What happened to Back 4 Blood?

 Back 4 good?

Back 4 Blood is a good game, okay; and I don't want it to come across that I am denying that. It's serves as a callback to the key days of the four person cooperative campaign game and a send up to Left 4 Dead. In fact, every facet of the marketing for this game was hyper focused to ensure that any and everyone would know that this title was to be Left 4 Dead's spiritual successor. Every trailer and description flaunts the 'From the makers of Left 4 Dead' tagline wherever possible, every interview has that game's shadow slung over it's shoulder with references and comparisons plucked back and forth, and even the title 'Back 4 Blood', is both a riff on the old game's name and a meta reference to the fact that these developers have finally returned after all of this time to pick things up and push this style of game forward. And to that end it really does feel like Turtle Rock Studios wanted people to be remembering their classic Zombie survival game whenever thinking of this new title for the free expectations and pre-existing fanbase that would draw; but things haven't been peachy.

If you look at active player figures for this month, the amount of people playing Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam surpasses Back 4 Blood, and I mean by a lot. Steam Charts notes how Back 4 Blood is, as of the time of writing, looking at about 7,000 players in the 30 day average, whilst L4D2? 20,000. Wow, that's quite the divide, is it not? And of course, one must remember that some people playing this game will be doing so through the Game Pass version on the Microsoft store, which won't show up on Steam charts, but it's probably not going to amount to an active 13,000 extra players. People who are passionate enough to actively play a game usually go the extra mile to buy it, rather than stick around day after day praying that the game they like isn't rotated off the Microsoft Gamepass, and Steam is still the number one store on the PC; so these number discrepancies are still significant. But what do they precisely mean?

Well for one they mean that the interest around this sort of shooter which Turtle Rock drummed up managed to revive the Left 4 Dead community as people remembered what they liked about those games. But by that same merit it means that this brand new title, Back 4 Blood, was somehow lacking enough to these same fans that they preferred to go back to what they know, and I want to explore that. What was it that Back 4 Blood didn't do as well as Left 4 Dead 2, why is this long-past-it's-prime game still capable of retaining it's audience after all these years and what this means for the future of updates and active development awaiting the near future of Back 4 Blood? Because whilst this is very clearly a loss for Turtle Rock in the immediate, this isn't the end of their journey and I think most who've given it a shot can agree that Back 4 Blood isn't a total dumpster fire with no hope.

But first if we want to remember what it was that Left 4 Dead bought to the table, you must remember that this was a Valve title as much as it was a Turtle Rock game. Now that's significant because, crucially, Valve don't make games unless they can be certain there's some sort of mechanical innovation they can push through in some sort of way. (Or unless the game is 'Artifact'. Don't know what they were thinking with that one.) But did this dingy 4 person zombie shooter really bring innovation? Well that I didn't know, because I only really played the game casually myself back in the day; but famed silent internet game disaster recorder, Crowbcat, made one of their videos on the topic confidently highlighting a bunch of stuff I, and I'd imagine a bunch of other people, never even noticed about those original games.

Like the zombie death animations which are motion captured by a real stunt actor who the team recorded countless dozens of dying animations from, all in different angles and from different sources of death so that they could be slotted into the enemy animation suite and zombies wouldn't just randomly ragdoll when they die like they do in every single zombie game since. The carefully scored musical cues which piqué up in order to tell the player what they've just triggered or which special beast is attacking them in a cinematic way that doesn't clutter up the screen with garish text pop-ups. The extensive intractability with physics in the environments that allowed for entire rooms of chairs cans and books to go flying as they get struck by stray bullets or blown across the room by a Boomer, the detail that went into the main survivors characterisation and design that spanned from facial expressions to personality and even marrying design with the human character written into the world. All this comse together as well as the incredibly impressive zombie damage models which, to this day, I think may only have been surpassed by the Resident Evil 2 Remake. This kind of stuff, by it's very subtle nature, is the sort of thing that a player will take for granted. It's the details designed to compliment the raw game around it and not stand out so that the entire experience swirls together into a solid lattice of a great game. Only when these sorts of features are missing do you start to realise that something isn't right, even if you can't put your finger on precisely what it is. Left 4 Dead is missing everyone of those features I just mentioned.

Although, to be clear, the problem with Back 4 Blood, and why people are preferring Left 4 Dead 2 over it, isn't just because the title is lacking the serious polish that those games pioneered. I mean sure, if you announce your game as a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead then it is a little disappointing when the final product doesn't even meet the level of detail that went into the inspiration from 12 years prior, but Turtle Rock is a much smaller studio than the Valve team who worked on L4D, there were always going to be concessions. (Such concessions weren't exactly advertised, but it's no great shock either.) I think that Back 4 Blood's issue is less what it lacks and more what it has; and I'm not just talking about their strangely convoluted online versus mode which was so bad and inferior to Left 4 Dead's Versus Mode that it died in less than a month. I think it's the core structure.

Because what Back 4 Blood bought to the game in order to change up the gameplay from Left 4 Dead was this card system that would join hands with the AI storyteller to make each run unique. You would be granted cards at the start of stages which would influence parts of your gameplay and probably the decisions you would make arming yourself throughout the level. Select a few positive ones and have some negative cards forced upon you, and suddenly the level would feel different to the last time you went through it. This 'Rougelike' system sounds great on paper, but in practice is ended up being somehow both confusing and non-substantial. Confusing to new players who just want to jump into the action but were instead forced to juggle card metas before every map (a notoriously off-putting style of game to pure actionheads) and the cards themselves which mostly just offered sterile stat boosts. Now stat boost improvements are the sort of thing laser focused to appeal to diehard fans of your game who pick apart your game to the minutiae level, the way that MMO addicts do, but anyone not feeling this game from day 1 just isn't going to care that they can carry 10% more ammo, or that they gain 10% melee damage and speed, alongside 5% movement speed, for 4 seconds after each melee kill. Even reading that sounds like too much infomation to process unless I'm meta deck building and looking for this specific card to finish my ideal deck; it's just not sexy enough.

So when you've got a zombie game which is marketed as a long awaited sequel to a legendary title (to some) and it doesn't live up to the last game, and the new additions it does bring to the genre don't exactly feel like slam dunks in of themselves, is it any wonder why the Left 4 Dead fervour this game stirred up is slipping out of Turtle Rock Studios hands and back into Valve-owned Left 4 Dead 2? Now I don't think this is the end of Back 4 Blood by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I think that a 20k player base on Left 4 Dead 2 proves that these sorts of games are still sought after and there's a healthy audience eager for more. However, the raw game Turtle Rock have put together doesn't match-up to the originals, and their current direction of diversification feels sickly and ill planned. Fair enough, they just need to change tactics, shift their content development into new directions that makes Back 4 Blood stick out as an experience that can be fun, rather than one that is more complicated for complexities sake. I don't know if that'll look like more interesting and unique infected forms, brand new interesting maps and weapons, who maybe whole new systems thrown into the game that changes how this title is played; but right now I just think that Back 4 Blood has an upwards struggle and I, for one, am routing for them all the way.