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.

I played the Back 4 Blood Alpha

 Back from the dead

So remember a few days back there was this thing called the 'Game Awards' that happened? Well you see it's this big show where they give us trailers and show off upcoming games and even play music sometimes. There's even the odd celebrity or two. I hear that they hand out awards too, but no one really cares about that stuff, so I just focus on the games really. And in that vein there was one title which really did the work of wooing me with it's very premise and that was Back 4 Blood. The cheekily-named successor to Left 4 Dead made by Turtle Rock Studios in the absence of any Valve funding. (They'd only fund a sequel if it came exclusively to VR with 4D options) I expressed some mild interest at the time, that's a lie I pretty much fell head-over-heels for it, but what I was really excited for was the promised closed Alpha which would be not too long after launch. Well as of the publishing of this article that Alpha ran it's course about a week back and I was lucky enough to be a part of the ride, so what exactly do you think I thought of the whole thing?

Well, firstly, I had a little bit of trouble with the settings, although for as embarrassingly weak as my rig is (there's nothing stronger than a GTX 1050 Ti in my box) I managed to erase practically all lag with a little bit of tinkering, so that certainly speaks to the accessibility of the game even in public Alpha. I also had a strange bug where I couldn't reliably use iron sights with my mouse, which was the most bizarre thing, but I have an Xbox controller so there was no big fuss there either. Hmm, let me see... The AI was terribly ineffective, but this game was clearly built for online play so I can't get too fussy. The sounds of the weapons were either too tinny, weak or- whatever the heck that vulcan minigun was supposed to be. (It sounded genuinely awful everytime I used it) Yep, I think that's about every major gripe I had in my experience; now with that out of the way I can focus on the many positives.

Firstly, yes, this is the Left 4 Dead 3 that you've been waiting for all these years by all accounts except name. From the moment you spawn inside of your first safe room you'll instantly know exactly where you are and what you're playing, and that familiarity might, if you're me, distract you from the actual new systems that this game shoves in your face without warning. Such as the store which is accessible in every starting area and makes use of the currency found throughout the levels in order to buy ammunition and special gear. (I.E. grenades, lockpicks and medkits) This is just about the start of the ways in which Back 4 Blood proposes to switch up the formula that you're used to by offering, among other things, actual builds to be run for characters.

Now don't worry, these characters aren't inbuilt with immutable skills that'll have people fighting over picks in the lobby (There's already been enough of that this year between Genshin and Avengers) although I did notice that Holly appeared to spawn with her baseball bat unlike the other characters, whom she referred to by its name an annoying amount. Instead Back 4 Blood operates with a perk card system which gives each character one unique trait and leaves the rest to be picked up the player each time that they enter a safehouse between acts. (Or they can be bought directly during the run in some very rare scenarios) These Perk cards are entirely random and part of a new Roguelite aesthetic that Back 4 Blood is trying on for replayabilities sake, and I like the idea even if the execution hasn't exactly stood out to me yet.

As you select your perk cards 'the Director', (Back 4 Blood's name for the AI who spins RNG and apparently dynamically places loot and enemies) picks three cards that the 'Ridden' abide by. Most of these I completely shrugged off each time they were pulled apart from the one which decked a bunch of them in bulletproof armour; that one actually sucked a lot. What I found a lot more interesting were the player perk cards which could range from something as innocuous as a damage boost to weak points to something as build-shifting as a sleight heal for melee kills or even one perk wherein when you heal another player you also get healed for the same amount of hitpoints. (Yeah, that one's pretty much a must-have) I really got a sense for how in the full game, when things are a little more refined, these cards could really change things up significantly enough to fuel replayability. And that's on top of a basic premise which already promotes replayability anyway as evidenced by the still thriving communities around the predecessors.

But that's all the stuff you can read on the box, how about how it all actually plays? Well just like with Left 4 Dead I found my play experience peppered with unforgettable dynamic moments that were the heart of this game to me. I had one standoff against one the deadly goliaths known as an Ogre who pinned me and another player down by camping a door we needed to leave out of, cue a scene of me managing to sneak between his legs and mounting a mad dash down the highway whilst his pursuits shook the screen with every step. Or how about the quest where we were tasked with blowing up a ship freighter, for which we all seemed well equipped until one by one we got picked off and only I was left to escape the horde whilst everyone else bled out around me. Or even the screw up where an AI teammate lowered a bridge for progression and then retracted it when half the team was crossing, killing us all. All these moments where over the course of several playthroughs across the one mission that was available in the Alpha, highlighting how much I expect to get out of running an entire campaign over and over.

For a very long time I had forgotten the heart of Left 4 Dead and what it was about the game that I found so alluring, but the silly fun of being swamped by so many bodies that you can't even see your bullets is easily summoned once more by Back 4 Blood. And why shouldn't it? These are pretty much the same devs. Whilst I have in the past praised games like Vermintide for evolving upon the Left 4 Dead premise and turning it into something new, like a melee brawler, there's something about the original that's just implacable. And whatsmore, I feel like there's enough space in this niche little corner of gaming for Back 4 Blood, Vermintide and even that new 40k themed title that's coming in the near future. Despite feeling similar they all serve vastly different genres and moods, and I respect a gametype that can be that diverse.

So safe-to-say I had a lot of fun with my few days playing Back 4 Blood, and though it's not the sort of game that I could grind out repeatedly, it was one that made me smile evetime I played. If that's the promise that this game can hold then you can consider me sold, and that goes doubly true if I get a chance to see the ways that a title like this will improve. (Because we all know what it means for us to be living in the live service age, no?) I see this as the sort of the game to keep on your harddrive for those days when you feel like doing nothing else but bashing-in some heads, and for me it takes a very special game to fill that sort of void. So given everything I've played so far, I'll say that Back 4 Blood is on the right track. (Although for a parting bit of advice I'd encourage given the Director a little more freedom, I'd imagine it could really become something incredible with some nurturing)

Back 4 Blood

It's go a name like a B-grade action movie starring Steven Segal

Christmas has finally arrived for me. No, not because of Cyberpunk, but because of Game Awards season, which essentially allows me to piggyback off of the industry for content. (Yay) The night itself was pretty boring and anticlimactic for me, with the obvious suspect collecting all of the rewards that they were looking for, but there were still a steady selection of trailers that tickled my interest in various ways. Now I didn't feel that everything I saw there was worthy of conversation, and that might be because we saw neither Silent Hills nor Elden Ring despite several assertions from 'in-the-know' sources. (Never trust anyone ever) But I thought it wouldn't be right if I just ignored the game awards entirely on this blog about gaming so I'll say this much; congrats to Last of Us, Hades should have won more and Christopher Nolan should spend more time talking about games and less time twisting producer's arms in order to get his movies into theatres in the middle of a pandemic. (I'm never going to let that go.) So let me start off this award day coverage by talking about Back 4 Blood.

Behold probably the biggest 180 I've ever done regarding my opinion of a game, because I went from completely disinterested to signing up for the Alpha in the space of a couple minutes. To my credit I will say thus; their trailer sucked. I mean the cinematic trailer specifically; and it was the most terrible cinematic that I've seen in a good long time. (Actually only topped by a few other trailers during this very event.) First it started off with zombies, never a good sign when you're looking for imaginative premises, then it showcased a group of survivors so forgettable I literally cannot remember a single one of their faces; and it was all garnished with comically generic dialogue and witty banter which bordered on parody in it's flat lifeless content. I mean this looked bad. That was, until, I saw the title and noticed it was 'Back 4 Blood', with a stylised '4' instead of 'for'. "Huh", I thought, "that's similar to Left 4 Dead." (The cogs began to turn.)

Apparently this particular game had been floating about for a while without me hearing about it, and it is quite literally the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead that Valve would never allow the original devs to make, so they left and made it anyway. I still think it's kinda crappy of Valve not to hand over the IP, provided the story really is as cut and dry as they say, but I cannot understate to you how excited that connection to L4D made me, because I am all about Left 4 Dead. Back in the day, that game was the co-op title of the day, a game that was so unendingly entertaining that it spawned a whole community dedicated to creating custom maps for it years down the line. I mark L4D as one of the few games that's just as fun to watch as it is to play, thus even hearing suggestion of a continuation was enough to soundly turn this here frown upside down.

It only made a cherry on the cake for the developers to then come out and treat us with an actual gameplay trailer that was luckily devoid of all the 'great dialogue' that the team decided to write. And I have to say, it looks just like my memory of the old games do when I close my eyes. The animations look smooth, the graphics have stepped up and this just feels like a natural successor to the Left 4 Dead franchise. Back 4 Blood doesn't try to push the envelope in terms of fidelity and it doesn't need to; merely capturing a glimmer of that excitement wrapped in ingenuity is what everyone really wants to see. The years have shown us countless pretenders to the throne of Left 4 Dead, and a few have even been decent, but I remain adamant that there's a special little touch of jank that really sets this sort of game apart. I hope that Back 4 Blood might touch upon that.

The basic story of the zombie infection has been slightly updated in the most perfunctory way too, by blaming this infection on some breed of alien worms, but aside from that everything seems to be like your typical apocalypse. The various types of zombies has changed somewhat, however nothing seems to be incredibly distinct from their Valve counterparts. You have the Four-armed zombies that seem to hop around the place and lay traps for players, large zombies that take a lot of damage to take down and quite a lot of bile spitters. Where the creativity takes a step up is with the scale of these beasts that can be several feet higher than any normal human. The gameplay even showed one juggernaut interacting with the environment and chucking things out of the way, creating a very dynamic looking gameplay moment which I hope will be indicative of the design philosophy for the rest of the game.

All the gunplay looks to be serviceable too, with the cartoonish vibe to the gore really offsetting the many limbs that are being shot off. It really reminds me of the arcade-like feel to L4D's action which made it so accessible to jump into. Although, I do wonder for what the public might think of this game now we're no longer in a world without competition for this style of game. I've mentioned that there's been many pretenders, but some similar style games have actually made the idea their own and innovated in truly spectacular ways, such as Vermintide. There is a game that worked in decent melee combat into the formula as well as loot systems and progression, all in a way which felt like an evolution upon the formula whilst Back 4 Blood might be seen as a little 'same old, same old' to some people. But each to their own, I say.

Honestly, at the end of the day the things that I'm most excited for regarding this project is the stuff that they didn't talk about; namely, how accessible it'll be for the community. L4D 2 proved to be a playground for people to mess around in, and it resulted in a game that ballooned it's lifecycle to a legendary length. (Albeit, much of that prestige is lost today due to plain zombie fatigue.) Nowadays we're really missing that sort of community interaction with our games, and I'd love for Back 4 Blood to be the catalyst for those sorts of games to return. Mods, model swaps, custom maps, these are the tools of a virtual playground I long to mess around in. Anything which stirs the creativity of it's players is always worth a look, even if it's not the sort of game you'd typically play. (Take that from someone who literally has no one to play a co-op focused game with)

But of course, I tend to be someone who's easy to inflame but harder to satiate, and it's quite possible that Turtle Rock Studios have no interest in nurturing a community of custom content in a title they'll clearly be looking to monetise. (Modern development sensibilities have diverged quite a bit from the old days) Yet even then, there's still enough interest and blind fun in a fun little zombie massacre game for me to sign up to the Alpha, so I guess that alone proves I'm willing to give this team at least a modicum of my faith. We may exist in a gaming world saturated to the gills with undead romps to the point where zombies have lost any and all remote intimidation they once held, but despite it all we keep going back for one more run like the mindless instinct-driven automatons we take pleasure in annihilating. There's a lesson there somewhere.