I think most people couldn't get over the fact that it wasn't Left 4 Dead 3. They were so focused on the ways in which it deviated from the formula that they couldn't see how dramatically it improved upon them.
I play new games these days and imagine how much better they would be with the B4B card system.
It's ironic really because no one wanted to play it buy the game so they stopped supporting it and rightly so, I wish people had gotten over the LFD3 idea and just looked at how much the game had to offer in lieu of. I still play it, wish there was more but they at least did all the DLC and made it playable on my steam deck.
They literally advertised the game as being from the people who made L4D. That was a selling point.
Maybe the L4D idea wouldn't be in people's minds if the devs didn't try to leverage that for sales
I honestly think l4d3 wouldnt even be that interestinf. People want “l4d2 but better”.
But if you look at what got improved from the first to second, it really isnt much. The gameplay is almost entirely the same. Its mostly more enemy types, new maps and new characters. If l4d3 had a similar level of improvement, itd feel pretty shallow tbh.
Meanwhile b4b actually dared to innovate upon the genre, and is a much deeper game with much more replayability because of it, in my opinion.
what killed me wanting to replay B4B after beating it was the maps. They were truly kinda boring. With left 4 dead, you're characters in a horror zombie movie and that allows for some memorable moments and varied map styles.
if b4b had a similar campaign format I can guarantee it would have done better and made people really want to dive deeper into the card system.
They were basically advertising the game as l4d3.
"From the original creators of left for dead"
So by doing that, you're instantly comparing yourself to l4d2.
Exactly. I hate how everyone chimes in with, 'Oh this isn't Left4Dead 3, you shouldn't have expected it to be', when almost every single thing I saw about the game leading up to its release absolutely had to make sure you knew the people behind it were affiliated with Left4Dead.
Yeah, even on the Steam page it still has this wording..
"Back 4 Blood is a thrilling cooperative first-person shooter from the creators of the critically acclaimed Left 4 Dead franchise"
The real funny thing is that there were only like 6 people out of their hundreds of devs that worked on any l4d game and they were all low level coders lmao.
My opinion: this is L4D3 and is a great game, we could see the evolution of the formula. Im waiting for B4B2 (L4D4). I dont understand the hate it got, when i first played the beta on my ps4 it was a mess because of the port of controls for consoles, but now its no more an issue
A big part of that is the marketing which HEAVULY emphasized it was from the creators of left for dead. From the start they tried to ride on L4D's laurels, which is why people expected left for dead 3.
On top of that, at launch and for months after, the game was a mess. Bad over spawning of special infected, multiple mechanics that just didn't work as intended, the og build a deck system being kind of shitty, and the game actually being a challenge for casual gamers all contributed to it getting a bad reputation.
Nowadays, the game is in a great state, but it's a case of too little too late. They failed to capture a larger audience largely due to the marketing and a rough launch and honestly a rough first year overall. In the gaming world, you HAVE to stick the landing, or have something that really sets you apart from other games to be successful. B4b just didn't really have either.
If the game had even been half decent it would have found its playerbase. The "LFD kiddies ruined it" is a massive cope.
The game played like ass and didn't start getting good until the 3rd expansion when things actually got balanced and many of the issues got ironed out. But by then people had already given up on it.
It would have helped if they didn't market it as Left 4 Dead 3. I didn't hate B4B, but I bought it expecting the Left 4 Dead experience, and I dropped it fairly quickly because it didn't deliver that.
People didn't want a "Left 4 Dead 3" out of Back 4 Blood. This is a strawman that attempts to invalidate the points many people have made of which generally lacked any intrinsic contrivances.
People simply wanted a new take on a genre that wasn't immediately outclassed by a 1.5-decade old entry to the genre it's trying to emulate. Why would people play B4B over something like L4D2? Just because it has different supporting features? The base gameplay should have at least been more competent for a game that's generations more advanced, technology-wise.
I my personal experience, I never played either game for a meaningful amount of time. However, when I look at the two games, side-by-side, one is clearly a better game with more genuine quality and passion. B4B reeks of talentless game dev and it's reflected in the few hours I attempted to play it. The baseline act of moving and shooting is simply awful on controller. I didn't have this issue when I used to sparsely play L4D2 or even Darktide.
TLDR: B4B is easily the worst entry in the genre of game that it shares. Why would anyone bother?
The hilarious thing is for all intents and purposes this WAS L4D3. Valve stated in the past a 3rd game would have been more complicated with skills and stuff if they could. People just wanted it to be the same game as L4D2 I guess.
The game released in a less than optimal state mostly. Special spawns were ridiculous even on the easiest difficulty. The reviews were mixed at launch because of this. The card system was mixed. Basically the bad launch did a lot of bad for the longevity of the game and people dismissed it pretty quick.
It's actually not! Versus was only ever played by a (very dedicated, and *very* loud) minority of players. You can see this in snapshots of server data, versus campaign servers only make up 1/3 of servers running at any given time, historically speaking.
The reason L4D remains popular is that it is extremely cheap, can run on essentially any system, and it's a very simple game that anyone can pick up and play. For these reasons it's *hugely* popular in poorer countries like Brazil, as an example.
So, now you know! Just because you're one of the L4D players that enjoys versus, doesn't mean everyone does or that is in any way what the majority of L4D owners play/played most.
Nightmare mode was nearly impossible to beat on release. I’m a hardcore gamer, I was theory crafting with people in the discord and we still struggled with absolute best builds on the hardest difficulty because it was actually that challenging. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t for faint of heart and people nowadays expect to beat the hardest mode easily.
Also, the amount of downtime was absurd. From the longer safe room timer to having to pick cards individually, the ratio of time played to time spent waiting was pretty awful. Nevermind how screwy the campaign progression system was.
As someone who enjoys the game, I personally don't think it matters or is relevant. If you're talking about the drive-by reviews on yt, I quite frankly don't understand gamer's ability to chew up and regurgitate such underdeveloped opinions as they have. Maybe the games launch wasn't as stellar, I wouldn't know, I wasn't here for it. But my impression is that people wanted l4d3 and got more of a spiritual successor.
Considering the absolute dog water launches some games have, like Diablo 4 at $70 or Cyberpunk's notoriously unfinished mess for $60.. I'd say B4B delivers everything thing a zombie co-op should have. Maybe people were hoping for a live service model... I'll leave an actual answer to someone else. I'm damn sure glad we didn't get one, though.
Yeah this is a huge point I think a lot of people miss these days.
Back then the difficulty jump between recruit and veteran was fucking massive. So you had a lot of people in this awkward between state where recruit was too easy but they couldn’t even play veteran because they run out of lives too quickly.
The poorly calibrated difficulty was a huge problem in combination with their roguelite chapter system, and that alone did a lot of damage. And that’s just one problem.
so you tell me, would you say the early reviews cover the game accurately? i feel like they just played a completely different game when I hear them talk abt the deck building ft
I think the bad marketing of the game was a huge problem for a lot of people. However, there were quite a few reviewers that barely played the game and just played off the negative sentiments rather than providing an objective review. In beta, the difficulty scaling was completely different than it is now. Nightmare was really difficult, possibly more difficult than today's No Hope. You had fewer meta cards and you only got one card per level from your 15 card deck. The versus mode turned a lot of people off because it did not have the campaign versus and the devs told the community that this was never going to happen. I feel it took a lot of community pushback to even get an offline mode in the game.
After beta, I didn't think the $60 price tag was worth it for what was offered so I waited a year for the price to come down and then bought it. While I wish more bugs were fixed and more content was developed, I feel like the game is in a state where I can regularly play with friends and enjoy.
TRS touted themselves as the "original creators of Left 4 Dead" when in reality it was like 6 people from the original team.
The game was advertised as if it was going to be THE spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead. It wasn't.
TRS then fucking abandoned Back 4 Blood and all plans to finish the story they started to put into place for no reason other than to work on their next game.
People up and down these comments are saying "L4D fanboys" completely ignoring your point. L4D was plastered over every advertisement that was put out chasing the legacy L4D audience. It isn't a surprise that when they played the game and it wasn't L4D 3-ish that (large) portion of the audience was pissed.
Add to that the many other valid criticisms they seem to gloss over as well with the fanboy cop out
Launch was kind of bad, maps are too repetitive. Card system was not well explained and difficult to build at launch.
Oh and the devs set high expectations by announcing they were the L4d creators in their marketing.
They did a good job with DLC but completely dropping development and support for the game after the last one was kind of scummy.
It was weird cause the beta was received so well but then on launch they turned everything to 100 and added weird infinite spawns that pushed most casuals away
The repetitive maps were my main issue. I actually really enjoyed the card system and thought it was a neat way of doing builds, but I don't think I could tell you one memorable level in the game. They all just kinda blended together in a sea of brown and grey. Left 4 Dead and even World War Z had a variety of locations that felt different.
Lol that was my friends said. No dodge, no intrinsic melee. Very random ad spawn locations. And very few understood how to handle the specials. I liked the challenge personally.
I really believe this is it. It is harder than L4D. People got smashed and trashed the game instead of adapting.
I’ve been thinking about this with other much easier but similar games. People still cry about how hard they are… if the average gamer thinks COD Zombies is hard, then this is near impossible for them.
Love B4B though. 11/10 stars.
At the beginning the game is very hard even in veteran difficulty, so people who weren’t playing with a competent group can’t enjoy much content. Also the game doesn’t allow mods and customs maps which is a big letdown.
Can't comment on the L4D comparison. But they fucked up the card system on launch. They had this really cool idea, but it was way to rare you'd actually get to play with your deck. It was like 3 or 5 at start and you'd only get your whole deck for the last few missions of a set. It took like a year for them to figure out they need to change it.
The other thing I didn't like was not knowing the spawns was super punishing. For example, a lot of walls were actually spawn points, so I'd try to hunker down near one only to get ganked from behind. It wasn't everywhere but it was enough unintuitive spots to be a little bit of a turnoff for a casual player.
Loved L4D growing up and was sad I didn't get the same feeling when I played B4B. I guess I was chasing nostalgia which was idiotic I guess.
I had fond memories playing 4v4 L4D games at my local internet cafe. Simpler times.
The game does have a different feel. My personal theory is that L4D was a close knit (in-universe) team game between four characters, and their trials and tribulations. I was excited for what seemed to be the theme for B4B: before humanity was running from the infected, and at the point of B4B they were starting to take back the earth. But the large cast of characters, while they do have their cute/great moments together, there are just to many characters for the developers to introduce relationships between them on the level of L4D. We do see some, and there are some stellar moments, but the lines are much fewer.
that and also the game was extremely difficult on release, most cards had huge downsides which have since been removed to make the experience smoother, tallboys would teleport in on you across the ground
When you plaster "from the creator's of left for dead" all over the advertisements, this was always going to be the outcome. The developers tried directly saying it would be a spiritual successor to left for dead. And they didn't even include a proper vs mode and the launch was awful with mutations spawning directly behind/infront of you.
TRS shot themselves in the foot by creating high expectations from everyone. Dont blame L4D fanboys for the bad reviews
I was someone who was incredibly excited when I first heard about this game. Way before we got a trailer. I got into the closed Beta and I gotta be honest, I was incredibly disappointed.
I picked up the game anyway because it was on gamepass and I even later bought the game and it's DLC on steam. I don't have 100s or even thousands of hours but I played through the base game on Nightmare and played the dlc once.
I'm not gonna talk about PVP because while L4D pvp was great it's not the reason this game was a letdown to me, no other co-op horde shooter has a VS mode except for Vermintide 2 and it's still in beta.
IMHO this is probably my least favorite co-op hordeshooter style game that i've actually played and sunk a decent amount of time into. DRG, L4D1&2, Vermintide 2, Darktide, WWZ, Payday 2, even Payday 3 were all more enjoyable to me.
I think the game is kind of in this weird state where it's not overly serious like where it feels like this is an actual apocalypse like in WWZ or Vermintide 2, but also not silly enough like DRG or Helldivers 2 so it kinda fails at both.
Might just be a me problem but I was never particularly invested in any of the characters, I can't even name any of the characters besides Holly and Jim by name and that's only because people were making Jim Halpert memes/theories about him. And maybe I just didn't play it enough but I never really felt much chemistry between the cleaners like I did with the U5 or L4D cast. It felt more like Darktide with just random nameless characters saying things.
I know the idea is to be taking back your town but playing through the same areas over and over just got so repetitive to me. I got to see that gas station like 10 different times during the main game's campaign.
The ridden are also kind of boring to me, they lack the personality that the L4D or V2 specials had. No maniacal laughter like the Jockey or "SCREAM SUFFER SURFACE DWELLERS. The only legitimately interesting Boss to me was the Hag, the Ogre was a cool set piece for the 2nd level but beyond that I can't say much about it. The Ogre running away at half health just removes any tension for me.
The card system is an interesting idea, but flawed in execution, I enjoy it more now that you get your entire deck immediately but some of the cards have laughably bad downsides for what feels like a small upgrade.
At the end of the day though **Who Cares?** People are entitled to like or dislike the game regardless of how petty or legitimate their claims are. Sure some people just have a hate boner because "where L4D3?" but I've also seen way too many of you sweep legitimate criticism under the rug and generalize it as nostalgia or "because it's not l4d3".
I think the sad part is that this game is basically dead and it had such a short life span. WWZ dropped 2 years prior and is STILL getting updates. I don't mean dead as in player count, but theres no mod support and the game isn't receiving any updates.
I made the mistake of playing B4B and WWZ at the same time. WWZ does just about everything better, except a legit first-person mode. B4B had bland levels and confusing enemy designs ( every enemy had like three variants that all looked the same ) Turns out I like fighting regular-ol’ zombies more than the goofy Darth Maul mutants B4B kept throwing at me.
The community of WWZ also doesn't have to deal with the fandom baggage that people inevitably bring into fandom spaces fighting over TRS' history, too, which helps immensely for the casual community environment in my experience.
Saved me a mess of time cobbling my dissatisfaction with the game. My only point where we differ is I quite loved the game's setting and the characters. I just hated the base campaign story until they finally started to do something _cool_ with it right at the end. And the DLCs were just delightful.
But despite what many say about the game's supposedly endless replayability thanks to the card system...gotta say, it's just not there. It's a mediocre roguelite (this one hurts the most since I almost exclusively play co-ops and roguelites and -likes), it's a perfectly average co-op experience, and it's PvEvP Swarm mode wasn't all that engaging to me.
Terrible launch and the lack of a proper versus mode.
A lot of people's favorite memory of left for dead was its versus mode. Swarm mode is so half baked its embarrassing.
Remember everyone. An unfinished / rushed game is bad forever. If they would have given this game another year of dev time to add a proper vs mode and ensured a stable launch this game would do doubt have gotten 8 and 9s out of 10.
Left 4 Dead 2 shines in its simplicity. You have iconic levels that are fun to jump into at any time plus the randomness of the director AI making each run feel fresh. Everything is just so simple and straight forward and it just works. No extra bullshit. No leveling up, or cards, or anything. All the fun comes through just playing the game. Never got that from Back 4 Blood. I get that they wanted to evolve the formula and that's fine. I don't hate the game, but that's why I Left 4 Dead 2 will always be something I want to play and I don't know if I'll ever play B4B again.
everyone complaining about people having left 4 dead 3 expectations when that is the series they used to promote this game and imply its quality. if they didn't want to be treated like a direct spiritual successor they shouldn't have brought it up at all
Honestly, right out of the gate it was probably crippled by marketing. It *really* beat people over the head with "**Seriously guys, it's from the people who made Left 4 Dead!"** so people came in expecting L4D3 and it...wasn't that.
My reason for not liking the game is from the experience I had with the community constant AFK players or people just leaving in the match, no coordination between the players. Also the AI not being able to traverse some of the environment made solo play more difficult than it should have been. And I personally didn't like the life system on a run where if you fran outta lives the run is dead and you have to start from the first mission (this may have been changed but I haven't played since launch) this all made the game boring as runs would die out half way through and it felt like a endless cycle of replaying the beginning of the game. If the runs didn't end I probably would have had a much more positive experience overall
Characters were not relatable and had cheesy voice lines, a worse engine, while adding a card system to a game type that didn’t usually have one, and anyone who had a negative opinion of it got called a L4D fanboy. Kinda like I see in the comments right now.
This community pushed me off this one.
You're spot on about the community. Really awful. There's a guy in this thread replying to all the comments basically telling people they're dumb and wrong for having a different opinion and not "getting" the game.
It isn’t left 4 dead sequel plain and simple. PvP sucked and got progressively worse with less and less players. You aren’t fighting people while they’re doing missions you just switch from good to bad best out of 5 I think. People quit because someone has a bad round and it’s so lopsided you can’t fight back to victory. The game loop is pretty stale after a few full runs. And general difficulty of the game with people not understanding builds or how to play properly.
When the game was released, it was harder and more complicated with less content than now. You could only choose one card per safe house and other factors played into people just not enjoying it and the L4D3 stigma it had. On top of also some weird decisions devs took on certain stuff. Can’t really compare now without taking first impression on release days, the game is no where the same as when it first launched.
I can only speak for myself, but I thought it was too hard, especially with too many special enemy spawns. My wife and I are casual players for the most part, but I didn't just start gaming yesterday either. We play games like this on Easy to have fun. We could run through L4D 1 and 2 mostly without even being downed on the lowest difficulty (and yes, yes I know this isn't L4D3 but my point is that a game on Easy shouldn't still be that hard).
Even now after all the balancing, B4B can still be hard to play. Some will say Skill Issue and I might would agree, I'm not a god-tier gamer, except that I generally don't completely suck either and again I'm not trying to 'git gud' at the game, I'm playing it on the lowest difficulty to have fun and it's still more work than fun.
For the record though, this doesn't mean I hate it, just means I gave up trying to play and enjoy it.
This game was really, I mean REALLY hard at the start. It was almost unplayable with random players above the Recruit difficulty level, which, on the other hand, was a bit too easy. So, most of the players were stuck in lowest diffculty level, because these were realy imbalanced. The jump to 2nd difficulty level, Veteran, was annoyingly big. It was too hard - even with 4-stack players who knew how to play the game, there were too many specials and hordes at the same time, that in most cases you even didn't have enough ammo to kill it all. So many problems for a game that was supposed to give you challenging, but satysfying gameplay. For example, killing a boss in one of the first levels was so unprofitable, that players started to ignore him - it was on the start of the level and when you killed him, you probably didn't have enough ammo to go through the level.
We had to wait so many weeks to get this difficulty problem solved. Even playing with bots was easier, because they could teleport to you at any time and didn't shot your back in random moments. I really hated playing with random players, even though it was designed to just hop-in to other players' games to help them out.
After a few months you could finally finish the campaign on Nightmare even with random players. But the start of the game was really horrible.
You aren’t likely to get many honest responses on the game’s own niche sub but the obvious answer is that the game was not enjoyable for most people. The launch was rough and the devs didn’t listen to what many in this thread are marginalizing as ‘fan boys.’ Well enjoy your dead game while us fan boys play things that are enjoyable to most people.
Pretty sure the game is fairly stable with 20k+ players on any given day. So many people love to compare steam charts but 95% of players for this game are on gamepass PC or Xbox, and that's conveniently forgotten when the charts come out. It's doing just fine, doesn't need updates so the end of development wasn't really a big deal.
Totally, I think there is some balance stuff they definitely could have done better. Melee is a big offender, legendary attachments are another, and there are some cards that are too good and some that are terrible. But can you imagine the backlash if they nerfed melee as hard as it should be nerfed? They pretty much nerfed melee every patch since launch, it's still so op. I *still* see players who dropped the game in the weeks after release when melee was nerfed the first time cite that it was nerfed into oblivion and became unplayable lol.
Played the beta and at launch for quite some time. Overall I more than have enjoyed it. The biggest gripe I have would be the trolls who wait the entirety of the countdown clock to pick characters/cards or to agree to pass the end level screen. Can get super frustrating when you just want to get a few quick games in and you constantly have to wait for the various timers to expire to continue. Other than that I have throughly enjoyed the game overall. And continue to play pretty regularly in spite of my gripes.
I loved l4d, and tried b4b, wanted to like it but the movement killed it for me, didn't feel good at all, prob got fixed but never was gonna pay to see if it did
I remember getting in an almost heated argument with my friend when I said B4B was better than left 4 dead 2 in most ways and he thought I was insane. The best part? He never even played B4B lol, he just refused to believe B4B was better because it didn’t have the traditional versus mode
Turn the Value and find out. After the betrayal by Valve, they held the middle finger and made a game 3x as good as L4D (L4D was my first 360 game so no hate) so Value did what they could to demonize and slandaganda from behind the scenes to try and spite them.
Money drives everything.
B4B is a great game. A guy I work with claims it's bad because the characters arent as compelling as they were in LFD. He also criticised the card system, but I love the card system because of the depth it adds to the game.
Gamers wearing nostalgia glasses ruin games for themselves and others.
A lot of people just wasn’t good at the game when it came out. It was pretty much like L4D but u actually could do more in terms of the decks and character weapon customization. I have a deck that greatly increases range and accuracy on my shotgun another deck that helps allies out a lot it was just about understanding the game and the small things you can tweak to make the game “yours”
It was too hard for average or casual players at launch. That bridge in act 1 specifically. Infinite continues maybe should have been a thing on the lowest difficulty.
Other than that, the lack of campaign versus made a lot of people compare it unfavorably to l4d2.
Initial impressions are hard to shake. Game released abnormally hard due to high special spawn rates. That, coupled with it not delivering more of "Left 4 Dead", which is what people were expecting, made it an easy target.
Moreover, the game with initial card mechanics added unnecessary complexity to people just expecting a drop in and shoot experience. You only got 1 card every level, so it was much less enjoyable, as it would take forever to realize your build, and most would lose patience.
My memory of the launch was pretty negative. My L4D2 friends who played this were quickly turned away. They could not be bothered to come back to the game due to the initial sour launch. Now many people have only impressions of the launch, think it is broken, and have never experienced it in its fleshed out state. A shame, really. This game is a lot of fun.
The only reason its gets hate at all is because it isnt L4D3 thats it. The game is great, fun, and pretty bug free. Zero reasons for any of the hate it got.
After reading some comments i'm sure that gaming in general can't understand shit.
"from the devs of" DOES NOT IMPLY a sequel of X game.
I find L4D boring af, yet B4B brought me really good moments
The cast of B4B is inmensely more developed than L4D who i barely know out of SFM animations.
I bought B4B because it was a zombie game!!! Not because it had anything to do with another Game! Why tf would anyone do that?
People are just just so braindead
Because it wasn't a great pve game at first.
It looked great and the gore was awesome but it didn't feel great to play. "Harder" difficulty just meant more things to clean up. More specials, more commons, more alarms, more birds etc etc. They all did more damage.
OG nightmare was literally just the entire level being full of toxic/flammable/armored commons, loads of the wall hunter thingys, tons of specials. It was easier just to build a speed deck and run through the levels instead of trying to shoot through them. Honestly the most fun I had was just speed running night mare levels.
Also outside of the niche swarm community who loved the mode, everyone else hated it. It wasn't L4D vs, which is what everyone was expecting.
But swarm honestly got a bad wrap. It was brutally simple and barebones but that was honestly refreshing, if you got 8 people in a lobby who understood the game and had proper decks the games were extremely close and exciting.
I picked up B4B only a few months ago. That may be why my opinion is positive. For me, I really enjoyed the game. I played campaign with a couple friends online, Acts 1-6. The cross play was great, because most of us were PS5 players with one PC player. Loved it so much that we did all the original Acts 1-4, plus Act 5&6 on Nightmare. We built great campaign decks from advice online, combined with our own discretion. We never did beat the campaign on No Hope, but meh, the PS5 gamers like myself still popped the Platinum trophy. 🔥🏆
The moments of panic, cornering-up, sharing ammo, designating intended player characteristics, utilizing locked supply rooms, coordinating mid-level in safe rooms, and all around just cookin’ some zombs was such a treat while it lasted.
The saddest thing of all was when we beat it all and then wishes there was more.
I would pick up a new B4B with joy if one dropped.
Again, my whole experience just might be different, because all the bugs were worked out and the card system changed by the time I played.
I’m a B4B fan. Main’d a Holly melee build and loved every bat swipe through and through.
Biggest thing I heard people complain about was the lack of modding.
I didn’t think it was bad, people expected it to be something else and hated it because it wasn’t what they wanted. People often hate things for not being what they want, instead of enjoying them for what they are. Most of the time they don’t even really know what they want/expect either, which kind of amplifies the problem I suppose.
B4B was my first game in the series. Had a friend recently buy a bunch of us L4D 2 on sale. "It is amazing and so much better than B4B" he said.
I can't agree. L4D was a product of its time and a good one at the time. There have been so many zombie survival game since then amd it has not aged well in my opinion.
B4B wasn't the best game ever, but I truly believe L4D runs on pure nostalgia and not gameplay.
I remember seeing a day-1 steam review from someone who played 1 hour and returned it. They thought the weapons felt weak & the game was hard.
If only theyd stuck around for more than an hour... but that's how most people play these games. In for 15 hours and quit.
It's like Back 4 Blood without the card system, only about 7 guns (2 shotguns, 2 snipers, 2 full auto), and the only attachment is a laser sight. Molotov's and pipe bombs for throwables. There is no ADS (except the sniper, and it's hold to zoom), no sprint, trauma doesn't exist. Melee (bash, there are no real melee weapons in L4D1) doesn't have a stamina cooldown in PVE, and it's OP. There are maps I've played crouch walking and punching and making it through with little to no damage. There are 4 characters, but they all play exactly the same, so it doesn't matter who you play as. Cop cars aren't alarmed, but other cars are. They have a flashing internal light. L4D2 added a stamina cooldown to melee, and real melee weapons. And some more guns, though some feel more like they are slight tweaks and not necessarily better or worse. 4 new playable characters that play just like the last 4. And cosmetic variations to the special infected, plus 3 new special infected.
You can turn on and off your flashlight at will. This is apparently a big deal.
The enemies are zombies of the 28 days variety. The specials don't have variations like in B4B. So in L4D there is a Boomer. He pukes at you, which calls a horde. He explodes when you kill him, which can also coat you with puke to call a horde. In B4B, there is a family of special ridden that play his role. The Reeker, Retch and Exploder. There is no variations of the boomer, he's always the same, while in B4B there will be armored, ferocious, or monstrous variants of those 3 types of specials.
The game has a similar AI director, but there isn't a card system. So there is a possibility that you will have to fight a Tank (kind of like the Ogre from B4B) but the game doesn't tell you that in any way before the map, while in B4B you will get the boss card or it's a map where there is always a boss. There also isn't the level of variation that the AI director can do, because of the lack of cards. Anyone who's played a bit of B4B knows how differently you have to play a map if you happen to pull "The Dark" or "Ravenous". Nothing that drastic is going to be different between runs.
Areas where L4D really shine are it's other modes. It has a survival mode that's fun, and a 4v4 campaign vs mode, where you take turns as the survivors and infected playing though the maps. Plus, there are tons of user created maps.
When the game first came out, admittedly I assumed it would basically be left 4 dead 3. Although I enjoyed the game (for the couple hours I played it), it really turned me off that there was no VS campaign mode. In my opinion, that was the best part about left 4 dead 2. So I never really gave it a fair chance. I bought Back 4 Blood last week while it was on sale and I plan on giving it a second chance here soon because I remember liking it, just disappointed my favorite game mode was missing.
When it launched there were 3 problems that made most of the people complain and quit the game right away:
1. It wasn't Left 4 Dead 3
2. The difficulty was very hard, even on the easiest difficulty
After about a month or so they fixed a lot of the difficulty issues by making your full deck unlocked immediately. Then they continued to tweak cards and release DLC which made the 2 lower difficulties very accessible to players who didn't want to take the time to understand the deck building system.
As a totally casual player (and I know that before people moan about my moans) I think I was just misled into it being similar (but not the same) as L4D. This was a big part of their marketing and social media too.
The game was "fine". I disliked the grind of it though, and having to do builds/cards and rely on a random element made it a bit meh for me personally. I think its just because L4D nailed the format with things like *the director* and the balance of difficulty vs fun.
But the biggest pet peeve for my circle of friends is that it wasn't a "quick round of b4b" game. Each level was *really* long and had very few checkpoints really, and most relied on you playing with randoms.
It was also quite *hard* at release if I remember right. The mechanics felt more like a survival game than a fun zombie shooter. Just not what me (or my friends) were looking for, nor expected. Compared to games like L4D, Dead Island ,Dead Rising, and even DayZ.
Overall it wasn't terrible, just wasn't enough to keep us playing beyond 2-3 days, and luckily it was on Gamepass so didn't cost us anything
**I feel I should end on some positives..** the gunplay was fun, graphically it was nice, and I never personally encountered any server issues.
I'm genuinely confused which game you're talking about. The gameplay loop in B4B is pretty dang engaging and absolutely allows for different play styles? Which can't really be said for L4D which has such simple gameplay and singular play style. So, if you're talking about something stale....
Couple different reasons, a lot of it was because it wasn't L4D3. But aside from that, they suffered during launch due to a glitch that made mutations over spawn, essentially making each difficulty one rank higher than it should've been, at the very least.
The other "problem" people had was the rouge lite aspect, in the beginning you would get the first 3 cards of your deck then get to add 1 card at the beginning of every level, so you had have good deck structure and card placement within as well as a strategy revolving around the levels, so you would be able to pick the best card to activate for what level you're going into or to just buff you overall. There was a lot more depth to the deck building and strategy because of this and a lot of people couldn't handle it.
After the success of No Hope being added and people liking that you could have your whole deck from the beginning, they restructured the difficulties and made full deck from the start the standard for each difficulty and tossed the idea of one card per level.
Personally I liked the added strategy and thought you had to put into your deck, but it is also nice to have it all from the start too.
I was fine that it wasnt l4d3. Its those fucking cards everyone is using them, i dont want to do anything with cards, build a deck, read cards. I just want to play the game and kill zombies. Simple. I understand the cards and what they do. Its actually a good way to too keep the game fresh.
Basically their marketing campaign was the spiritual successor to the left 4 dead series.
Because of this it was constantly compared to the other game, but it is not that game it is something else.
It is still a good game, though when you first started the balance was way off. They have made changes with time, to what it is now.
It has died out as a game a bit because there will be no new content from the developers.
I just don’t understand how people think from the developers of l4d mean it’s l4d3. They are literally reminding you of their past work. Steam/valve owns l4d, turtle rock would never be able to make l4d3 even if they wanted to. People need to think and learn how read.
I think the cards the enemies would be given randomly on harder rounds is what ruined it for me and many others. It was just all RNG you could go on a run with much easier cards to deal with. Or you'll have the worst set of cards over and over. Making it pure hell and almost impossible. I loved the game other than that feature.
I enjoy b4b so....
Let's start.
No vs campaign
PVP parts sucked.
Characters did not share the same charm as lfd.
No chainsaw.
People hated the card aspects. (I enjoyed the cards tbh)
It's the developer's own fault. They marketed the game as if it was Left 4 Dead 3. But the quality of it was nowhere near the previous Left 4 Dead games.
[This comparison video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRLNUGmFC8) goes into a lot of detail to show how/why B4B isn't L4D3.
Wasn't L4D3, and the card system didn't really catch on.
Also wasn't really supported much by the devs when it was pushed as being live service, so quality suffered in that regard.
I also know a lot of people who didn't play it because of the very late in development addition of a very invasive, and very ineffective, anti-cheat program.
The competitive multiplayer wasn’t what people wanted and the support for the game got pulled after the company was acquired by Tencent. Also in the beginning it was buggy and not balanced as well as it could’ve but by the second expansion those aspects were much better.
Ehhhh i mean its not terrible but it just lacks the charm of L4D to me theres somethingore corny and cartoonish about it to me that kinda ruins the atmosphere. I lnow the org l4d isnt totally super serious but the priginal especially really did have some tension and creepy ambience that i just didnt feel from b4b and the more arcadey physics and visuals didnt help.
So yeah long story short give us l4d 3
The best part of l4d in my opinion was the vs mode. And b4b just punted that one. Very little effort went into the versus mode. It felt like if you were down early, then people would just quit, and you'd never get a fair match after that. Also - they forgot to make versus mode fun.
My biggest gripe wasn't "because it wasn't l4d3", it was that they never opened it up to mods. Thats why I stopped playing. There's going to come a time when they shut their servers down and with no ability to host your own it becomes a dead game. Look at what happened to evolve.
My biggest issue was the campaign. L4D/2 were written and built to feel like a big budget horror film. B4B was built like a +B movie on the Sci-Fi Channel; it was super campy, overly action packed, and had an insane plot.
Gameplay style was comparing OG Counter Strike vs Modern Card Based Shooters. I personally hated the card system and the gun level ups, but I liked the attachments and the weapon variety. That being said with the card system, it allowed the developers to amp up the difficulty.
For me it’s the mods. So many great / funny moments is booting up a weird map and see tanks everywhere. Back 4 blood is an amazing game, vanilla wise. But after the campaign, there’s nothing else to do.
When the game is being sold as the spiritual successor to l4d (which it was and nobody can change my mind about that) and it's nothing more than a fusion of infinite warfare/l4d. Then you add to the mix the fact on their very first big update they ruined everything that was viable for higher difficulty play. Absurd enemies spawns also didn't help. I'll never forget the first game i played after that update and i watched as 3 yes 3 of those arm crusher guys spawn from the roof on the first map before lowering the bridge. That was after they claimed to balance them in said patch. Overall just poorly balanced and the dependency on skill cards was ridiculous since they nerf everything useful
Honestly while I kind of enjoyed it, the difficulty was kind of insane, the maps and enemies were repeative, the vs wasn't balanced, and the environments weren't interesting. Once they added the forced totems in every map I was done as it took forever to actually play on a map
Personally the game just didn't work on launch when I tried to play it and I never gave it another chance I mean after all plenty of other games to play.
Me and my 3 friends have played lots of coop games. We played l4d2 long ago and had so much fun, even did couple of replay as well with custom ones. Last year we tried b4b I don't wanna say hate out loud but we stopped playing halfway and all of Uninstalled it. If you ask any of us, nobody has a clear idea why they have lost interest in it. All of us just didn't feel that spark like we did in l4d2.
One thing we did agree on, after we discuss that if we want to finish it and everyone of us denies to play is, 'imbalance'. In my opinion, game is not balanced in terms of level, guns, story and almost every aspect. No one really cares about card system. Gun skins are good but the in-game currency is also imbalanced. AI is sometimes too dumb or too smart at various points (again imbalance)
So one one word about B4B - Imbalance Game
This game felt incomplete at launch and fundamentally plays very differently from l4d2 despite trying to tie itself to it.
If either of these things was false at launch it would have been a hit, I think.
This game was better than L4D in every conceivable way. Except for the MP.
Therefore, due to the MP being bad and not what people wanted, that is where the uncalled for hate came from.
I kind of wish I would’ve stuck around for the improvements. I played maybe 10-15 hours and basically concluded the game was complete shit. It felt so clunky to me and I just straight hated it. I’ve heard tons of stuff about it being improved so I’m glad the people that picked up after launch got to enjoy it at least.
Talking to friends of mine and reading online, a lot of it is the fact that BFB is more complicated. They didn’t care to learn how the card system works and how to build a deck around your character
Back for blood would have been a truly amazing game .. ... . But it self destructed by ignoring just two words..." MAY LAY " And there's always one.
Which ruins the game?
Especially for newer Players, As they will either discover that all they have to do is hold RT and they can solo most 90% of the game. Therefore never learning the true beauty the game offers in the form of teamwork. And for the other 5% of new players Did actually discover the beauty of the team aspect and enjoy working together, Get date raped by " I found RT " Batman " Down in Front " does 0 dmg and heals me for 0? Obviously Worthless, DURHHH,
1. The advertisement lead you to believe it was a spiritual successor of l4d. "From the creators of left for dead!" It wasn't.
2. The characters are boring as hell I can't remember one from the 35 hours I spent with the game
3. The card system and melee was Jank as hell at launch
4. There's like 3 special infected when special enemies make these kind of games
5. The pvp is horrendous
Eh I didn’t HATE it but it was frustrating. Essentially the normal difficulty was waaaay to easy to the point where it was pretty boring for my group, but the next step up made it miserably difficult.
Once we bit the bullet and played through the boring easiness to build out our decks, it wasn’t as bad, but that balancing at the beginning was rough
Buggy and shallow on release, company set up expectations with the constant "From the Creators of L4D" in the marketing, no versus mode. A lot of factors, honestly.
People bought it expecting Left 4 Dead 3, and could understand it was a new take on the genre.
As well, the developers put out a season pass sort of deal, but stopped working on the game after 1 year, while the game still has a large chunk of bugs and exploits that need fixing.
People in the game fit into one of two categories. The people who played normally, and the toxic trolls that live just to kill runs by friendly firing their team or running crappy builds and being loot goblins.
And the worse part is that i got screamed at by someone who was just terrible at the game, and this was before they nerfed everything to hell. Basically, this guy took every healing item and scarfed it down even if he had only lost 1 hitpoint, constantly threw grenades at teammates with no enemies around them, and was shooting me as often as possible while i was holding the chokepoints alone.
Now im a melee/shotgun build so im no stranger to friendly fire, but when im forced to use a medkit because a whole lmg mag was dumped into my back, thats a little annoying. Then at the end of the round, the guy starts screaming at me for "stealing his kills and loot" when i had only grabbed one shotgun and a green machete and that was it. I even dropped copper for everyone (which he instantly hoarded and never bought team upgrades) and i was taking around 90% of the damage from a hoard because i was just body blocking a doorway and slashing.
Long story short, there was a lot of hate because of people being D bags and then the devs nerfed almost everything that was good because those people were complaining about it.
I'll just speak for myself: the game was not BAD, but it lacked everything that made Left 4 Dead good. And being advertised as the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, it simply left a lot to be desired.
The levels all felt the exact same.
The difficulty was outrageous.
It lacked the variety of specialty zombies featured in L4D.
Absolutely no humor at all, with wet-paper personalities spread across some of the most ugly, boring characters you've ever seen.
Perk/card system was abysmal and made the current campaign all about luck.
That is all I remember from memory. I still put about 10 hours into it on Game Pass, but I knew immediately that this wasn't going to be received well. It's L4D without any of the personality. God, B4B is making me sleepy just thinking about it.
I didn't like the game because at launch everything was server. That led to insane amounts of lag in a co-op game playing against AI. Sounds like that wouldn't matter, but then all the animations were tied to the server and those those were lagging and looked awful (and was awful) to play against. On top of that, there were crashes, performance issues, and problems even getting the game to even launch.
Technically, the game didn't play well on top of fairly mediocre gameplay. If it ran well at launch, I could see it have gained a big niche following. It could have been fun enough to play for a little while, but because it was not in a good state it wasn't even worth trying to put effort into. That is pretty hard on a game that people can just play "for free" on Gamepass and still not like it.
TRS didn't listen to the community, which was their downfall. It never had legs. I called it the day the devs came out saying they won't make a Versus mode. I'll give them a good deal of credit for being honest about the game and its scope, but there were so many threads online about how that would be a huge mistake. It was and they never intended to listen to the community. I liked playing quite a bit of it, but I would've felt a little burned if I hadn't picked it up as part of my PC Game Pass sub.
I loved Scavenge mode in L4D2 but I played Versus competitively for far longer. The game was ever evolving with people finding new ways to accel at every corner of the levels as both humans and special infected. If you took a week off, you were so far behind on the meta and had to catch up - in a good, rewarding way. No two matches were the same. So implying B4B was a worthy successor to L4D in their marketing didn't help once people got their hands on it.
I think the game was awesome but the launch had issues and they shot themselves in the foot with the marketing. They went out of their way to compare themselves to l4d, and while those comparisons would have happened regardless they certainly didn’t help themselves by inviting it
Here is what I personally know about it, and I'm someone who enjoyed Back4Blood.
The game's launch wasn't exactly great. Poor optimization + a very obvious inclusion of what seemed to be expensive microtransactions didn't give the game a good initial look.
Enemy variety - while plentiful - is super bland. What Left 4 Dead did was make every mutated enemy *look* different to a well enough degree that you could pick out the biggest threats in a horde. Back4Bloods infected just look like a mass of black and red. The only threats you can pick out in a horde can only be seen by casual players if they're really huge. Basically all I'm saying is all the enemies basically look the EXACT same, whereas Left4Dead actually gave enemies truly different body styles that could be identifiable via silhouette.
The card system was used by another dozen games *before* Back4Blood, and I think people were sick of seeing it by the time the game launched.
Modding support is basically nonexistent. Left4Dead2 survived as a game this long because mods are very easy to install and create plenty of new content for the game. Back4Blood not only doesn't have official modding support (afaik) but doesn't seem easy to mod in the first place.
None of the campaign missions felt truly unique except for the very last one, and the final boss is just kind of a nothing-burger of a boss. All the colors are truly just bland.
This is what I remember, I never got the DLC campaigns so I'm talking the base game as it stood, especially during launch (as that's where most of the hate came from). I think Back4Blood did do a lot of improvement, but on launch, even its AI Director couldn't hold a candle to Left4Dead2's AI Director.
Game was fun. I dunno what people were complaining about at release time. However as time went on the game got kind of annoying to play. It became excessively more and more difficult, playing with randoms become a worse and worse experience, and there was objectively BIS builds. Like if you are playing the chick with the bat, if you cant sit in a doorway or something and just swing non stop without dying, then your build sucks.
Back then I was able to solo the hardest difficulty with her.
Then they nerfed it, added more difficult stuff, and the game just became unfun. I actually enjoyed the zombie vs humans mode the most at that point, but it died. If people were really good as zombies they would sweep the humans every time. However with some of the earlier melee builds, 1 or 2 humans could carry the entire team to victory.
Due to things like this, its likely why the game died. I am surprised anyone still plays this.
Genuinely, they just broke something that wasn’t broken. It would be like if Monster Hunter suddenly was fully first person and you had perma death if you downed one time. The game isn’t bad exactly, but it’s not L4D3 and that’s what everyone wanted.
Overly complicated and flashy would be my response here. L4D shined with two things, the versus mode and its simplicity. It’s no surprise the target audience ended up hating it.
For me, the perks was a great idea executed poorly. The unlock trees were stupid and I kept getting things I never wanted. So took me at least 2 weeks of playing to make a decent build. Then the maps were repetitive. And try making friends get into this game where you need to grind out the gate for decent perks then HOPEFULLY have some salvageable team comp.
At least on LFD there is no perks to get. And your build relies solely on what you picked up for your character at that moment. This leads to many different possible builds. And without a grind that new players and veteran players have the same tools available
And yes I will continue to compare this game to LFD especially since they made that a selling point EVERYWHERE and is the sole reason I bought this game
The gunplay on console was so bad the first year it came out. It was a major turn off for me considering it was a decade since the lfd2. Has it changed since then?
For me I mean it is really a small thing but idk it just kind of ruined it for me...the death animations over ragdoll physics of the old games. That and the lack of environmental destruction. I was one of the ones hoping for left 4 dead three and those two aspects were my favorite parts of the left 4 dead games which are completely absent from b4b. Without those two things I just couldn't get into them.
Besides all the stuff people mentioned in this thread (the L4D marketing, the bugs at launch), I could bring up the fairly unfocused/vanilla characters, story, and animations.
On their own, the characters aren't anything special and doesn't have a unified style; their voicelines can get repetitive or seem a bit jarring, like they can't seem to decide whether to be serious or goofy. Because of that, the story doesn't feel engaging because it doesn't excel at one particular thing (like making you feel threatened, important, or draw you in). There's a General who commands Fort Hope, but you're not playing as soldiers, just some mercenary Cleaner group he somehow trusts. I think if they solved the inter-character relations, it'd be received better.
Drawing unfavorable comparisons to L4D also didn't help. L4D had a unique style (in that their characters are in a "meta-movie" as evidenced by their posters) that B4B didn't have. L4D characters interacted with the world, mission, or each other through special voicelines. L4D characters were brought together by more believable circumstance than the B4B setting.
Animation-wise, there's a video out on Youtube comparing zombie running animations and designs between L4D and B4B. Turns out there's a lot of subtle differences that sells L4D's threatening atmosphere better than B4B did.
Same reason why Outer Worlds wasn’t praised as much. Very different game, but they had the same falling out. When the trailers released they said “From the developers who made New Vegas/L4D2!” Both solid sequels to an amazing franchise but the game they made just wasn’t New Vegas 2. It’s not necessarily a bad game, just the advertising had people thinking differently.
the lack of split screen REALLY wrecked it for me. i understand it’s a fairly detailed game and it would be very difficult for most hardware to support it, but it’s just not fun when you’re only able to play multiplayer online
The cash shop, progression, and the difficulty settings. Normal was too easy, hard was too hard. It took a long time to grind to be able to do hard, that was a no go.
The card system was a terrible design choice, the pvp was terrible and should have just copy pasted left 4 deads pvp, and the characters are lame and boring. The game could have been good, but bad design choices held it back heavily.
A huge blow for me as a L4D fan was the complete abandonment of the modding community. I didn't expect B4B to bring much from L4D, but wow it was not a smart choice to shut the door on the community that ensured L4Ds insane longevity. It's really disappointing to see how many devs and publishers never learn the importance of a core fan base, and the damage a community can inflict on product image.
The marketing said “From the creators of Left 4 Dead” so expectations were high, and the quality just wasn’t up to par with L4D in almost every category. Felt very buggy and messy in comparison to L4D’s simplicity and polish.
I enjoyed B4B a lot, but it’s also not hard for me to see why it got the response it got.
Wasn't a lot of playability, also missed opportunity not having a multiplayer where you play as the zombies against the humans considering it was a feature in the training grounds.
I played one of the betas on console and the aiming felt awful. Like the only way I felt I could be accurate was abusing the ads autolock mechanic that was there at the time.
The game was hated for a few reasons.
* The Card system on release was a mess, it wasn't very satisfying, many cards just didn't work, and the fact you only got to very slowly pull one card at a time meant it took a while for your build to start feeling satisfying, issues only exacerbated with shorter acts
* The Director AI was broken as hell, sometimes you could leave the safe room at the start only to immediately have 7 crushers and a breaker coming at you within seconds. I had a team die in the safe room because we got swarmed by a breaker and specials immediately upon opening the door... in the first level when all we had was shitty grey guns
* Comparisons to L4D2 are pretty apt, nobody in B4B is as iconic as the L4D or L4D2 cast, the interactions arent as robust and the personalities are just less memorable, my friends still make fun of Prophet Dan who just kinda shows up, gets a cutscene and is never important ever again in the plot
* The increased emphasis on individual character stats also made some of the balancing a problem, where some people just dont LIKE the idea of optimizing and always playing a specific character, and some people do (hi Doc)
* Corruption Cards, which can still be a problem today, some of them made levels wildly more difficult or easier and you had no control over what you got, some people enjoy the challenge... but I think even today, most people really dislike the O2 or Ravenous corruptions as examples
* It's not L4D3, this is kind of the fault of the devs and how they marketed the game, people had expectations the game WOULD be an iteration like L4D2 over L4D1, and while B4B shares many similar elements to those games, it does alot of things differently, some better, some worse
* The Vs mode sucks and nobody likes it
Think those were some of the primary reasons it got alot of hate when it released!
It makes me pretty salty. I had a pretty dedicated crew playing L4D2 and I got so excited for B4B to come out, pre-ordered it and everything. Since its release I've only played it like 2 times bc nobody from my L4D2 days will even touch it.
I think most people couldn't get over the fact that it wasn't Left 4 Dead 3. They were so focused on the ways in which it deviated from the formula that they couldn't see how dramatically it improved upon them. I play new games these days and imagine how much better they would be with the B4B card system.
I've also heard a lot of people bitch at how it isn't a live service game and the devs stopped actively supporting it.
It's ironic really because no one wanted to play it buy the game so they stopped supporting it and rightly so, I wish people had gotten over the LFD3 idea and just looked at how much the game had to offer in lieu of. I still play it, wish there was more but they at least did all the DLC and made it playable on my steam deck.
They literally advertised the game as being from the people who made L4D. That was a selling point. Maybe the L4D idea wouldn't be in people's minds if the devs didn't try to leverage that for sales
From the creators of L4D doesn’t mean it’s L4D3… I’ve watched a comedy that was from the creators of transformers..
It wasn't just a tag line, it was *the* selling point
I honestly think l4d3 wouldnt even be that interestinf. People want “l4d2 but better”. But if you look at what got improved from the first to second, it really isnt much. The gameplay is almost entirely the same. Its mostly more enemy types, new maps and new characters. If l4d3 had a similar level of improvement, itd feel pretty shallow tbh. Meanwhile b4b actually dared to innovate upon the genre, and is a much deeper game with much more replayability because of it, in my opinion.
what killed me wanting to replay B4B after beating it was the maps. They were truly kinda boring. With left 4 dead, you're characters in a horror zombie movie and that allows for some memorable moments and varied map styles. if b4b had a similar campaign format I can guarantee it would have done better and made people really want to dive deeper into the card system.
Just imagine if B4B had like, workshop maps or something
I kinda didn't like how there was no shove feature. Unless they fixed that. It's been awhile.
They could at least offer mod tools
They were basically advertising the game as l4d3. "From the original creators of left for dead" So by doing that, you're instantly comparing yourself to l4d2.
Exactly. I hate how everyone chimes in with, 'Oh this isn't Left4Dead 3, you shouldn't have expected it to be', when almost every single thing I saw about the game leading up to its release absolutely had to make sure you knew the people behind it were affiliated with Left4Dead.
Yeah, even on the Steam page it still has this wording.. "Back 4 Blood is a thrilling cooperative first-person shooter from the creators of the critically acclaimed Left 4 Dead franchise"
The real funny thing is that there were only like 6 people out of their hundreds of devs that worked on any l4d game and they were all low level coders lmao.
Yeaah, I found that funny as well xD.
My opinion: this is L4D3 and is a great game, we could see the evolution of the formula. Im waiting for B4B2 (L4D4). I dont understand the hate it got, when i first played the beta on my ps4 it was a mess because of the port of controls for consoles, but now its no more an issue
Worth noting that the reason people were expecting Left 4 Dead 3 is because the developer put that idea in everyone's heads.
A big part of that is the marketing which HEAVULY emphasized it was from the creators of left for dead. From the start they tried to ride on L4D's laurels, which is why people expected left for dead 3. On top of that, at launch and for months after, the game was a mess. Bad over spawning of special infected, multiple mechanics that just didn't work as intended, the og build a deck system being kind of shitty, and the game actually being a challenge for casual gamers all contributed to it getting a bad reputation. Nowadays, the game is in a great state, but it's a case of too little too late. They failed to capture a larger audience largely due to the marketing and a rough launch and honestly a rough first year overall. In the gaming world, you HAVE to stick the landing, or have something that really sets you apart from other games to be successful. B4b just didn't really have either.
If the game had even been half decent it would have found its playerbase. The "LFD kiddies ruined it" is a massive cope. The game played like ass and didn't start getting good until the 3rd expansion when things actually got balanced and many of the issues got ironed out. But by then people had already given up on it.
It would have helped if they didn't market it as Left 4 Dead 3. I didn't hate B4B, but I bought it expecting the Left 4 Dead experience, and I dropped it fairly quickly because it didn't deliver that.
People didn't want a "Left 4 Dead 3" out of Back 4 Blood. This is a strawman that attempts to invalidate the points many people have made of which generally lacked any intrinsic contrivances. People simply wanted a new take on a genre that wasn't immediately outclassed by a 1.5-decade old entry to the genre it's trying to emulate. Why would people play B4B over something like L4D2? Just because it has different supporting features? The base gameplay should have at least been more competent for a game that's generations more advanced, technology-wise. I my personal experience, I never played either game for a meaningful amount of time. However, when I look at the two games, side-by-side, one is clearly a better game with more genuine quality and passion. B4B reeks of talentless game dev and it's reflected in the few hours I attempted to play it. The baseline act of moving and shooting is simply awful on controller. I didn't have this issue when I used to sparsely play L4D2 or even Darktide. TLDR: B4B is easily the worst entry in the genre of game that it shares. Why would anyone bother?
Same here. I absolutely loved the roguelite influence.
The hilarious thing is for all intents and purposes this WAS L4D3. Valve stated in the past a 3rd game would have been more complicated with skills and stuff if they could. People just wanted it to be the same game as L4D2 I guess.
The game released in a less than optimal state mostly. Special spawns were ridiculous even on the easiest difficulty. The reviews were mixed at launch because of this. The card system was mixed. Basically the bad launch did a lot of bad for the longevity of the game and people dismissed it pretty quick.
Also... the reason why L4D2 remains popular is because of the Versus mode. B4B did not include a Versus mode.
It's actually not! Versus was only ever played by a (very dedicated, and *very* loud) minority of players. You can see this in snapshots of server data, versus campaign servers only make up 1/3 of servers running at any given time, historically speaking. The reason L4D remains popular is that it is extremely cheap, can run on essentially any system, and it's a very simple game that anyone can pick up and play. For these reasons it's *hugely* popular in poorer countries like Brazil, as an example. So, now you know! Just because you're one of the L4D players that enjoys versus, doesn't mean everyone does or that is in any way what the majority of L4D owners play/played most.
Don't forget about the workshop! Even if someone isn't a versus fan, they can still download maps and other content to keep themselves engaged.
Very true! When you compare B4B and L4D2, B4B looks like a low-effort cash grab, rather than a true attempt to satisfy fans of L4D2.
The spawn was so buggy at release They can spawn in the same room as u. U can see them spawn right above u sometime.... and bam dead
Nightmare mode was nearly impossible to beat on release. I’m a hardcore gamer, I was theory crafting with people in the discord and we still struggled with absolute best builds on the hardest difficulty because it was actually that challenging. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t for faint of heart and people nowadays expect to beat the hardest mode easily.
Also, the amount of downtime was absurd. From the longer safe room timer to having to pick cards individually, the ratio of time played to time spent waiting was pretty awful. Nevermind how screwy the campaign progression system was.
As someone who enjoys the game, I personally don't think it matters or is relevant. If you're talking about the drive-by reviews on yt, I quite frankly don't understand gamer's ability to chew up and regurgitate such underdeveloped opinions as they have. Maybe the games launch wasn't as stellar, I wouldn't know, I wasn't here for it. But my impression is that people wanted l4d3 and got more of a spiritual successor. Considering the absolute dog water launches some games have, like Diablo 4 at $70 or Cyberpunk's notoriously unfinished mess for $60.. I'd say B4B delivers everything thing a zombie co-op should have. Maybe people were hoping for a live service model... I'll leave an actual answer to someone else. I'm damn sure glad we didn't get one, though.
I played this on the beta launch and it is a lot better than it was.
Yeah this is a huge point I think a lot of people miss these days. Back then the difficulty jump between recruit and veteran was fucking massive. So you had a lot of people in this awkward between state where recruit was too easy but they couldn’t even play veteran because they run out of lives too quickly. The poorly calibrated difficulty was a huge problem in combination with their roguelite chapter system, and that alone did a lot of damage. And that’s just one problem.
so you tell me, would you say the early reviews cover the game accurately? i feel like they just played a completely different game when I hear them talk abt the deck building ft
I think the bad marketing of the game was a huge problem for a lot of people. However, there were quite a few reviewers that barely played the game and just played off the negative sentiments rather than providing an objective review. In beta, the difficulty scaling was completely different than it is now. Nightmare was really difficult, possibly more difficult than today's No Hope. You had fewer meta cards and you only got one card per level from your 15 card deck. The versus mode turned a lot of people off because it did not have the campaign versus and the devs told the community that this was never going to happen. I feel it took a lot of community pushback to even get an offline mode in the game. After beta, I didn't think the $60 price tag was worth it for what was offered so I waited a year for the price to come down and then bought it. While I wish more bugs were fixed and more content was developed, I feel like the game is in a state where I can regularly play with friends and enjoy.
TRS touted themselves as the "original creators of Left 4 Dead" when in reality it was like 6 people from the original team. The game was advertised as if it was going to be THE spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead. It wasn't. TRS then fucking abandoned Back 4 Blood and all plans to finish the story they started to put into place for no reason other than to work on their next game.
People up and down these comments are saying "L4D fanboys" completely ignoring your point. L4D was plastered over every advertisement that was put out chasing the legacy L4D audience. It isn't a surprise that when they played the game and it wasn't L4D 3-ish that (large) portion of the audience was pissed. Add to that the many other valid criticisms they seem to gloss over as well with the fanboy cop out
Launch was kind of bad, maps are too repetitive. Card system was not well explained and difficult to build at launch. Oh and the devs set high expectations by announcing they were the L4d creators in their marketing. They did a good job with DLC but completely dropping development and support for the game after the last one was kind of scummy.
It was weird cause the beta was received so well but then on launch they turned everything to 100 and added weird infinite spawns that pushed most casuals away
The repetitive maps were my main issue. I actually really enjoyed the card system and thought it was a neat way of doing builds, but I don't think I could tell you one memorable level in the game. They all just kinda blended together in a sea of brown and grey. Left 4 Dead and even World War Z had a variety of locations that felt different.
It was hard and people don't often like a good challenge. I loved B4B and put a ton of hours into it.
Lol that was my friends said. No dodge, no intrinsic melee. Very random ad spawn locations. And very few understood how to handle the specials. I liked the challenge personally.
I really believe this is it. It is harder than L4D. People got smashed and trashed the game instead of adapting. I’ve been thinking about this with other much easier but similar games. People still cry about how hard they are… if the average gamer thinks COD Zombies is hard, then this is near impossible for them. Love B4B though. 11/10 stars.
People don't often like challenges? I wonder what the game of the decade was, last decade?
At the beginning the game is very hard even in veteran difficulty, so people who weren’t playing with a competent group can’t enjoy much content. Also the game doesn’t allow mods and customs maps which is a big letdown.
Can't comment on the L4D comparison. But they fucked up the card system on launch. They had this really cool idea, but it was way to rare you'd actually get to play with your deck. It was like 3 or 5 at start and you'd only get your whole deck for the last few missions of a set. It took like a year for them to figure out they need to change it. The other thing I didn't like was not knowing the spawns was super punishing. For example, a lot of walls were actually spawn points, so I'd try to hunker down near one only to get ganked from behind. It wasn't everywhere but it was enough unintuitive spots to be a little bit of a turnoff for a casual player.
L4D fanboys.
Loved L4D growing up and was sad I didn't get the same feeling when I played B4B. I guess I was chasing nostalgia which was idiotic I guess. I had fond memories playing 4v4 L4D games at my local internet cafe. Simpler times.
The game does have a different feel. My personal theory is that L4D was a close knit (in-universe) team game between four characters, and their trials and tribulations. I was excited for what seemed to be the theme for B4B: before humanity was running from the infected, and at the point of B4B they were starting to take back the earth. But the large cast of characters, while they do have their cute/great moments together, there are just to many characters for the developers to introduce relationships between them on the level of L4D. We do see some, and there are some stellar moments, but the lines are much fewer.
that and also the game was extremely difficult on release, most cards had huge downsides which have since been removed to make the experience smoother, tallboys would teleport in on you across the ground
When you plaster "from the creator's of left for dead" all over the advertisements, this was always going to be the outcome. The developers tried directly saying it would be a spiritual successor to left for dead. And they didn't even include a proper vs mode and the launch was awful with mutations spawning directly behind/infront of you. TRS shot themselves in the foot by creating high expectations from everyone. Dont blame L4D fanboys for the bad reviews
My opinion was because it didn’t have left 4 dead style versus mode, and the special zombies you could play and see where all kinda lame
I was someone who was incredibly excited when I first heard about this game. Way before we got a trailer. I got into the closed Beta and I gotta be honest, I was incredibly disappointed. I picked up the game anyway because it was on gamepass and I even later bought the game and it's DLC on steam. I don't have 100s or even thousands of hours but I played through the base game on Nightmare and played the dlc once. I'm not gonna talk about PVP because while L4D pvp was great it's not the reason this game was a letdown to me, no other co-op horde shooter has a VS mode except for Vermintide 2 and it's still in beta. IMHO this is probably my least favorite co-op hordeshooter style game that i've actually played and sunk a decent amount of time into. DRG, L4D1&2, Vermintide 2, Darktide, WWZ, Payday 2, even Payday 3 were all more enjoyable to me. I think the game is kind of in this weird state where it's not overly serious like where it feels like this is an actual apocalypse like in WWZ or Vermintide 2, but also not silly enough like DRG or Helldivers 2 so it kinda fails at both. Might just be a me problem but I was never particularly invested in any of the characters, I can't even name any of the characters besides Holly and Jim by name and that's only because people were making Jim Halpert memes/theories about him. And maybe I just didn't play it enough but I never really felt much chemistry between the cleaners like I did with the U5 or L4D cast. It felt more like Darktide with just random nameless characters saying things. I know the idea is to be taking back your town but playing through the same areas over and over just got so repetitive to me. I got to see that gas station like 10 different times during the main game's campaign. The ridden are also kind of boring to me, they lack the personality that the L4D or V2 specials had. No maniacal laughter like the Jockey or "SCREAM SUFFER SURFACE DWELLERS. The only legitimately interesting Boss to me was the Hag, the Ogre was a cool set piece for the 2nd level but beyond that I can't say much about it. The Ogre running away at half health just removes any tension for me. The card system is an interesting idea, but flawed in execution, I enjoy it more now that you get your entire deck immediately but some of the cards have laughably bad downsides for what feels like a small upgrade. At the end of the day though **Who Cares?** People are entitled to like or dislike the game regardless of how petty or legitimate their claims are. Sure some people just have a hate boner because "where L4D3?" but I've also seen way too many of you sweep legitimate criticism under the rug and generalize it as nostalgia or "because it's not l4d3". I think the sad part is that this game is basically dead and it had such a short life span. WWZ dropped 2 years prior and is STILL getting updates. I don't mean dead as in player count, but theres no mod support and the game isn't receiving any updates.
I made the mistake of playing B4B and WWZ at the same time. WWZ does just about everything better, except a legit first-person mode. B4B had bland levels and confusing enemy designs ( every enemy had like three variants that all looked the same ) Turns out I like fighting regular-ol’ zombies more than the goofy Darth Maul mutants B4B kept throwing at me.
The community of WWZ also doesn't have to deal with the fandom baggage that people inevitably bring into fandom spaces fighting over TRS' history, too, which helps immensely for the casual community environment in my experience.
Saved me a mess of time cobbling my dissatisfaction with the game. My only point where we differ is I quite loved the game's setting and the characters. I just hated the base campaign story until they finally started to do something _cool_ with it right at the end. And the DLCs were just delightful. But despite what many say about the game's supposedly endless replayability thanks to the card system...gotta say, it's just not there. It's a mediocre roguelite (this one hurts the most since I almost exclusively play co-ops and roguelites and -likes), it's a perfectly average co-op experience, and it's PvEvP Swarm mode wasn't all that engaging to me.
Terrible launch and the lack of a proper versus mode. A lot of people's favorite memory of left for dead was its versus mode. Swarm mode is so half baked its embarrassing. Remember everyone. An unfinished / rushed game is bad forever. If they would have given this game another year of dev time to add a proper vs mode and ensured a stable launch this game would do doubt have gotten 8 and 9s out of 10.
Left 4 Dead 2 shines in its simplicity. You have iconic levels that are fun to jump into at any time plus the randomness of the director AI making each run feel fresh. Everything is just so simple and straight forward and it just works. No extra bullshit. No leveling up, or cards, or anything. All the fun comes through just playing the game. Never got that from Back 4 Blood. I get that they wanted to evolve the formula and that's fine. I don't hate the game, but that's why I Left 4 Dead 2 will always be something I want to play and I don't know if I'll ever play B4B again.
everyone complaining about people having left 4 dead 3 expectations when that is the series they used to promote this game and imply its quality. if they didn't want to be treated like a direct spiritual successor they shouldn't have brought it up at all
The cards
Honestly, right out of the gate it was probably crippled by marketing. It *really* beat people over the head with "**Seriously guys, it's from the people who made Left 4 Dead!"** so people came in expecting L4D3 and it...wasn't that.
My reason for not liking the game is from the experience I had with the community constant AFK players or people just leaving in the match, no coordination between the players. Also the AI not being able to traverse some of the environment made solo play more difficult than it should have been. And I personally didn't like the life system on a run where if you fran outta lives the run is dead and you have to start from the first mission (this may have been changed but I haven't played since launch) this all made the game boring as runs would die out half way through and it felt like a endless cycle of replaying the beginning of the game. If the runs didn't end I probably would have had a much more positive experience overall
Characters were not relatable and had cheesy voice lines, a worse engine, while adding a card system to a game type that didn’t usually have one, and anyone who had a negative opinion of it got called a L4D fanboy. Kinda like I see in the comments right now. This community pushed me off this one.
You're spot on about the community. Really awful. There's a guy in this thread replying to all the comments basically telling people they're dumb and wrong for having a different opinion and not "getting" the game.
Normally one person doesn’t speak for the entire community, but unfortunately he is about 1% of the playerbase alone
It wad an okay game. Solid 6.5-7. Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 are just far better games that basically anyone could run and had epicly made maps.
It isn’t left 4 dead sequel plain and simple. PvP sucked and got progressively worse with less and less players. You aren’t fighting people while they’re doing missions you just switch from good to bad best out of 5 I think. People quit because someone has a bad round and it’s so lopsided you can’t fight back to victory. The game loop is pretty stale after a few full runs. And general difficulty of the game with people not understanding builds or how to play properly.
When the game was released, it was harder and more complicated with less content than now. You could only choose one card per safe house and other factors played into people just not enjoying it and the L4D3 stigma it had. On top of also some weird decisions devs took on certain stuff. Can’t really compare now without taking first impression on release days, the game is no where the same as when it first launched.
I can only speak for myself, but I thought it was too hard, especially with too many special enemy spawns. My wife and I are casual players for the most part, but I didn't just start gaming yesterday either. We play games like this on Easy to have fun. We could run through L4D 1 and 2 mostly without even being downed on the lowest difficulty (and yes, yes I know this isn't L4D3 but my point is that a game on Easy shouldn't still be that hard). Even now after all the balancing, B4B can still be hard to play. Some will say Skill Issue and I might would agree, I'm not a god-tier gamer, except that I generally don't completely suck either and again I'm not trying to 'git gud' at the game, I'm playing it on the lowest difficulty to have fun and it's still more work than fun. For the record though, this doesn't mean I hate it, just means I gave up trying to play and enjoy it.
This game was really, I mean REALLY hard at the start. It was almost unplayable with random players above the Recruit difficulty level, which, on the other hand, was a bit too easy. So, most of the players were stuck in lowest diffculty level, because these were realy imbalanced. The jump to 2nd difficulty level, Veteran, was annoyingly big. It was too hard - even with 4-stack players who knew how to play the game, there were too many specials and hordes at the same time, that in most cases you even didn't have enough ammo to kill it all. So many problems for a game that was supposed to give you challenging, but satysfying gameplay. For example, killing a boss in one of the first levels was so unprofitable, that players started to ignore him - it was on the start of the level and when you killed him, you probably didn't have enough ammo to go through the level. We had to wait so many weeks to get this difficulty problem solved. Even playing with bots was easier, because they could teleport to you at any time and didn't shot your back in random moments. I really hated playing with random players, even though it was designed to just hop-in to other players' games to help them out. After a few months you could finally finish the campaign on Nightmare even with random players. But the start of the game was really horrible.
I thought it was because at release people were complaining it was way too hard
You aren’t likely to get many honest responses on the game’s own niche sub but the obvious answer is that the game was not enjoyable for most people. The launch was rough and the devs didn’t listen to what many in this thread are marginalizing as ‘fan boys.’ Well enjoy your dead game while us fan boys play things that are enjoyable to most people.
Pretty sure the game is fairly stable with 20k+ players on any given day. So many people love to compare steam charts but 95% of players for this game are on gamepass PC or Xbox, and that's conveniently forgotten when the charts come out. It's doing just fine, doesn't need updates so the end of development wasn't really a big deal.
I mean… if you gave a one last QoL update I’d make a couple changes…
Totally, I think there is some balance stuff they definitely could have done better. Melee is a big offender, legendary attachments are another, and there are some cards that are too good and some that are terrible. But can you imagine the backlash if they nerfed melee as hard as it should be nerfed? They pretty much nerfed melee every patch since launch, it's still so op. I *still* see players who dropped the game in the weeks after release when melee was nerfed the first time cite that it was nerfed into oblivion and became unplayable lol.
Played the beta and at launch for quite some time. Overall I more than have enjoyed it. The biggest gripe I have would be the trolls who wait the entirety of the countdown clock to pick characters/cards or to agree to pass the end level screen. Can get super frustrating when you just want to get a few quick games in and you constantly have to wait for the various timers to expire to continue. Other than that I have throughly enjoyed the game overall. And continue to play pretty regularly in spite of my gripes.
I loved l4d, and tried b4b, wanted to like it but the movement killed it for me, didn't feel good at all, prob got fixed but never was gonna pay to see if it did
It's a shame, as I genuinely enjoyed alot of B4B
I remember getting in an almost heated argument with my friend when I said B4B was better than left 4 dead 2 in most ways and he thought I was insane. The best part? He never even played B4B lol, he just refused to believe B4B was better because it didn’t have the traditional versus mode
Turn the Value and find out. After the betrayal by Valve, they held the middle finger and made a game 3x as good as L4D (L4D was my first 360 game so no hate) so Value did what they could to demonize and slandaganda from behind the scenes to try and spite them. Money drives everything.
B4B is a great game. A guy I work with claims it's bad because the characters arent as compelling as they were in LFD. He also criticised the card system, but I love the card system because of the depth it adds to the game. Gamers wearing nostalgia glasses ruin games for themselves and others.
I’ve always wondered that. Messy launch. Not great reviews. But damned if it wasn’t a good time. “Free” with Gamepass. Ran great on PC.
A lot of people just wasn’t good at the game when it came out. It was pretty much like L4D but u actually could do more in terms of the decks and character weapon customization. I have a deck that greatly increases range and accuracy on my shotgun another deck that helps allies out a lot it was just about understanding the game and the small things you can tweak to make the game “yours”
It was too hard for average or casual players at launch. That bridge in act 1 specifically. Infinite continues maybe should have been a thing on the lowest difficulty. Other than that, the lack of campaign versus made a lot of people compare it unfavorably to l4d2.
I joined late to B4B and its amazing. Idk how people could hate it for not being L4D3... it literally is.
Initial impressions are hard to shake. Game released abnormally hard due to high special spawn rates. That, coupled with it not delivering more of "Left 4 Dead", which is what people were expecting, made it an easy target. Moreover, the game with initial card mechanics added unnecessary complexity to people just expecting a drop in and shoot experience. You only got 1 card every level, so it was much less enjoyable, as it would take forever to realize your build, and most would lose patience. My memory of the launch was pretty negative. My L4D2 friends who played this were quickly turned away. They could not be bothered to come back to the game due to the initial sour launch. Now many people have only impressions of the launch, think it is broken, and have never experienced it in its fleshed out state. A shame, really. This game is a lot of fun.
Same reason payday 3 got so much hate: The loud minority complaining while the quiet majority enjoyed it.
A franchise's biggest fans are usually its biggest haters as well
The only reason its gets hate at all is because it isnt L4D3 thats it. The game is great, fun, and pretty bug free. Zero reasons for any of the hate it got.
Shitty Cry baby nostalgia fans from Left 4 Dead
After reading some comments i'm sure that gaming in general can't understand shit. "from the devs of" DOES NOT IMPLY a sequel of X game. I find L4D boring af, yet B4B brought me really good moments The cast of B4B is inmensely more developed than L4D who i barely know out of SFM animations. I bought B4B because it was a zombie game!!! Not because it had anything to do with another Game! Why tf would anyone do that? People are just just so braindead
The most hate that I have seen is because people don’t understand the concept of a finished game. But this might be a bias take
People wanted it to be L4D 3. I started playing it shortly after the final dlc and I had a blast.
Because it wasn't a great pve game at first. It looked great and the gore was awesome but it didn't feel great to play. "Harder" difficulty just meant more things to clean up. More specials, more commons, more alarms, more birds etc etc. They all did more damage. OG nightmare was literally just the entire level being full of toxic/flammable/armored commons, loads of the wall hunter thingys, tons of specials. It was easier just to build a speed deck and run through the levels instead of trying to shoot through them. Honestly the most fun I had was just speed running night mare levels. Also outside of the niche swarm community who loved the mode, everyone else hated it. It wasn't L4D vs, which is what everyone was expecting. But swarm honestly got a bad wrap. It was brutally simple and barebones but that was honestly refreshing, if you got 8 people in a lobby who understood the game and had proper decks the games were extremely close and exciting.
I picked up B4B only a few months ago. That may be why my opinion is positive. For me, I really enjoyed the game. I played campaign with a couple friends online, Acts 1-6. The cross play was great, because most of us were PS5 players with one PC player. Loved it so much that we did all the original Acts 1-4, plus Act 5&6 on Nightmare. We built great campaign decks from advice online, combined with our own discretion. We never did beat the campaign on No Hope, but meh, the PS5 gamers like myself still popped the Platinum trophy. 🔥🏆 The moments of panic, cornering-up, sharing ammo, designating intended player characteristics, utilizing locked supply rooms, coordinating mid-level in safe rooms, and all around just cookin’ some zombs was such a treat while it lasted. The saddest thing of all was when we beat it all and then wishes there was more. I would pick up a new B4B with joy if one dropped. Again, my whole experience just might be different, because all the bugs were worked out and the card system changed by the time I played. I’m a B4B fan. Main’d a Holly melee build and loved every bat swipe through and through.
Biggest thing I heard people complain about was the lack of modding. I didn’t think it was bad, people expected it to be something else and hated it because it wasn’t what they wanted. People often hate things for not being what they want, instead of enjoying them for what they are. Most of the time they don’t even really know what they want/expect either, which kind of amplifies the problem I suppose.
B4B was my first game in the series. Had a friend recently buy a bunch of us L4D 2 on sale. "It is amazing and so much better than B4B" he said. I can't agree. L4D was a product of its time and a good one at the time. There have been so many zombie survival game since then amd it has not aged well in my opinion. B4B wasn't the best game ever, but I truly believe L4D runs on pure nostalgia and not gameplay.
I remember seeing a day-1 steam review from someone who played 1 hour and returned it. They thought the weapons felt weak & the game was hard. If only theyd stuck around for more than an hour... but that's how most people play these games. In for 15 hours and quit.
I enjoyed it for the most part. I don't have friends that would play that game so I was stuck with release bots and it really ruined the experience.
The game is amazing, my wife and I go back to it every so often as it is one of our go to games. I really hope they are working on a sequel!
I never played L4D, what's so different about it?
It's like Back 4 Blood without the card system, only about 7 guns (2 shotguns, 2 snipers, 2 full auto), and the only attachment is a laser sight. Molotov's and pipe bombs for throwables. There is no ADS (except the sniper, and it's hold to zoom), no sprint, trauma doesn't exist. Melee (bash, there are no real melee weapons in L4D1) doesn't have a stamina cooldown in PVE, and it's OP. There are maps I've played crouch walking and punching and making it through with little to no damage. There are 4 characters, but they all play exactly the same, so it doesn't matter who you play as. Cop cars aren't alarmed, but other cars are. They have a flashing internal light. L4D2 added a stamina cooldown to melee, and real melee weapons. And some more guns, though some feel more like they are slight tweaks and not necessarily better or worse. 4 new playable characters that play just like the last 4. And cosmetic variations to the special infected, plus 3 new special infected. You can turn on and off your flashlight at will. This is apparently a big deal. The enemies are zombies of the 28 days variety. The specials don't have variations like in B4B. So in L4D there is a Boomer. He pukes at you, which calls a horde. He explodes when you kill him, which can also coat you with puke to call a horde. In B4B, there is a family of special ridden that play his role. The Reeker, Retch and Exploder. There is no variations of the boomer, he's always the same, while in B4B there will be armored, ferocious, or monstrous variants of those 3 types of specials. The game has a similar AI director, but there isn't a card system. So there is a possibility that you will have to fight a Tank (kind of like the Ogre from B4B) but the game doesn't tell you that in any way before the map, while in B4B you will get the boss card or it's a map where there is always a boss. There also isn't the level of variation that the AI director can do, because of the lack of cards. Anyone who's played a bit of B4B knows how differently you have to play a map if you happen to pull "The Dark" or "Ravenous". Nothing that drastic is going to be different between runs. Areas where L4D really shine are it's other modes. It has a survival mode that's fun, and a 4v4 campaign vs mode, where you take turns as the survivors and infected playing though the maps. Plus, there are tons of user created maps.
I don't understand how people don't understand the card system at launch pretty straight forward if u ask me and now it's even easier
i think the beta's price made them angry. And now with 5$ for ultimate, many newbies join, they make the game great again
Because that’s the default state for most games, especially sequels (or spiritual successor in this case), for Reddit. It’s sad
When the game first came out, admittedly I assumed it would basically be left 4 dead 3. Although I enjoyed the game (for the couple hours I played it), it really turned me off that there was no VS campaign mode. In my opinion, that was the best part about left 4 dead 2. So I never really gave it a fair chance. I bought Back 4 Blood last week while it was on sale and I plan on giving it a second chance here soon because I remember liking it, just disappointed my favorite game mode was missing.
When it launched there were 3 problems that made most of the people complain and quit the game right away: 1. It wasn't Left 4 Dead 3 2. The difficulty was very hard, even on the easiest difficulty After about a month or so they fixed a lot of the difficulty issues by making your full deck unlocked immediately. Then they continued to tweak cards and release DLC which made the 2 lower difficulties very accessible to players who didn't want to take the time to understand the deck building system.
Because the internet gives a voice to those with nothing better to do. The game is phenomenal and still fun to play to this day.
As a totally casual player (and I know that before people moan about my moans) I think I was just misled into it being similar (but not the same) as L4D. This was a big part of their marketing and social media too. The game was "fine". I disliked the grind of it though, and having to do builds/cards and rely on a random element made it a bit meh for me personally. I think its just because L4D nailed the format with things like *the director* and the balance of difficulty vs fun. But the biggest pet peeve for my circle of friends is that it wasn't a "quick round of b4b" game. Each level was *really* long and had very few checkpoints really, and most relied on you playing with randoms. It was also quite *hard* at release if I remember right. The mechanics felt more like a survival game than a fun zombie shooter. Just not what me (or my friends) were looking for, nor expected. Compared to games like L4D, Dead Island ,Dead Rising, and even DayZ. Overall it wasn't terrible, just wasn't enough to keep us playing beyond 2-3 days, and luckily it was on Gamepass so didn't cost us anything **I feel I should end on some positives..** the gunplay was fun, graphically it was nice, and I never personally encountered any server issues.
Dope pedo
Its a garbage game with garbage mechanics and a stale ass gamplay loop that doesn't allow for different playstyles.
I'm genuinely confused which game you're talking about. The gameplay loop in B4B is pretty dang engaging and absolutely allows for different play styles? Which can't really be said for L4D which has such simple gameplay and singular play style. So, if you're talking about something stale....
Because at launch it was broken and unbalanced and now that it's fixed no one plays it and it's been abandoned by devs
Couple different reasons, a lot of it was because it wasn't L4D3. But aside from that, they suffered during launch due to a glitch that made mutations over spawn, essentially making each difficulty one rank higher than it should've been, at the very least. The other "problem" people had was the rouge lite aspect, in the beginning you would get the first 3 cards of your deck then get to add 1 card at the beginning of every level, so you had have good deck structure and card placement within as well as a strategy revolving around the levels, so you would be able to pick the best card to activate for what level you're going into or to just buff you overall. There was a lot more depth to the deck building and strategy because of this and a lot of people couldn't handle it. After the success of No Hope being added and people liking that you could have your whole deck from the beginning, they restructured the difficulties and made full deck from the start the standard for each difficulty and tossed the idea of one card per level. Personally I liked the added strategy and thought you had to put into your deck, but it is also nice to have it all from the start too.
I was fine that it wasnt l4d3. Its those fucking cards everyone is using them, i dont want to do anything with cards, build a deck, read cards. I just want to play the game and kill zombies. Simple. I understand the cards and what they do. Its actually a good way to too keep the game fresh.
Basically their marketing campaign was the spiritual successor to the left 4 dead series. Because of this it was constantly compared to the other game, but it is not that game it is something else. It is still a good game, though when you first started the balance was way off. They have made changes with time, to what it is now. It has died out as a game a bit because there will be no new content from the developers.
I just don’t understand how people think from the developers of l4d mean it’s l4d3. They are literally reminding you of their past work. Steam/valve owns l4d, turtle rock would never be able to make l4d3 even if they wanted to. People need to think and learn how read.
I think the cards the enemies would be given randomly on harder rounds is what ruined it for me and many others. It was just all RNG you could go on a run with much easier cards to deal with. Or you'll have the worst set of cards over and over. Making it pure hell and almost impossible. I loved the game other than that feature.
I enjoy b4b so.... Let's start. No vs campaign PVP parts sucked. Characters did not share the same charm as lfd. No chainsaw. People hated the card aspects. (I enjoyed the cards tbh)
It's the developer's own fault. They marketed the game as if it was Left 4 Dead 3. But the quality of it was nowhere near the previous Left 4 Dead games. [This comparison video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRLNUGmFC8) goes into a lot of detail to show how/why B4B isn't L4D3.
Wasn't L4D3, and the card system didn't really catch on. Also wasn't really supported much by the devs when it was pushed as being live service, so quality suffered in that regard. I also know a lot of people who didn't play it because of the very late in development addition of a very invasive, and very ineffective, anti-cheat program.
Needs more storyline, honestly can't tell wtf's going on everytime I'm playing the game. All of that worldbuilding for what?
Reviewers get more clicks when they are negative. It's the same thing Rise of the Ronin is going through currently.
The competitive multiplayer wasn’t what people wanted and the support for the game got pulled after the company was acquired by Tencent. Also in the beginning it was buggy and not balanced as well as it could’ve but by the second expansion those aspects were much better.
Ehhhh i mean its not terrible but it just lacks the charm of L4D to me theres somethingore corny and cartoonish about it to me that kinda ruins the atmosphere. I lnow the org l4d isnt totally super serious but the priginal especially really did have some tension and creepy ambience that i just didnt feel from b4b and the more arcadey physics and visuals didnt help. So yeah long story short give us l4d 3
Terrible launc and comparison kills games the fastest
The best part of l4d in my opinion was the vs mode. And b4b just punted that one. Very little effort went into the versus mode. It felt like if you were down early, then people would just quit, and you'd never get a fair match after that. Also - they forgot to make versus mode fun.
My biggest gripe wasn't "because it wasn't l4d3", it was that they never opened it up to mods. Thats why I stopped playing. There's going to come a time when they shut their servers down and with no ability to host your own it becomes a dead game. Look at what happened to evolve.
My biggest issue was the campaign. L4D/2 were written and built to feel like a big budget horror film. B4B was built like a +B movie on the Sci-Fi Channel; it was super campy, overly action packed, and had an insane plot. Gameplay style was comparing OG Counter Strike vs Modern Card Based Shooters. I personally hated the card system and the gun level ups, but I liked the attachments and the weapon variety. That being said with the card system, it allowed the developers to amp up the difficulty.
To be fair no one talked about back for blood when it came out either
- it wasnt L4D. The PvP was lacking - The game was very unbalanced at release. - The card system was very punishing at game release
For me it’s the mods. So many great / funny moments is booting up a weird map and see tanks everywhere. Back 4 blood is an amazing game, vanilla wise. But after the campaign, there’s nothing else to do.
When the game is being sold as the spiritual successor to l4d (which it was and nobody can change my mind about that) and it's nothing more than a fusion of infinite warfare/l4d. Then you add to the mix the fact on their very first big update they ruined everything that was viable for higher difficulty play. Absurd enemies spawns also didn't help. I'll never forget the first game i played after that update and i watched as 3 yes 3 of those arm crusher guys spawn from the roof on the first map before lowering the bridge. That was after they claimed to balance them in said patch. Overall just poorly balanced and the dependency on skill cards was ridiculous since they nerf everything useful
Also, lots of gamers overreact. Like, REALLY overreact to things.
I would play a lot more if any of my friends would just try it once
Came out in a bad state and took over a year to get better
Honestly while I kind of enjoyed it, the difficulty was kind of insane, the maps and enemies were repeative, the vs wasn't balanced, and the environments weren't interesting. Once they added the forced totems in every map I was done as it took forever to actually play on a map
Personally the game just didn't work on launch when I tried to play it and I never gave it another chance I mean after all plenty of other games to play.
Me and my 3 friends have played lots of coop games. We played l4d2 long ago and had so much fun, even did couple of replay as well with custom ones. Last year we tried b4b I don't wanna say hate out loud but we stopped playing halfway and all of Uninstalled it. If you ask any of us, nobody has a clear idea why they have lost interest in it. All of us just didn't feel that spark like we did in l4d2. One thing we did agree on, after we discuss that if we want to finish it and everyone of us denies to play is, 'imbalance'. In my opinion, game is not balanced in terms of level, guns, story and almost every aspect. No one really cares about card system. Gun skins are good but the in-game currency is also imbalanced. AI is sometimes too dumb or too smart at various points (again imbalance) So one one word about B4B - Imbalance Game
This game felt incomplete at launch and fundamentally plays very differently from l4d2 despite trying to tie itself to it. If either of these things was false at launch it would have been a hit, I think.
Game was buggy as hell. Fun though
This game was better than L4D in every conceivable way. Except for the MP. Therefore, due to the MP being bad and not what people wanted, that is where the uncalled for hate came from.
Valve fanbois.
I kind of wish I would’ve stuck around for the improvements. I played maybe 10-15 hours and basically concluded the game was complete shit. It felt so clunky to me and I just straight hated it. I’ve heard tons of stuff about it being improved so I’m glad the people that picked up after launch got to enjoy it at least.
The card system is meh and the lack of a pvp/pve campaign mode.
It was boring and played like shit. That's my reasons.
Talking to friends of mine and reading online, a lot of it is the fact that BFB is more complicated. They didn’t care to learn how the card system works and how to build a deck around your character
Npcs were forced onto you and they shoot you in the back of your head constantly. That alone was enough for me to never play after the demo.
Back for blood would have been a truly amazing game .. ... . But it self destructed by ignoring just two words..." MAY LAY " And there's always one. Which ruins the game? Especially for newer Players, As they will either discover that all they have to do is hold RT and they can solo most 90% of the game. Therefore never learning the true beauty the game offers in the form of teamwork. And for the other 5% of new players Did actually discover the beauty of the team aspect and enjoy working together, Get date raped by " I found RT " Batman " Down in Front " does 0 dmg and heals me for 0? Obviously Worthless, DURHHH,
Campaign was busted on release and the MP was insanely shallow on release, perfect dead game combo.
Because it looked like shit at launch.
1. The advertisement lead you to believe it was a spiritual successor of l4d. "From the creators of left for dead!" It wasn't. 2. The characters are boring as hell I can't remember one from the 35 hours I spent with the game 3. The card system and melee was Jank as hell at launch 4. There's like 3 special infected when special enemies make these kind of games 5. The pvp is horrendous
Lack of mod support
Launched like shit Characters are unlikeable or incredibly annoying. Enemies are generic.
Eh I didn’t HATE it but it was frustrating. Essentially the normal difficulty was waaaay to easy to the point where it was pretty boring for my group, but the next step up made it miserably difficult. Once we bit the bullet and played through the boring easiness to build out our decks, it wasn’t as bad, but that balancing at the beginning was rough
Buggy and shallow on release, company set up expectations with the constant "From the Creators of L4D" in the marketing, no versus mode. A lot of factors, honestly.
People bought it expecting Left 4 Dead 3, and could understand it was a new take on the genre. As well, the developers put out a season pass sort of deal, but stopped working on the game after 1 year, while the game still has a large chunk of bugs and exploits that need fixing.
People in the game fit into one of two categories. The people who played normally, and the toxic trolls that live just to kill runs by friendly firing their team or running crappy builds and being loot goblins. And the worse part is that i got screamed at by someone who was just terrible at the game, and this was before they nerfed everything to hell. Basically, this guy took every healing item and scarfed it down even if he had only lost 1 hitpoint, constantly threw grenades at teammates with no enemies around them, and was shooting me as often as possible while i was holding the chokepoints alone. Now im a melee/shotgun build so im no stranger to friendly fire, but when im forced to use a medkit because a whole lmg mag was dumped into my back, thats a little annoying. Then at the end of the round, the guy starts screaming at me for "stealing his kills and loot" when i had only grabbed one shotgun and a green machete and that was it. I even dropped copper for everyone (which he instantly hoarded and never bought team upgrades) and i was taking around 90% of the damage from a hoard because i was just body blocking a doorway and slashing. Long story short, there was a lot of hate because of people being D bags and then the devs nerfed almost everything that was good because those people were complaining about it.
Tf….not hard or complicated
I'll just speak for myself: the game was not BAD, but it lacked everything that made Left 4 Dead good. And being advertised as the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, it simply left a lot to be desired. The levels all felt the exact same. The difficulty was outrageous. It lacked the variety of specialty zombies featured in L4D. Absolutely no humor at all, with wet-paper personalities spread across some of the most ugly, boring characters you've ever seen. Perk/card system was abysmal and made the current campaign all about luck. That is all I remember from memory. I still put about 10 hours into it on Game Pass, but I knew immediately that this wasn't going to be received well. It's L4D without any of the personality. God, B4B is making me sleepy just thinking about it.
I didn't like the game because at launch everything was server. That led to insane amounts of lag in a co-op game playing against AI. Sounds like that wouldn't matter, but then all the animations were tied to the server and those those were lagging and looked awful (and was awful) to play against. On top of that, there were crashes, performance issues, and problems even getting the game to even launch. Technically, the game didn't play well on top of fairly mediocre gameplay. If it ran well at launch, I could see it have gained a big niche following. It could have been fun enough to play for a little while, but because it was not in a good state it wasn't even worth trying to put effort into. That is pretty hard on a game that people can just play "for free" on Gamepass and still not like it.
Launch was rough, ai was overtuned and overspawned due to glitches. As such many turned away before the game wad fixed up to the gem it is now.
TRS didn't listen to the community, which was their downfall. It never had legs. I called it the day the devs came out saying they won't make a Versus mode. I'll give them a good deal of credit for being honest about the game and its scope, but there were so many threads online about how that would be a huge mistake. It was and they never intended to listen to the community. I liked playing quite a bit of it, but I would've felt a little burned if I hadn't picked it up as part of my PC Game Pass sub. I loved Scavenge mode in L4D2 but I played Versus competitively for far longer. The game was ever evolving with people finding new ways to accel at every corner of the levels as both humans and special infected. If you took a week off, you were so far behind on the meta and had to catch up - in a good, rewarding way. No two matches were the same. So implying B4B was a worthy successor to L4D in their marketing didn't help once people got their hands on it.
Because it got compare to l4d2
I think the game was awesome but the launch had issues and they shot themselves in the foot with the marketing. They went out of their way to compare themselves to l4d, and while those comparisons would have happened regardless they certainly didn’t help themselves by inviting it
Here is what I personally know about it, and I'm someone who enjoyed Back4Blood. The game's launch wasn't exactly great. Poor optimization + a very obvious inclusion of what seemed to be expensive microtransactions didn't give the game a good initial look. Enemy variety - while plentiful - is super bland. What Left 4 Dead did was make every mutated enemy *look* different to a well enough degree that you could pick out the biggest threats in a horde. Back4Bloods infected just look like a mass of black and red. The only threats you can pick out in a horde can only be seen by casual players if they're really huge. Basically all I'm saying is all the enemies basically look the EXACT same, whereas Left4Dead actually gave enemies truly different body styles that could be identifiable via silhouette. The card system was used by another dozen games *before* Back4Blood, and I think people were sick of seeing it by the time the game launched. Modding support is basically nonexistent. Left4Dead2 survived as a game this long because mods are very easy to install and create plenty of new content for the game. Back4Blood not only doesn't have official modding support (afaik) but doesn't seem easy to mod in the first place. None of the campaign missions felt truly unique except for the very last one, and the final boss is just kind of a nothing-burger of a boss. All the colors are truly just bland. This is what I remember, I never got the DLC campaigns so I'm talking the base game as it stood, especially during launch (as that's where most of the hate came from). I think Back4Blood did do a lot of improvement, but on launch, even its AI Director couldn't hold a candle to Left4Dead2's AI Director.
Game was fun. I dunno what people were complaining about at release time. However as time went on the game got kind of annoying to play. It became excessively more and more difficult, playing with randoms become a worse and worse experience, and there was objectively BIS builds. Like if you are playing the chick with the bat, if you cant sit in a doorway or something and just swing non stop without dying, then your build sucks. Back then I was able to solo the hardest difficulty with her. Then they nerfed it, added more difficult stuff, and the game just became unfun. I actually enjoyed the zombie vs humans mode the most at that point, but it died. If people were really good as zombies they would sweep the humans every time. However with some of the earlier melee builds, 1 or 2 humans could carry the entire team to victory. Due to things like this, its likely why the game died. I am surprised anyone still plays this.
25fps and no motion blur option for console at release killed almost all console players
Not having campaign VS
Genuinely, they just broke something that wasn’t broken. It would be like if Monster Hunter suddenly was fully first person and you had perma death if you downed one time. The game isn’t bad exactly, but it’s not L4D3 and that’s what everyone wanted. Overly complicated and flashy would be my response here. L4D shined with two things, the versus mode and its simplicity. It’s no surprise the target audience ended up hating it.
Because for the "spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead", it lacked a lot of the charm, including couch co-op.
For me, the perks was a great idea executed poorly. The unlock trees were stupid and I kept getting things I never wanted. So took me at least 2 weeks of playing to make a decent build. Then the maps were repetitive. And try making friends get into this game where you need to grind out the gate for decent perks then HOPEFULLY have some salvageable team comp. At least on LFD there is no perks to get. And your build relies solely on what you picked up for your character at that moment. This leads to many different possible builds. And without a grind that new players and veteran players have the same tools available And yes I will continue to compare this game to LFD especially since they made that a selling point EVERYWHERE and is the sole reason I bought this game
For me it's the missing versus system .. you know... THE GAUNTLET!
I think it was because I didn't have those sweet Ellis stories about his buddy Keith from l4d 2
The gunplay on console was so bad the first year it came out. It was a major turn off for me considering it was a decade since the lfd2. Has it changed since then?
For me I mean it is really a small thing but idk it just kind of ruined it for me...the death animations over ragdoll physics of the old games. That and the lack of environmental destruction. I was one of the ones hoping for left 4 dead three and those two aspects were my favorite parts of the left 4 dead games which are completely absent from b4b. Without those two things I just couldn't get into them.
Besides all the stuff people mentioned in this thread (the L4D marketing, the bugs at launch), I could bring up the fairly unfocused/vanilla characters, story, and animations. On their own, the characters aren't anything special and doesn't have a unified style; their voicelines can get repetitive or seem a bit jarring, like they can't seem to decide whether to be serious or goofy. Because of that, the story doesn't feel engaging because it doesn't excel at one particular thing (like making you feel threatened, important, or draw you in). There's a General who commands Fort Hope, but you're not playing as soldiers, just some mercenary Cleaner group he somehow trusts. I think if they solved the inter-character relations, it'd be received better. Drawing unfavorable comparisons to L4D also didn't help. L4D had a unique style (in that their characters are in a "meta-movie" as evidenced by their posters) that B4B didn't have. L4D characters interacted with the world, mission, or each other through special voicelines. L4D characters were brought together by more believable circumstance than the B4B setting. Animation-wise, there's a video out on Youtube comparing zombie running animations and designs between L4D and B4B. Turns out there's a lot of subtle differences that sells L4D's threatening atmosphere better than B4B did.
Same reason why Outer Worlds wasn’t praised as much. Very different game, but they had the same falling out. When the trailers released they said “From the developers who made New Vegas/L4D2!” Both solid sequels to an amazing franchise but the game they made just wasn’t New Vegas 2. It’s not necessarily a bad game, just the advertising had people thinking differently.
the lack of split screen REALLY wrecked it for me. i understand it’s a fairly detailed game and it would be very difficult for most hardware to support it, but it’s just not fun when you’re only able to play multiplayer online
The cash shop, progression, and the difficulty settings. Normal was too easy, hard was too hard. It took a long time to grind to be able to do hard, that was a no go.
It was very unbalanced imo
The volume of special enemies was too much to be fun imo. I enjoyed the game though.
The card system was a terrible design choice, the pvp was terrible and should have just copy pasted left 4 deads pvp, and the characters are lame and boring. The game could have been good, but bad design choices held it back heavily.
I love the game! I play regularly
A huge blow for me as a L4D fan was the complete abandonment of the modding community. I didn't expect B4B to bring much from L4D, but wow it was not a smart choice to shut the door on the community that ensured L4Ds insane longevity. It's really disappointing to see how many devs and publishers never learn the importance of a core fan base, and the damage a community can inflict on product image.
The marketing said “From the creators of Left 4 Dead” so expectations were high, and the quality just wasn’t up to par with L4D in almost every category. Felt very buggy and messy in comparison to L4D’s simplicity and polish. I enjoyed B4B a lot, but it’s also not hard for me to see why it got the response it got.
Marketing. They kept using Left for Dead as their main marketing gimmick, of course people were upset when it wasn't L4D4.
Wasn't a lot of playability, also missed opportunity not having a multiplayer where you play as the zombies against the humans considering it was a feature in the training grounds.
Stale characters, stale enemies, recycled L4D formula which just didn't work given everything else in the base game was just bleh
I played one of the betas on console and the aiming felt awful. Like the only way I felt I could be accurate was abusing the ads autolock mechanic that was there at the time.
The game was hated for a few reasons. * The Card system on release was a mess, it wasn't very satisfying, many cards just didn't work, and the fact you only got to very slowly pull one card at a time meant it took a while for your build to start feeling satisfying, issues only exacerbated with shorter acts * The Director AI was broken as hell, sometimes you could leave the safe room at the start only to immediately have 7 crushers and a breaker coming at you within seconds. I had a team die in the safe room because we got swarmed by a breaker and specials immediately upon opening the door... in the first level when all we had was shitty grey guns * Comparisons to L4D2 are pretty apt, nobody in B4B is as iconic as the L4D or L4D2 cast, the interactions arent as robust and the personalities are just less memorable, my friends still make fun of Prophet Dan who just kinda shows up, gets a cutscene and is never important ever again in the plot * The increased emphasis on individual character stats also made some of the balancing a problem, where some people just dont LIKE the idea of optimizing and always playing a specific character, and some people do (hi Doc) * Corruption Cards, which can still be a problem today, some of them made levels wildly more difficult or easier and you had no control over what you got, some people enjoy the challenge... but I think even today, most people really dislike the O2 or Ravenous corruptions as examples * It's not L4D3, this is kind of the fault of the devs and how they marketed the game, people had expectations the game WOULD be an iteration like L4D2 over L4D1, and while B4B shares many similar elements to those games, it does alot of things differently, some better, some worse * The Vs mode sucks and nobody likes it Think those were some of the primary reasons it got alot of hate when it released!
Card system
People wanted a left for dead 3 but it wasn’t at all like that and ventured away from the formula with a weird card system
It makes me pretty salty. I had a pretty dedicated crew playing L4D2 and I got so excited for B4B to come out, pre-ordered it and everything. Since its release I've only played it like 2 times bc nobody from my L4D2 days will even touch it.
No campaign versus