Board 8 > Anyone playing Back 4 Blood beta?

(+) Yeah! (+)

This is like if Left 4 Dead was made by EA and was 5 times as hard. I'm not a huge fan of it, but it can be a good basis if they tweak a lot of things before full release.

What do y'all think?

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Tried to play a bit ago and the servers werent working.

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red13n posted...

Tried to play a bit ago and the servers werent working.

They were working when I played about 30 minutes ago. Try it again if you're still interested.

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here's the feedback i left after the closed beta last weekend

Visually, the players don't look that different from zombies, especially when splattered with blood, which is a problem when friendly fire is on and when the game is based on swiveling my head around to find a stray zombie trying to backstab me. This results in both accidentally shooting a teammates for thinking they are a zombie, and accidentally dismissing a zombie thinking its a player and letting it hit me or someone. Both experiences feel bad and I feel let down by the visual design.

Attachments are fun and finding better guns is fun. Not being able to move attachments to a new gun makes both experiences bad. I have a basic gun tricked out with good attachments, but then I find another gun I want more.... but its just objectively worse without my suppressor / legendary mag / scope, so I don't take it. This design doesn't work.

The idea of having special ridden that have the same character models but different abilities is very bad design. We should be able to at a glance tell what a special ridden is. Thats something both L4D and Vermintide does very well. The Tallboy, Stinger, and Reeker families are awful. If Im in the middle of a hectic battle and spot a Retch, but think its an Exploder, that changes how I need to deal with it. To the devs, the difference in these mobs may seem obvious, but its not at all apparent in the middle of a Horde. This needs a definite redo.

Taking over a bot in quick play removes the main gun thats so bad. Theres a lot of discussion over on if cards and everything change, but thats all icing details. The main gun is mandatory.

Knocking off hunters and smokers felt great in L4d it doesnt feel like this replaced that. Its all just more damage with the different variants.

Trauma is kinda fine to replicate the effect in L4D that you never really heal to full health when things are going okay, but it makes the game basically unplayable if you are having a rough run with the difficulty up and corruption cards are adding lots of damage to the ridden. You get hit a couple times and suddenly your max health is really low, and you have no way to increase it, which means you are now in 1-2 shot territory forever. This doesnt feel good and makes me just want to give up on a run entirely, which my crew probably would be pissed at me for.

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i didn't try pvp but from what i was reading about it... i decided not to try pvp

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Wanted to play the closed beta but I didn't have time. Then I tried playing the open beta yesterday and couldn't sign in. Hoping I can try it today.

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CoolCly posted...

here's the feedback i left after the closed beta last weekend

Visually, the players don't look that different from zombies, especially when splattered with blood, which is a problem when friendly fire is on and when the game is based on swiveling my head around to find a stray zombie trying to backstab me. This results in both accidentally shooting a teammates for thinking they are a zombie, and accidentally dismissing a zombie thinking its a player and letting it hit me or someone. Both experiences feel bad and I feel let down by the visual design.

Attachments are fun and finding better guns is fun. Not being able to move attachments to a new gun makes both experiences bad. I have a basic gun tricked out with good attachments, but then I find another gun I want more.... but its just objectively worse without my suppressor / legendary mag / scope, so I don't take it. This design doesn't work.

The idea of having special ridden that have the same character models but different abilities is very bad design. We should be able to at a glance tell what a special ridden is. Thats something both L4D and Vermintide does very well. The Tallboy, Stinger, and Reeker families are awful. If Im in the middle of a hectic battle and spot a Retch, but think its an Exploder, that changes how I need to deal with it. To the devs, the difference in these mobs may seem obvious, but its not at all apparent in the middle of a Horde. This needs a definite redo.

Taking over a bot in quick play removes the main gun thats so bad. Theres a lot of discussion over on if cards and everything change, but thats all icing details. The main gun is mandatory.

Knocking off hunters and smokers felt great in L4d it doesnt feel like this replaced that. Its all just more damage with the different variants.

Trauma is kinda fine to replicate the effect in L4D that you never really heal to full health when things are going okay, but it makes the game basically unplayable if you are having a rough run with the difficulty up and corruption cards are adding lots of damage to the ridden. You get hit a couple times and suddenly your max health is really low, and you have no way to increase it, which means you are now in 1-2 shot territory forever. This doesnt feel good and makes me just want to give up on a run entirely, which my crew probably would be pissed at me for.

I see all of your points and don't fully disagree with any of them.

Although, I think the special ridden families are excusable

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My final thoughts were these:

• Veteran and Nightmare difficulties definitely need to be scaled way back unless they're going to add another difficulty inbetween Survivor and Veteran.
• The cards are definitely an interesting addition once you get used to them, though I wish the characters were more different.
• I like the special ridden having weak spots, but I feel like the Tallboys have way too much health for how fast and hard to avoid they are. Should pull one of those three things back: health, speed, or reach.
• The guns feel better and better the more you play with them.
• I like the ability to make strong melee builds
• I like how it punishes you more for making mistakes than L4D did, barring L4D's expert mode (but I still wish B4B's difficulty was lowered at least on Veteran)
• Definitely need to be able to swap attachments on guns
• This game would be worth full price if they had 5 campaigns.
• It's fun with friends and will probably be worth the money after a slight discount or DLC gets released.
• I didn't touch the PVP and don't care to.

Overall, I liked it, but I see a fuckton of ways that it could be much better.

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Shit I forgot all about this

Ah well, sounds like it needs some time anyways

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OH - last thing I have to mention

They MUST introduce an ability to play offline with the bots, and on that note, the bots are incredibly stupid and MUST be improved. The bots that replace human players are practically the Big Rigs of bots. They don't save you when trapped by a hocker, they get stuck on miniguns, they always get hit way more than anyone else on your team, and they're almost more of a liability than an asset.

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