Back 4 Blood

They can’t get this one rolled out fast enough. Act 3 in veteran is an exercise in pain right now; I can only imagine how bad nightmare must be.

With patches like these, who even needs bugs?

-Tom

Epic fall.

1 month in… I wonder if it is retaining players better on Gamepass and console?

I see its on sale at GMG for 38% off.

https://www.greenmangaming.com/games/back-4-blood-pc/

Even more damning

image

The roadmap lists what new stuff will supposedly be added:

-Tom

Cards can apparently catch fire, going by that graphic.

They’re just that hot, LordKOSC!

-Tom

My friends, who really loved the L4D games, did not seem to take to this and I can’t get them interested in playing anymore. And I’m not sure I just want to go through with bots so maybe I’m done too. Bummer, it seemed kind of fun.

My usually running mates and I hit pretty hard for a couple weeks, but it has dropped off the map fairly quickly.

I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it seems to lack some crucial factor that brings players back for more.

Numbers keep declining, so it doesn’t appear to be just us.

Any thoughts on what the root issues are?

image

fun gratifyingness

I got bored with it really fast but that’s not saying much because I didn’t care for L4D either.

I think I liked this game more than most here - and even I got burned out on it about a month ago. I managed to complete veteran difficulty, but the Body Dump finale on Act 3 was absolute torture with pubs and took me about 10-12 attempts. Once I had veteran completion and all the cards unlocked, I quickly lost interest with B4B as Nightmare with pubs is masochism.

I’ll go back and try Nightmare again after this patch on Thursday, but I’m to the point where if I’m not progressing with that - it’s time to uninstall.

For us the campaign was waaaaay too long. They would’ve done better having multiple smaller, self-contained scenarios like L4D. The card system needed work - unlocks weren’t at a satisfying pace and it wasn’t 100% clear what cards did at times, or displayed values were wrong/interacted in ways that weren’t immediately obvious. We dropped it right around their big balance patch that was discussed upthread that on its face made it sound like the game would be harder.

The update seems good, at least

Not only they have decreased the difficulty with these changes:

They also used the nerf stick on the Ridden waves here:

and the ridden stats here:

and gave some misc buff to players here

and buffed Combat Card and Healing Card and nerfed Corruption Cards.

All together it should make the game pretty different, difficulty wise.

I don’t think difficulty level is (was) the problem.

It was one of the problems. From what I could see in three different forums, there was a general agreement about it.
I still couldn’t finish Act 3 on Recruit, although I’m playing with dumb bots.
Steam says only 8% of the players have seen the end on Veteran or superior.

the problems of the game imo are:
-the difficulty. Not now, but before it was notably more difficulty than games like L4D, Vermintide, DRG, Payday 2, etc.
-the matchmaking system, with the weird series system, and the quick match players not being able to join the players doing the campaign.
-Together the mutation system, I thought it would server to apply a gameplay modifier to a match, but instead they accumulate all together as you play the levels in an Act, mushing the experience all together.
-The lack of campaign versus, it was what really gave L4D more life to the game for veterans.
-And perhaps the most important flaw, the special ridden. Their design makes the whole experience different (and less elegant) than L4D series. They are more tanky and the game throws more of them at you. While in L4D they were (with the Tank exception of course) more fragile, and they served mostly to push or pull someone from the team, separating them, or punishing players that are already separated of their team by trapping them, and thus making the team vulnerable to the normal zombies, which otherwise are a pushover. So it was all about being aware of your surroundings, communicate with your team and sticking with your mates. In B4B they are more about killing them fast the moment they appear by focusing fire on them.

In short, L4D: playtested, iterated on, and tuned to a fault; B4B: your typical “throw in every flavor of the month and hope it sticks” modern release (combined, of course, with the GaaS mentality that’s mesmerized every big dev out there)