![]() In the first act of the campaign, we were each given a Starter Deck that could imbue each character with bonuses – 10% endurance, 5+ hit points, the ability to heal yourself by bashing in Ridden skulls. It's in this system where the upgraded AI Director, atmospheric world, and finely-tuned weapons all take on a different dimension, helping to propel Back 4 Blood beyond anything Turtle Rock (Valve South at the time) was able to achieve with Left 4 Dead or its sequel.Ĭards are used to introduce variables, and are available to both player and AI alike. Instead, it's up to you and your crew to create a balanced squad composition as you progress through scenarios, leveraging a simple to grasp and easy to manage deck-building system. Back 4 Blood features eight unique characters – fully voiced, with their own personalities, stories, and characteristics – but there are no set classes. The guns become a hell of a lot of fun to wield, particularly as you begin to factor in specialisations. SMGs transformed into powerhouse machine guns, shotguns started offering the utility of snipers, and a magnum I stumbled across in the late-game became a handheld rifle once I introduced it to the right attachment – bought out of a randomized shopping box at the safehouse, paid for with credits we accrued as a group for completing challenges. The hordes of zombies we were facing were becoming more aggressive, yes, but the weapons we were equipping scaled to meet them. The further we pushed through the first act of the campaign, the more absurd it seemed to get. I get the sense that it's this process that has ensured that Back 4 Blood is not only as reactive as it is, but as ridiculous too. We're balancing and tweaking throughout the entire dev process… it's a super important function of our studio, that we've got a playable build every day." "Our studio philosophy is we iterate and we playtest," says O'Driscoll. You can see that reflected through everything, from how fantastic the weapons feel in your hands, to the delicate animations seen in the waves of Ridden being chewed up by streams of gunfire, to the dazzling visual and audio effects that ensure every adventure has a suffocating, all-encompassing atmosphere to it. "The beta us a chance to react before launch, so that we've got as fine tuned a game as we can" Matt O'Driscoll, lead producerĮven as Turtle Rock eagerly anticipates the opportunity to submerge itself in playtest data over the coming weeks, it's clear that Back 4 Blood has benefited from heavy iteration through its years of development. The AI Director keeps an eye on you and your play-style throughout the game." We can ramp the difficulty up and we can ramp the difficulty down. "We can bring in some more hordes, add in different mutations, throw in a couple of Tallboys and maybe an Exploder. ![]() In your case, you're breezing through it, thinking 'oh, it's not so much of a challenge', and then bang," O'Driscoll laughs. "The AI Director really keeps an eye on how you're going through the level. Although, to be fair to my boss, Sam can only shoulder so much of the blame for failure Back 4 Blood is always looking for new and exciting ways to screw you over. It wasn't long before I came to regret those words, as we began to bicker over who triggered an event before we were ready to face it, robbing us of a valuable 'Continue game' token – for the record, I'd like to state that it was probably Sam Loveridge, Global Editor-in-Chief of GamesRadar. 45 minutes into our play session, I made the mistake of remarking that the early chapters of the campaign felt too easy – that we should have turned the initial underlying difficulty up before beginning the campaign. There's this ever-present sense that the whole adventure could come crashing down around you at any time, particularly if one of your party members proves to be too volatile to follow orders or vulnerable to hold a defensive line on their own. That tension is part of what makes Back 4 Blood so appealing. The Walking Dead sought to show us how humans are the real evil of the zombie apocalypse, and Back 4 Blood will let you live it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |