oh yeah, they added a single-player offline mode with the bots...but before people jump to conclusions...listen to this "just note that you need an internet connection to download and patch the game first". You still need the internet...you can just play after you access it one time. So it's still VERY much at risk for being shutdown, don't be fooled by delusional defenders. www.videogameschronicle.com/news/back-4-bloods-latest-update-adds-a-single-player-campaign-mode/ (also too bad the bots suck and are useless)

Funniest part of it all is that after months of pushing “FROM THE CREATORS OF…” they immediately fall back to “sorry we’re so small and can’t dev anymore 😢”

Saddest thing about Zoey's story, she has to kill her father to prevent him from turning But turns out her father is also immune from the flu because immunity is inherited through genetics

28. september 2023 Left 4 Dead 2 - 18.000 players (PC / Steam) Back 4 Blood - 500 players (PC / Steam)

You can 100% have a story about a kill team that ventures out into an apocalyptic world and still have it feel like a cinematic and tense uphill battle. Because Vermintide 2 absolutely nailed it haha

What's disgusting is Evolve will be shut down again. Fully removing peer to peer, and slapping the community that keep the game on life support.

Its really troubling that the Death of a Game series is touching REALLY recent games. Just goes to show that devs need to put more effort or at least given proper time instead of getting pressured by people who only care about money.

The rag doll effects were huge for me; loved the physics and damage details of Left4Dead.

The director AI was also broken for months and would spawn double or even triple of the same special infected which could result in you being just slaughtered at the very beginning of the level. TRS devs also stream sniped speedrunners and reached out to them to learn what cards were the meta and what skips were being used so they could nerf them all while lying that they would only patch things that affected the casual experience. They are a spiteful group of people that hated anyone making their game look easy.

For me, the actual spiritual successor to L4D 2 was the Vermintide games. They took the idea and went with a different direction with it, more melee focus and drastically different setting, but it still felt thematically as though I was playing L4D.

Back 4 Blood is an amazing example of what happens when you make a game without soul

Glad you commented on the Cleaners being so...off. I noticed early on that they're basically sociopathic murderhobo types, as compared to the survivors from both of the L4D games who have a wide variety of personalities.

at around 20:18 when you mention how recognizable the special infected sounds are it also makes me think of the piano jingles that accompany each one when they spawn. Each one of those jingles fits the infected perfectly and gives you a sound queue of what's lurking in the shadows

The fact that they saw speedrunners having fun and absolutely _neutered_ every glitch & loadout they were using is the most pants on head stupid thing I've seen a game dev do

Turtle Rock is like serial Entrepreneur, they love to make New game, when everything fell apart quickly move to New product instead of figuring out what went wrong.

they branded themselves as the "creators of left 4 dead" when in reality valve carried the L4D franchise and turtle rock was pretty much there for emotional support

Regarding Molly and Zoey's parents, it doesn't actually matter that Molly lost her parents. It doesn't contribute anything to the character. It doesn't inform her decisions or dialogue, but it does for Zoey. In one of the comics it's revealed that during the zombie outbreak when she and her parents were barricading their home her mother ended up turning, and her dad quick to protect zoey was bitten and had to put her mother down. On top of that, her dad did it with a pistol, a pistol Zoey kept which you always see her using in all the campaign posters. Anyway, since the poor fellow was bitten she had to use the pistol to then kill her father before he turned, and that's not even the tragic part. No, the part that breaks my heart is that later in the comics you find out that the immunity to the infection is passed down from the father's side, meaning her dad would have never turned and she killed him for nothing. Now that in itself may not be the most original or interesting story, but it is a sufficient backstory for the character, and it informs how the character thinks and behaves, and you can see it in how she speaks to the other cast members while playing the game or reading further into the comics. So yeah, Back For Blood definitely lacks soul. I get it might be difficult to pack as much personality and story into the characters when they're not always going to be the ones used since there's a bigger roster, but it just feels weird to only have cardboard cutouts for this sort of game.

One thing I remember vividly from left 4 dead was when the tank shows up, no matter how many times you play the game when that music plays and you hear the thing roar at you it's tense. You are actually concerned about the damn thing even scared depending on how well you did up to that point. Back 4 blood has nothing like this... it's dull and outside of the easy mode it's just annoying to play not at all genuinely a challenge like left 4 dead was on the hard difficulties.

20:20 absolutely top tier voice acting

all of my friends i tried to get to play this game were put off by the card system they said" they dont want to deal with cards, they wanna shoot zombies "

Tbh the L4D & L4D2 characters are SO well done, I just love everyone and they are all relateable.

I'm probably never going to buy another Turtle Rock game if I'm honest. Their track record at this point speaks for itself.

The familiar sounds of the Infected from L4D/L4D2 were not only iconic, but also had very important gameplay impact. When you hear the familiar crying of the Witch, your whole team now needs to turn off flashlights and tread carefully to avoid angering her, or prepare to face her if she gets triggered. It was a very important part of the gameplay. I stayed away from Back 4 Blood because I watched a review that talked about how the game didn't incorporate audio into the gameplay and that immediately made it a much worse game.

hey man, i for real didnt expect to hear that u sadly lost both of ur parents. i dont know how u mustve felt and still feel, i dont know how badly it hit u, i dont know how hard it was for u to be where u at right now. i hope u are doing well in life. ur content is fucking good that i know

What are you talking about? The zombies in B4B had very memorable screams. Don't you remember the one shouting "NIGGAAAAAAAA"?

Glad you covered the Left 4 Dead comparison in depth. I've said that it was a dangerous card to play from the start as they set themselves a bar there was almost no chance of reaching. People would have brought up comparisons regardless, but by stating it so directly, you put over a decade of experience, memories, mods, and nostalgia right in the minds of those buying it and set a level of expectation that's near impossible to meet (hell, when you look at it, it would almost be understandable if Valve didn't/doesn't want to make L4D3).

The thing that killed it the most for me was the lack of modding support. They truly shot on the foot themselves with that

I feel like you forgot one incredibly annoying issue - the freaking menu. When I want to play a game I wan't to navigate a simple menu and then go, I don't want a 3d representation of a menu loaded up and then have to find the f'ing go area

I guess you could say back 4 blood was left 4 dead

The trailer introducing the Cleaners that’s done in a sitcom-like style is probably the best example of why it didn’t work: the world and the characters feel lifeless, with everything in game trying to be that spiritual successor and nothing more. L4D had a lot of great characters and their personalities were shown mainly via interactions with one another, plus a lot of the world building came from safe room graffiti and heck even the way the Infected moved and acted helped with establishing their own personality. Meanwhile in B4B we’re told what the characters are like and what the world is like as opposed to being shown, and everything that is shown is mirroring L4D or is something we’ve seen in countless other zombie games. Even if B4B ended up having much better gameplay or whatever, it’s too focused on trying to be another L4D without understanding that part of what made it so good was all the little things. There’s nothing to go back to.

Hey my condolences to you man. I didn’t know that about your parents. Thanks for making great content. Just wanted to send some love.

I remember firing up back for blood for the first time listening to the game... And the lack of music and sound queues alone was enough for me to be like... "Well this game isn't gonna last."

For me is the background music. In L4D2, each infectors have their OWN themes, one when they appear one when you were attacked by them, and each of those theme were unique and special. Even hordes got their own theme!! And that's why they are so memorable than those meat chunk in B4B imo, when you get attacked by infectors in B4B all you got were some weird siren sound, no dramatic music, no monsters screamming. In summarize, lack of souls.

I love that point you made about L4D being a cinematic horror expierience because that is the thing that bothered me about B4B the most! It never felt scary. I also thought the shooting felt lackluster overall and wasnt very well balanced.

The saddest thing is that this game had genuine hype around it, and it was in a relatively unexplored market that was experiencing a renaissance via stuff like Deep Rock Galactic. They had the perfect opportunity to make this truly great and hugely successful, and they completely missed the boat.

Hearing your comments on the lack of soul in B4B was inspiring. I cherish my memories of playing L4D and L4D2 with friends, but will always remember how awesome the maps were and how enjoyable they were to play on singleplayer. The maps in both L4D's told a story without words. Wall scribblings in the saferooms aside, there were set pieces and locations that explained the outbreak and the struggle to survive prior to you encountering that scenario yourself. The Mercy campaign is the best example of this. I'm probably not doing a great job of explaining but just know that L4D story telling was what set it apart. Back4Blood campaign acts felt like a blob of nonsense with narrow chokepoints that forced you to interact with the game in very limited ways. I dont care enough to recall the mission names but there is one mission that comes to mind that I felt is the most memorable of the unmemorable maps... the one with all the boats smashed together for no explainable reason. I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing yet the characters in game talked nonchalantly like it was no big deal. I got a headache just looking at the mess of vehicles piled on top of each other. Practically all of the missions follow the same design pattern. They make no sense for pathing the route your characters take, have no story behind them, and maybe have one or two props or set pieces to distinguish the importance of the location... it's lazy. Not even going to talk about the dark tunnels or whatever that DLC was called. So uninspired. I paid for the preorder of the most expensive version of this game on Steam, purely on the fact that I loved L4D so much and had high hopes.... only to find that I couldve gotten it free using my Gamepass subscription. Paying for the game didnt seem to show fruit until almost a whole year after launch, and even then it's still a rip off. To think I paid ~$100 for a game that doesnt let me play without an internet connection and could eventually go away... modern gaming at it's finest. The graphics of B4B are the ONLY redeeming quality but it is overshadowed by the uninspired characters, campaign, lack of singleplayer offline, pathetic pvp, over monetization, and long time spans between updates. Honestly yeah, the fact that they labeled this game as being developed by the team that brought us L4D is the main reason I bought it without second thought... wont make that mistake again. Anyone wanna bet $5 that they do that same cheap trick with their next game? I feel like this game could have recovered if they implemented changes sooner and werent so money hungry, but here we are. I think the thing that made this game's failure hurt so much more is that The Last of Us 2 was terrible as well. Games in recent years just havent measured up to their legacies and I find myself replaying classic games or remakes more than I do newer titles. It's sad that this is where we are and it's only getting worse. I do not envy future generations of gamers.

i remember counting down to B4B's launch because i grew up playing L4D and L4D2 with my dad. he moved away back in 2020 and it was really hard on me so the idea of us being able to kill zombies together 10+ years later with B4B online was like a dream come true. i legitimately told him it was an L4D2 sequel because that's what i had assumed with the marketing material and the similar title... but when we played through the first mission and stood still, shooting a giant zombie with regular guns for like 2 minutes straight, i knew it wasn't gonna be the same. honestly, i don't think i ever picked it up again after that mission.

It's funny how L4D Survivors, despite being average Joes, are memorable and remembered fondly by the gaming community. Cleaners are fine for the most part, but I just can't shake the generic, "badass" zombie killer feeling from those guys

What makes Zoey's story even more tragic is, that she most likely didn't have to kill her father. It's only a community theroy, but with the survivors being made out of 3 men and 1 woman each, it's speculated that men have a better chance to be carriers of the virus and that Zoey inherited her resistence against it from her dad. And also, thank you for making a stance for singleplayerplayer gamers and for calling out that online only non-sense. As for Back 4 Blood, I still have a minor interest in it, because I'm a sucker for zombie things. But even to this day, where I could get the Ultimate edition for 18€, I can't bring myself to buy it, because I don't really see the appeal or that it will end up like Earthfall for me. I play it once, say that it was "fine.". Not bad, not satisfiying, just "fine.". And then go back to Payday or DRG to get my solo coop shooter kick. What also put me off the game was the Marvel style humor. As you said, L4D's characters behaved properly for the situation they were in, although even L4D2 already got a little too light hearted for me. But with Back 4 Blood, they constantly make funny quibs and remarks, even though their entire family and friends are dead, while alien worms try to eat their faces.

i just recently got into b4b cause of some friends suggesting it bc of a steam sale. had never even heard of it before honestly, and it caught me by surprise how much ive been enjoying it. then i look online and its just.. constantly getting shit on lmao. i do think its a much more polished game nowadays, but i also understand people being put off by its release state. i personally enjoy it more than l4d myself. i like the card system and how that plays into roles, which aids in the teamplay aspects. the fact i can be a healer doc, sniper jim, or a melee chef heng is really neat and i love the variety in builds. i appreciate its more challenging as well. but i went into this not comparing it to l4d, i feel like thats why i can appreciate some of the things it does well. i do love l4d lemme be crystal clear, and i absolutely think it does things better. such as sound design, storytelling, and the physics/animations. but i can also still appreciate what b4b does well. i love that i can play a variety of builds, that each map and loadout you use can be vastly different depending on map, item spawns, corrupt cards, etc, i love the chaotic action, and i enjoy that i can play quick play with randoms, even if my friends arent in the mood to play, especially since a lot of the times, they are in need of a healer! i hope the servers stay up, ill play it for as long as they do anyways. im sure this honeymoon phase will eventually end, and ill be off playing something else, but its a game i think ill revisit even after ive 'beat' it. this isnt so much a defense of the game as it is "sorry you didnt enjoy it personally, but i am." i think their biggest mistake was making people believe it was l4d-like. i think it could have been received much better if they just marketed it as its own thing, and i dont consider the games that similar myself. l4d is a co-op atmospheric cinematic horror game, where as b4b is a co-op role based horror shooter. love both for completely different reasons. anywho, even if i dont agree with the dislike of this game, at least i have a better understanding as to WHY its so disliked, specifically by l4d enjoyers. so thank you for including the history of the game, for those of us who werent around for any of this.

I absolutely loved this game. I had hundreds of hours with a group of friends and it was super enjoyable for us. As soon as they announced maintenance mode I think we all bailed. So sad

My condolences man, wasn't expecting that about your parents, I absolutely love your videos and I hope your happy and well in life.

TRS: We are a small studio we can't possibly keep updating the game while we make a new game :( Concerned Ape: here you go stardew 1.6 ok back to work

tripwire interactive did everything right with Killing floor 2. If a developer with more resources put that kind of effort into a game it would be the best ever.

I gotta thank B4B cause when it launched the player count on L4D/2 went up & that gave me some hella fun in VS mode.

15:12 Speaking of multiplayer games that die due to being always online, Evolve, Turtle Rock's former game will -finally- go offline for good this year due to 2K pulling their servers needed for auth.

Here's my lengthy take on this game, focusing on its many design issues throughout its release. I wrote so much because I liked this game but my biggest issues with it aren't with most of the issues Crowbcat's video deals with. First, an out-of-place critique: The Acts were super long at 3+ hours for 1 and 2, and loading into a saved run-in-progress was always buggy and often times undid your friend's builds, or forced you to use whatever the previous player's cards were. On launch, TRS talked about wanting a somewhat roguelike action game, taking notes from battle royale with weapon rarity, where you steadily unlock abilities (cards) and build your character along with finding higher quality builds. This created a major issue with balance: Your character is weak on level 1-1, and super powerful on 1-8 - meaning, the beginning levels are super tough because you don't have any of the abilities you need. You can see this trend in how they released levels afterwards: all later acts were shorter and gave you more starter cards. It became commonplace to die on act 1 and burn Extra Life cards to get all your build cards just to beat those levels. Remember, new players didn't have any cards unlocked, so they couldn't just pick better cards until they beat the Ogre on the second level with nothing but white gear. In later builds, they had to undo that to reverse the difficulty curve by giving you all your character cards at the start. This meant that the card system, which they centered their entire gameplay progression over, was essentially scrapped and not rebalanced nor redesigned for this new power burst (an issue which I'll get back to in the last paragraph). Now, instead of a roguelike, you were playing a class-based shooter: Support / Healing, Single-Target, Horde-Clear... Characters became "Heroes" - as an example, if you saw an Evangelo, you know they'd either be melee or speedrun SMG. I liked that the intrinsic character abilities were vague enough to allow the player to make different and uniquely fun builds, but it bred a whole new class of issues. Because they were moving into a class-based system, they extremely discouraged teamplay. Example: If you had pills, you wouldn't want to use them or give them to your friend - you had to give it to the dedicated Support - if they didn't have 7 of them already, in which case players may get on you about your build. Dedicated support players were the only ones who could heal trauma or had all the healing buffs. It was an extremely huge waste for a non-medic to use a medkit on another player even if the situation was dire. The same with Melee - their damage boosts were extremely high, and those values translated directly to Team Damage - A melee character could not hang out anywhere near a player, lest they instantly down them by accident. Again, this was remedied by the card Down In Front, which the team would deride the melee player if they didn't take it. On a different note of discouraging teamplay, in harder difficulties, if you didn't plan out your build BEFORE playing, you'd end up at a severe disadvantage, because there was no in-game way to tell other players what you wanted to run. As an example, if two or more players pick assault rifles, there's only so much of that ammo type on the map - forcing you to share, be greedy, or not use the weapon and lose all your pre-built buffs. This meant each cleaner was built to be self sufficient - use your own ammo, kill your own enemies, escape your own grapples. While this card/class change was welcome for making the beginning levels less brutally hard, it flattened the difficulty curve, instead of starting low and letting it ramp up. Instead of slowly losing resources and being forced to improvise like a Survivor, each level became homogenous - if you can beat one level, you can definitely beat the next - resetting your health and ammo by having a well-built doctor and money cards. There was no need for continuity between levels in an Act - a game that build its "Run" system on this need for continuity. The DLC was extremely problematic every time in how you interacted with it. Finding a Hive in your level ends the level, often times letting players skip entire challenging sections. It essentially forced players to play about half of a level, then adds on an entirely new level in the middle of that already lengthy act. There's only a few Hive level variations, so you'd repeat them constantly in an already content-starved game. However, you were incentivized to always go into a Hive, because it was the only way to earn a pittance of Premium Currency to unlock Cards and outfits (in random unlocks, of course). Hives also were the only instances of legendary chests, which always guaranteed you higher quality gear. This often guaranteed your party to be beyond OP, completely nuking threatening bosses like the hulking Ogre by stun-locking him and downing him in less than two seconds. Imagine if you could two-shot multiple Tank spawns in L4D back to back. Each DLC followed this trend, forcing you to grind that set of levels over and over again for a chance to unlock new cards and power abilities. By the end, characters and abilities were redone with insane new builds. Heng, for example, could very easily get literally no stamina loss and ultra fast melee strikes less than halfway through a single level. Movespeed solo speedrunners were common in multiplayer matches because you could move almost as fast as the sprinters. Pinata players could have almost infinite grenades, turning a challenging infinite swarm escape into a cakewalk. My fav, building for Shotguns + Fire and getting the dragon's breath shotgun could build you for insane damage and insane healing. Instead of getting small buffs or building a class of character, now the game became which builds can break the game. They weren't Survivors, nor were they Cleaners - they became min-maxers. The game became optimizable before you even loaded into the level. "Feels bad." -Karlee

Basically back for blood was gotham knights trying to be arkham knights successor.

My experience with this game was “oh hey it’s on gamepass. Oh hey it looks pretty good. Uh oh it crashed. Oh… it uses a crap card perk system… oh I got disconnected from my party. Oh that boss balance is a little off. Oops I “accidentally” uninstalled the game”

It’s time for everyone to place their bets for how long it will take for Redfall to be reported on this channel. My bet is within atleast 4 months.

It's no coincidence that Turtle Rock Studios haven't released anything worthwhile since splitting from Valve and, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they're considered radioactive by a large number of publishers because of it.

Hey nerdslayer I noticed that you’re having a hard time with sponsors. Just wanted to let you know that we really appreciate your content and I hope you can continue making these videos for everyone!

I remember when I first played it that I hoped they would lean in more on the whole Cleaner idea and build from there because that was interesting to me, but it wore me out quick before I got far into the second Act.

L4D robbed me from my sleep many nights. I would stay up until 2 or 3 am playing with friends in PVP. It was such an amazing game.

Over 2000 hours in L4D 1 and 2 on Xbox 360 and PC, and this game didn't click with me a single time, I played it on Gamepass and felt no soul, no charm within the final product..

The only game that lives up to Left 4 dead when it comes to the characters' interactions is Vermintide, the banter is beautifully written and unmatched in the genre. I can't even remember b4b's characters' names.

I played evolve for about an hour before deciding it was total crap. This one I played for about 6 hours. At this rate, I'll be able to play the next one for a whole 36 hours!!

I will be honest, I loved Back 4 Blood. Yes it lacks many of the "way ahead of its time" features of Left 4 Dead like the amazing ragdoll physics, but the perk card system and resulting ability to build your own class or playstyle was an amazing development that kept me playing and excited for new card updates. It made for a very interesting skill ceiling on the harder difficulties, where a full team of people who knew the game and had strategically chosen class builds could really make the game shine. Its a shame that turtlerock was so quick to give up on the game, when it had so much going for it. But I guess a mixed launch and a lot of people comparing it to Left 4 Dead gave the studio the impression they had another "Evolve" dud. This game was not a dud, it was not Evolve, it had great bones and needed some additional TLC to make it one of the great co-op horror games of the age. It absolutely could have been that.

Fully expecting your zombie voice acting to be modded into l4d now.

I did not even know it was only 6 of the OG devs until now. Kind of amazing they floated on that so fervently. As always, phenomenal deep dive into another dearly departed from a stellar researcher and presenter.

I keep telling people that "Games as a service" is the biggest slap in the face to consumers. Imagine having to pay a subscription or needing to continually buy upgrades for your car? It's like buying a car and not getting a door and having the car salesman say, you can pay for the door in the next year at the price of $199.99 .... like no motherfucker. You sold me the car. I want the full product that I'm paying for. Same with games.

I'll just say this: Turtle Rock Studios is a company with great ideas, but the ideas are too ambitious for their lack of manpower. Like, it's almost a necessity for them to stay with Valve with how crazy they are. Imagine Valve helping with Evolve. Probably could've been a contender for best on-going game category.

they made a single-player co-op game how someone would make an e-sports game designed to sell skins

Left 4 dead 2 was a masterpiece ! 800h of play and sometimei go back... still 10 000 ppl online...after 15 years

Me and my friend absolutely loved this game but once we beat it in and tried to replay the whole story as many times as fast as possible. After about 2 weeks of fun, there was nothing else to do. I think we beat it on what was considered “normal” difficulty and the step up to the next difficulty was such a huge spike we couldn’t even get past the first level no matter how we stacked our cards.

I like that you explained what exactly you meant by soul. As I usually hate when people use that term in critique as it usually comes off as that they can't actually articulate why they disliked something but don't want to seem uninformed or subjective so they make a vague statement that can mean almost anything. So I really appreciate you made it clear you were talking about effort and attention to detail put into little aspects and moments of a game.

20:23 Can’t believe NerdSlayer got the ACTUAL voice actors for all of the special infected to narrate this DOAG. Respect

I miss L4D. I would pay full price for a remake or remaster right now.

The first thing I said when this game came out was "It's going to die because the designs aren't iconic" And that's exactly what happened. As funny as "Tall Boi" was for a Zombie name lmao- All the zombie variants & cleaners were SO forgettable I actually *have* already forgotten them 7 months later.

Already hit Humble Bundle monthly goddamn this died fast

I was one of those pricks that had loads of faith in this project. I was so stoked... then it came out with it's poorly executed (and needless) card system, and it sadly turned in to a game I played for a single weekend, and forgot all about it until seeing it here now

Game ratings are often way different between users and critics Imo a big part of this is that critics focus mainly on the gameplay (bugs, amount of content, accessibility, balance and monetization rarely have any effect on critics just look at sports games being the same) Users can more freely predict the future with content and monetization as critics don't have much of a chance to since they can't experience all or most of a game at the time of a review Knowing this difference in reviews has helped me find games which aren't mainstream but are great in my own opinion

That are some clues that you ignore, sometimes... such as " overprice for a multiplayer game" or "lack of worldwide servers". Sometimes, people don't favor the world, only eu and us

"Evolve was a blast to play, but yeah, the burnout of the game rose up way to quickly for the game to have longevity. Great video, can't wait to see Back4Blood in a year on this channel." My comment a year ago on the DoaG: Evolve video. Saw it coming a mile away, sadly.

The thing about the survivors being absolutely equal in terms of performance also shows how unprepared everyone is when the apocalypse started. Bill = Despite being arguably the strongest survivor lorewise is not any stronger than Zoey because of his age. Louis = IT guy without much in terms of physique. Coach = High school coach who lacks cardio. The only characters who can arguably be "stronger" are Ellis and Francis. But their individual strength advantage (if they have any) aren't really useful when pinned by the specials, making each and every member of the group just as important.

I got caught up in the "from the creators" tag line. Hell I even offered feedback when the studio was asking for feedback. My main issues with the game had more to do with it not being as simplified and the card system. I still go back for L4D and even playing a basic non vs match is still fun. Who doesn't like the rooftop hospital battle or fighting the zombies on stage at a carnival? Or the random banter of the characters. I still can still hear the soundtrack. We didn't need card systems or badassery. It was simple and challenging fun. This kinda forgot that. It did show a lot of promise but I didn't even play the last expansion yet.

I hate the idea of hero’s, specialists and cleaners. I’m the player let me be the hero. Let me specialize in what I want. Let me pick my own damn weapons

some of the characters they wrote were really interesting, it's a wonder how they managed to make them all so soulless with such fun concepts. ma in particular struck me as a super cool character with lots of potential and then i played the beta and she was devoid of any semblance of personality. truly wondrous.

I'm sad now :( I put in ALLOT of time in B4B, it really turned into a fine zombie-co-op game as time went on, but people just never came back. Understandable though, just really loved killing and synergizing new builds together to try on runs. And killing the A.I. felt pretty satisfying. It's launch and missed marketing really killed it. I do want to thank the devs for sticking through the game and making some really meaty and big changes to the game, regardless of whether or not the game would succeed. The weapons, new lvls, cards, and balance changes really made the game better but... It was too late. Those who stayed playing enjoyed it, the community was pretty nice, but we all knew it was in it's dying legs. I hope Turtle Rocks next game goes well for them. Liked this WAY more than Evolved, I'll tell you that much. (I'll keep playing B4B as a pass time but not much to do, already got all the cards and special skins.)

I had a great time playing this with my buddies. I really enjoyed the deck system. I basically turned mom into Doom guy.

If there is anything I've learned about games the past couple years, it's that games that have the backing of Tencent are always an automatic ignore to pick up as a game, even on sale. It's like that publisher are cursed, every single game they touch the game just either dies, is broken, is plagued by severe performance and stability issues, or a combination of all 3. First it was B4B, then Darktide. Like Jesus, it's like they are cursed.

I would argue that soul in a game is a thing you only notice on a sub-conscious level. When I played the Back 4 Blood open beta, I felt something was off and missing, except I couldn't place my finger on what. I couldn't even explain it properly until I saw the Crowbcat video. However it is a very important component regardless.

It was often more frustrating than fun... with friends.

The lack of soul part is really jarring because Evolve 2 had lots of it, at least in its characters. All characters interactions (done so while the monster player was preparing themself) were always delightful to watch. Sometimes I'll load up a video and get a kick out of them. Good times!

Valve talking to Left 4 Dead about Turtlerock: *"He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn't your daddy"*

Devs are looting the community while the community thinks its looting in the apocalypse

I know it just came out, but Im really looking forward to you covering Redfall.

I think soul really translates to "the company cared about their game beyond it's ability to make money"

Okay someone has to explain to me why making games about vampires cause VtM: Bloodline 2, Back 4 blood and Redfall all had issues.

Always online + no mods = immediate pass for me.

As the biggest L4D fan this game made me want to cry truly the biggest let down I have ever witnessed in my 13+ years of gaming

What’s kinda sad is I liked the game for what it was, it wasn’t the best, it wasn’t the worst. It started to get cool ideas right as they ended support for it and it’s disappointing

Looking forward to this video for a while. This game looked so promising at first.

My favourite reason why Left4Dead is clearly a labour of love, and the weakest comparison Back4Blood holds against it is definitely the zombie animations. The animation team in L4D were absolute animals in the industry. The zombies, when shot, react differently depending on where they were shot in magnificent magnitude. There is something like over 200 different zombie injury reactions in L4D, all of which were acted out by motion capture actors that the animators used for reference. In hindsight it's such a small detail, but it makes the zombies feel real and makes the impact of your weapons feel meaningful. It's a deceptively powerful aspect of the game and absolutely defines how a player feels when playing it. The zombies in Back4Blood just ragdoll when you kill them. There's a video on KZfaq comparing the two and it really showcases why these two games are not on the same level of quality, of developer skill, or of love and care.

Summed up how I felt. It didn’t feel like a thrill ride of survival like L4D did. Instead it was just a shoot ‘em up. Also 90% of my obsession with L4D was mods and pvp

I agree with your points, but I still had fun with back 4 blood. Its a pity that it fell short and was cancelled as I think it had a lot of things that I kinda wanted in a l4d3 (and we know that valve will basically never release such a game since it had the forbidden number within it).

I would love if you could make a spin off series of death of a game featuring games that "died" Like forspoken which released and got DLC and its not a live service so it cant actually die But flopped so hard it killed the Studio behind it So yeah would be interesting seeing you cover those as well

Basically, the biggest problem with Back 4 Blood is the modern video game industry. It's like a poster child of everything that has gone wrong.

My friend isn't very internet savvy. He bought this game without researching it on the way to my house, excited for some classic L4D couch co-op. After a few minutes of digging around menus and discovering there was no split screen, we turned it off and returned it the next day.

There are so many points i agree on you with that i cant even be arsed listing them all. Great video