made that a point to begin with. The only part I stand by as being an issue, or at least a missed opportunity, is how firearm accuracy is tied to aiming down the sights, making running and gunning a non-option. Even shotguns will miss everything short of point blank (and sometimes even that with the sawed-off or the AA12) when fired from the hip. Shotguns simply gaining a higher rate of fire instead of accuracy when aimed down the sights would have been more interesting and allowed players to adopt a run-and-gun tactic on the fly without having to devote half a deck of cards to it.

So in its place, here’s just some parts of fighting zombies that I came to dislike over 40 hours of playtime:

• Stingers and their variants can just instantly jump to any wall they want, effectively meaning that they have no rules for positioning themselves.
• Stringers themselves can be hard to identify when getting hit due to poor sound design and the damage indicators not being well pronounced.
• Hockers, the Stinger variation that can pin the player, has a stupidly short cooldown period that when topped off with their wall clinging can make them nearly impossible to kill without at least 2 players because they will almost alway land their shot.
• Stalkers also have almost no cooldown if they get knocked off a survivor they are dragging away, meaning there will be times they just immediately grab the same survivor again.
• The Crushers, a variation of the Tallboy that grabs a survivor and… well, crushes them, has the same problem with the bonus with the Stalkers along with being massive damage sponges. This is because their weapon points are on the arm, which can only be easily hit from the side or when someone is being lifted up and crushed. If one is coming at you, it may as well not have a weak point.
• Boss enemies (Ogres, Hags, and Breakers) only appear in a small handful of locations, and even with the corruption card system most maps only have two locations they’ll spawn. Most of the time, boss zombies are simply set pieces to be run from or killed.
• Retches (the fat zombies that spit acid instead of puke) have two design faults. First, they look almost the same as the Reekers, the vomitters that summon the horde, making identifying and countering them on short notice rather difficult (the Tallboy and Bruises have a similar issue). Second, the fact the acid sticks to them and leaves a pool everywhere they vomit is overkill. Top that off with they’re high health (only outdown by Tallboy types) and the stupid range (they can puke about a good 4 to 5 car lengths) for an obnoxious enemy.

I could go on, but you get the idea: the actual combat has a lot of small annoyances and a single update won’t fix them.

Rarity

In the Beta archive, I expressed a concern that the moment-to-moment gameplay would make things too complicated for a player to jump on in. I’m happy to say in the final game that is hardly a problem. Instead, it’s the weapon rarity (a mechanic I merely referenced before writing off as unimportant in the original archive) that turned out to be a big problem. More accurately, it compromises what appears to be the intended purposes of some systems.

Left 4 Dead 2 encouraged players to regularly switch weapons with ammo and attachments: grabbing the laser sight attachment made your gun more accurate, but only ammo piles would replenish its depleted ammo; a duplicate of the gun would simply replace it with an unupgraded version. Back 4 Blood ups the ante in terms of attachments. There are now laser sights (as in more than one kind) along with scopes to choose from, and there are also attachments for the gun’s barrel, clip, and stock. However, ammo is now separate from guns (there are four types of ammo in the game: pistol, machine gun, sniper, and shotgun) and so there’s really no reason to drop your weapon (among other problems).

This is where the rarity system comes into play. Weapons, attachments, and supplies all come in varieties (color-wise, white, green, blue, purple, and a few attachments get a yellow tier), offering direct upgrades to the stats of that item. However, the player cannot (at the time of this article’s writing) remove attachments, so one needs to think if dropping the upgraded weapon for a higher tier but basic weapon is a good idea. At least in theory. In practice, there’s never a good reason to hold onto a lower grade weapon if a higher tier is present unless you’re literally at the end of an act.

First, there’s the fact that the attachments operate in percentage values. This means that higher-tier guns will simply get larger benefits from attachments, to the point where even lower-tier attachments can get identical results. Second, guns themselves get ridiculous increases in stats, to the point where the statistical performance of trading would barely be felt. Third is how attachments are distributed: while gun rarity is determined by how far into an act the team is, attachments are determined by location. Typically, better attachments will be found in areas that require tool kits to open. So there’s never really a reason to not immediately apply a better attachment to a gun when you find it unless you’re letting a teammate get it instead. Finally, the game just gives out attachments like candy. If at least one player enters each level with a tool kit (which so long as the team collects copper as they go through is a non-issue), you can be assured you’ll always have some quality attachments for your weapons.

(Side note: items like first aid kits, pipe bombs, and defibs don’t come in separate rarities. Safehouse stores sometimes sell cards that just make each item for that equip slot go up a rank, which then affects all spawning items of that type)

Okay, so the rarity system doesn’t make for interesting decision making, but what’s actually wrong with it? Well, it’s what’s known as min-maxing. This is when players try to max out their stats, be it the player or weapon, in favor of neglecting or actively minimizing all others. The attachments even at their best only offer percentages high enough to where if the gun specializes in that area it can get a big effect, so typically players will be constantly searching for better guns, better attachments, and copper for upgrades. This will continue up until the final level of an Act, after which the run ends.

The rarity system turns this into a looter shooter where you don’t get to keep your loot. Every run starts from square one. All the while adding nothing to the gameplay loop that Left 4 Dead [2] achieved without the aid of this Destiny nonsense.

Level Design

Level design is a bit hit and miss. The main levels can be a bit too straightforward for their own good, as there aren’t as many nooks and crannies as either of the Left 4 Dead games had. It doesn’t outright lack them, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like there was less explorable space to help justify the placement of the tool-kit locked doors. The bigger downside comes with the mutated infected: since there’s not much in the way of dark rooms or corners for them to spawn in, they’re mostly just standing out in the open or spawning out of bounds before walking in. And since they can be shot before even agroed, even the most fragile of them have stupidly high health pools. Neither of these applies to the finales, though; they’re generally far more open and have more room to explore for both enemy spawns and supplies to find.

In fact, the campaign finales are my favorite part of the game. The level-sized finale has the exploration and proper scavenging that the main levels tend to skimp out on (which is a little embarrassing since the finales don’t skip out on the tool kit doors to achieve this), while the smaller ones are still open enough to give the infected flanking opportunities while forcing survivors to watch multiple flanks. 

Variety in the levels is probably the strongest part. Not visually, that’s actually rather below average. But the level objectives don’t take long to go beyond surviving points A to B. From having to find and rescue survivors to boarding up a library (that in later missions serve as the entire safe house) to even option objectives like destroying mines to stop infected from spawning, Back 4 Blood does a good job mixing up the objectives. This reaches its apex during finales, as only a single finale falls into the “hold out until help arrives” angle, with the rest having either additional elements or entirely different objectives. My favorite level hands down is “bar room blitz” where the team needs to keep a jukebox going to distract the infected while the hospital loads up survivors. The infected prioritize attacking the jukebox and will only focus on survivors when it shorts out, but survivors are only loaded in while music is still playing. If there’s ever a mod for Left 4 Dead 2 to add this finale, I’m getting it.

That said, not all the attempts at variety work. Act 1 especially has some really annoying gimmicks to it. Chapter 3, a two-level campaign, requires players to carry supply boxes throughout both levels in what would normally be a mutation in Left 4 Dead 2. Act 1’s first chapter also has the worst finale in the game: you have to cross a bridge to blow up a boat, stopping the infected from leaving the now destroyed town of Evansburg. Ignoring how often random players can’t decide if they want to speedrun this section or take the time to prepare, the finale requires the players to escape the boat, pick up bombs, run back in the boat to plant them, then after they’re planted escape in 90 seconds. This is way too much for the first finale and is the only finale teams seem to regularly wipe on. You’ll only have a handful of cards and fairly mediocre weapons at this point in the run, so the special infected will give you a lot of hell here.

Combine all of that with the “wipe twice and you’re s.o.l. Try again and don’t ever make a mistake again” system and that each act is a two-hour commitment, and you have a really tiring level structure that undermines some creative levels and ideas.

Trauma

I’ll keep this one short. They made it so temporary health stops the player from receiving trauma damage. This is a good step in giving the player a way to prevent it. However, none of the issues I originally brought up have seen changes. So allow me to just copy and past:

“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 need 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 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?

There are cards to reduce trauma damage or allow first aid kits to recover trauma. Why not use those?

About that…”

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 the kicker for the card system: you’re not making builds per se, but are instead making a progression system for the act. You decide what perks you can acquire without paying copper, which perks you start with, and the order you can generally get the selected perks. However, just like in the beta, you don’t get to spend a lot of time with the full effects of your set. This encourages players to follow a basic structure for building a deck: the first six cards are designed for the first few levels as safe options, with halfway through the deck having the high-risk-high-reward options (the cards with the crippling downsides and massive upsides) with any beneficial cards that aren’t strong enough for the early game going towards the bottom. The final boss is the only time the player can draw all their cards, and I didn’t bother playing the game long enough to get to it (but I hear it’s not very good; go figure).

Also, remember how I said the game ends up discouraging experimentation? That’s because the card system encourages the player to play in a similar manner with each play-through. Let’s take a card I use: Mean Drunk. Increase melee damage by a whopping 60%, but you lose the ability to sprint. Now, you could devote a bunch of movement speed upgrades to make up for that… or use those spaces to max out your damage output so anything that attacks you dies instantly. Any card in the game with a detrimental effect will take several other cards to undo the effect of, basically meaning that one really good card now takes several slots to make usable; it’s almost always better to min-max a deck’s loadout to play into your strengths, and the one-card-per-level rule means that countering downsides is just not viable for a from-scratch run.

Then there’s the nerfs. You see, Turtle Rock decided over the past two months that some builds have been too effective and had players beating the game in unintended ways. As a result, early every melee, speedrunning, economics, and healing card in the game has been nerfed into the ground across the two updates. This further encourages min-maxing with builds because every time these cards get nerfed, it means those focusing on the builds need more of them to make up the difference while a single one cannot boost a different playstyle because the stat is too low to justify using it over something that plays into the strengths of your build.

Then there’s the grind. It’s even worse than it was in the Beta. The fourth issue with the cosmetics I alluded to earlier is that you have to unlock costume pieces because you need everything in a supply line to get rid of it and replace it with a new one, and you have to get them in order. No joke, 80% of the supply points earned from the game go to cosmetics you’re forced to get, basically creating a massive tax on most of the player’s rewards. That’s ignoring the player having to also buy cards they have no interest in using. This means that players are forced to just grind and squeeze the blood from the stone, as it can easily take 20+ hours. It took me 40+, as I didn’t want to tackle the final acts of the game until I perfected my melee build. Literally the night I got the final card (Face Your Fears) is when the infamous November Nerfs hit.

That’s what caused me to quit the game, and I bet several others as well: spending dozens of hours to get that perfect build only for it to be harshly nerfed (melee builds deal a total of 40% less extra damage, speedrunner run about 35% slower, etc) demotivated players. Why learn a new deck? They’ll just nerf that as well. Why earn supply points for more cards? The most recent patch dropped supply points earned in almost every level, and I have to spend most of them on crap I don’t want anyway. In my case, why even finish the game? It’s not like anything I would want is rewarded for beating Act 4 for the first time. I’m confident in saying many players were like me and just went “this isn’t worth it” and dropped the game.

The game also added burn cards, or one-time use cards. Most people think it’s for monetization. While I think that might be true, I have another theory. I think they’re added for infinite unlocks, as the game is built with the idea of grinding for more cards. So since you can have as many burn cards as you can hold, players who are desperate enough to justify the time spent (sunk cost fallacy) will now always have something to work toward, won’t they?

And the bad news is there’s still one more section.

Game Modes

For this final section, allow me to just point out Back 4 Blood has 2 of the 8 game modes from Left 4 Dead 2: Campaign Mode and Survival Versus. I would like to point out why I don’t think the other modes are likely to come later down the line:

• Campaign Versus: the more gimmicky levels along with the lack of spawning occasions for the infected means that both sides will have levels that just suck for them. Imagine as a survivor having to save others in the supermarket and then the special infected players can just corner you and gang up on players isolated.
• Realism/Realism Versus: The game already has elements of the traditional versus mode, and the idea of difficulties with added downsides is rendered mute by the card system. Even the idea of having a mode without cards means the entire game would have to be rebalanced to account for that since the game is already built around the players making their own strengths and weaknesses
• Survival: Could very well be added, but character and card perks would make infinite survival actually possible. But if they just remove those cards, the mode will likely go unplayed.
• Mutation: the closest they could do is pre-set challenges with certain builds (WWZ does something similar), but I don’t see anything like this being deemed worth the effort.
• Scavenge: Probably the most achievable of the L4D2 modes, as all the VS maps are just arenas, so adding gas and a generator shouldn’t be too hard. But much like with mutation, I don’t see a side more like this being deemed worth the effort.

All of this is to say that the game is lackluster in terms of content, is forcing players to squeeze the blood out of the base content, and is not in a position to add additional game modes. Plus, with most of the new content (likely) to be locked behind DLC, it’s hard to say B4B is getting any better any time soon.

What a shame of a game. A game I wanted to love, still kinda liked, and came to hate. I got 40 hours out of Back 4 Blood at launch, and I had fun with those 40 hours, warts and all. But with the updates since launch, the game I tolerated but was having fun with no longer exists, and the Back 4 Blood that replaced it has all the problems along with new ones and lower highs. Frankly, I probably won’t come back to this game even if they fix it, which they probably won’t because they want to make a game they want to see played, not a game that their player base enjoys playing.

I never finished Back 4 Blood, but all this nonsense, I’m certainly done with it.