Catching up to the rest of the world

 I'll just hang myself now.

The otherday I was slowly working my way through my ungodly long Steam wishlist (Yeah, we all know that pain, don't we?) and I ended up picking up a game that I must have thrown on that list perhaps a decade ago. It wasn't just on a crazy whim like some of the games I have there either, (I literally have no idea when I decided to throw Kynseed on that list, but I own it now. No idea why or how to play the damn thing; but I own it.) this was a simply legendary game that I wishlisted out of actual embarrassment as much as anticipation to actually play the accursed thing. The kind of game that is probably sitting on the games libraries of so many people out there that most people own multiple copies on now long depreciated consoles and storefronts; whilst I bought my first just the otherday. The kind of game that would get you funny looks for saying you've never played. I bought Left 4 Dead.

Now to be fair, I have played Left 4 Dead 2. I borrowed that quite often for my Xbox 360 back in the days that Blockbuster existed, and I have a feeling that I must have played the original at some point in my life but I could not take a guess as to when or where. But I've never owned either one of those games outright to play extensively until I'm sick of them; which I how I typically like to enjoy my games. Picking it up for the first time now, in the year of our accursed torturer 2022, feels like the kind of thing I should keep quite and sweep under the bed never to be seen again in the light of day. But I talk about literally everything on this blog and no one will ever see. I could pen my own verbose plans to take over an independent oil rig and adjudicate it from it's motherland and no one would be waiting there to stop me. So I might as well air my deepest and most embarrassing gaming confessions.

Left 4 Dead is one of those staples of gaming that shaped so much of what the industry is today. Four player co-op, party game mentality, dynamic level layout; so many of these systems existed in concept and idea before the creation of Left 4 Dead, but that game allowed these ideas to be bought into pristine focus for the first time ever. You can talk all day about a smart level editor who places objects and enemies in relation to how the players are progressing, but until you've seen it play out in front of you through multiple playthroughs of the same few levels; you don't get it yet. And then, suddenly, Resident Evil 4 is making use of similar systems because they work just that well. Iteration and improvement, key tenets of game design until Warner Bros. Interactive got involved. (Thank you once again for trying to ruin game development for the whole world, Warner Bros.)

Coming to Left 4 Dead for, perhaps not he first time per se, but the first fully engrossed time, is certainly a significant moment for me. Seeing the ways in which the game very much lives up to the hype built around it's name and the desperate fans still scratching for a true successor after the half-job that Back 4 Blood did. As well as the surprising ways in which Left 4 Dead somewhat disappoints, specifically I noticed the absolute lack of weapon variety. Which makes sense from a purely mechanical level; the game provieds the exact ingredients it needed to be what it needed to be and absolutely nothing more, but it still feels a bit weird to only find five different primary throughout the course of the entire game. Understandable, but absolutely unacceptable by the standards of today. (Can you imagine how many chairs would be flipped if a modern Zombie game launched without a chainsaw? Apocalyptic!)

One of the really interesting design choices that I haven't seen pretty much any other game of this style employ is a selection of neat musical cues tied directly to specific types of special infected. So that everytime you hear a strike of a piano you know that one has spawned, and when they got close enough to aggro you'll even be able to tell from their backing track which type they are without actually seeing them. It's sort of like encoding the soundscape of the game with it's own language that players start to pick up on subconsciously, or actively, as they play through the campaigns more and more. Of course, these are cues that are played throughout the entirety of the iconic Left 4 Dead introduction animatic, already driving home what soundtrack beats to attribute to which creature before you've even picked up the controller. That really did stick out to me because I just know any other modern company of the exact same time would pile up their trailers with pre-rendered action and unrelated action music. Valve always does go that extra mile.

There's actually a lot of very carefully designed systems that function neatly even within the bold choice of giving spawn placing to the hands of an AI. Smokers can grab and drag you from anywhere in their range, but if there's any sort of obstacle in the way, instead of letting the player dangle helplessly because of bad pathfinding, the pull action will stop and the creature will start choking you right there on the spot, ensuring there's no softlock situation on it's attack. Every high surface has a neat path leading up towards it it for Zombies to funnel through so there's no route to jumping completely out of harm's way and avoiding the horde, most high spots even have spawn spots even higher than you, so you're never free from watching your back. And there's also the nody vanishing, which is handled excessively cleverly so that the engine doesn't explode from rendering too many corpses and you won't just notice entire piles disappear the second you turn your back. Looking at the level of polish dedicated into every area of the design choice for the game kind of reminds me why it is people whine and moan constantly for Valve to come back to game development. (It's not just the Portal teams that paid attention to the little and dynamic stuff.)

Of course the sign for any timeless classic of a game is whether or not all of it's systems are still in use. I quite literally clicked the 'matchmaking' option by accident and was immediately thrown into a game; which alerted me that people still play this game and on open lobbies. Of course, then curiosity struck and I decided to consult the Steam Charts. Left 4 Dead does a respectable 500 people average, not brilliant but the game came out back in 2008; that there's any player base is a shock. And Left 4 Dead 2, the 2009 game, averages... woah- 18,000 players? Regularly? Actually it averages around about 20,000; but there was a moment in November when it was seeing around 80,000 players. In 2022. And 2021's Back 4 Blood, a game designed not only to be the successor to L4D but literally built around encouraging online play- is lucky to hit more than 6,000 players... Some games just can't die, it would seem.

So with my slow mastery of Left 4 Dead, which I'll probably take to Left 4 Dead 2 at somepoint, I've patched yet another hole in my lamentable video game lore and come one step closer to 'acceptable amongst gaming society'. It really is stark how much a single well made game can stand the test of time even amid an industry fraught with rapid improvement and reiteration. The standards of AAA gaming may be insanely high, but the level of care has become a far away myth now and it shows. Whilst games like Callisto Protocol launch with huge bugs that could have been avoided with basic due diligence, and Cyberpunk 2077 still has no word on whether or not they're going to put out a working world simulation police system before they wrap up support; masterpieces like Left 4 Dead and Baldur's Gate remain as pillars of quality demonstrating the value of solid management, clear visions and unflinching dedication.

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.