The utter lack of polish and adding in too many mechanics while not tightening up the core gameplay. They also did not have a versus mode where you could control the zombies while the survivors made their way through the map, which was in my opinion one of the most fun versus modes in any game.
That video is completely out of date. I watched a sampling of the bugs they were showing, and none of them appear for me, even when playing with bots.
I remember it being shared on release, and its focus on things like physics within maps was a very specific thing - after Half-Life 2 many games gave up on physics especially in online, because it was more likely to lead to glitchy and unexpected behavior than emergent gameplay.
There’s so much in that video you’d have to pick out what matters to make your case, but to take melee reactions: B4B didn’t want the shove to be so powerful or delay the horde much, so it made sense zombies wouldn’t fall to the ground from one shove; the animation length would end up locking up the difficulty.
Death reactions is another gameplay choice. With automatic weapons, I wasted alot of ammo in L4D2 simply because it wasn’t instantly clear an enemy was dead - they were just playing out their lengthy Oscar death. Sometimes it’s a tradeoff between showcasing the enemy design, and showcasing the weapon’s effects when dozens of other enemies are bearing down.
I did enjoy it but I only maybe put 10 hours into it or so. I think it tried to be more than L4D with all the perks/cards or whatever but IMO people just want a simple replayable zombie survival game you can spontaneously jump in and out of with some friends
Even as someone who generally enjoys games adapted with similar rules, I HATE videogames with cards or a board as their main logical center. It’s a VIDEO GAME, not a table top… FFS, at least hide it behind a minimally intrusive UI… That’s the fucking point in having a computer and interface involved: it doesn’t have to be reduced to a small set of human-parseable rules presented as text.
I didn’t enjoy it at all, but you’re right about what people wanted. L4D is so simple in its core concept and streamlined in its gameplay, but it still has a ton of depth. That’s what people want.
I just generally need more games I can just quickly play. Why do I have to spend 30+ minutes just to play anything? I love Rocket League for the ability to quickly do a few games with the friends while we consider what to play.
It had the worst gunplay ive felt in a long time and the atmosphere of the game was destroyed by all the rainbow coloured glow effects and animations. That game was so full of really weird design choices.
That game was such trash. A real mockery of what made L4D great.
I’m still not sure what people disliked most about it. I installed it again relatively recently and had a lot of fun.
It’s certainly following some different concepts than Left 4 Dead, but I really like some of the resource management and build planning you can do.
Yeah, I had a lot of fun with it. I didn’t like the zombies vs humans mode and prefer the l4d way, but the campaigns were really fun.
The utter lack of polish and adding in too many mechanics while not tightening up the core gameplay. They also did not have a versus mode where you could control the zombies while the survivors made their way through the map, which was in my opinion one of the most fun versus modes in any game.
This video explains it pretty well. https://youtu.be/EdRLNUGmFC8
That video is completely out of date. I watched a sampling of the bugs they were showing, and none of them appear for me, even when playing with bots.
I remember it being shared on release, and its focus on things like physics within maps was a very specific thing - after Half-Life 2 many games gave up on physics especially in online, because it was more likely to lead to glitchy and unexpected behavior than emergent gameplay.
There’s so much in that video you’d have to pick out what matters to make your case, but to take melee reactions: B4B didn’t want the shove to be so powerful or delay the horde much, so it made sense zombies wouldn’t fall to the ground from one shove; the animation length would end up locking up the difficulty.
Death reactions is another gameplay choice. With automatic weapons, I wasted alot of ammo in L4D2 simply because it wasn’t instantly clear an enemy was dead - they were just playing out their lengthy Oscar death. Sometimes it’s a tradeoff between showcasing the enemy design, and showcasing the weapon’s effects when dozens of other enemies are bearing down.
I did enjoy it but I only maybe put 10 hours into it or so. I think it tried to be more than L4D with all the perks/cards or whatever but IMO people just want a simple replayable zombie survival game you can spontaneously jump in and out of with some friends
I don’t see myself ever playing a video game with cards in it.
I hear “cards” or “deck-building” or “RPG mechanics” and I think oh my god no
Even as someone who generally enjoys games adapted with similar rules, I HATE videogames with cards or a board as their main logical center. It’s a VIDEO GAME, not a table top… FFS, at least hide it behind a minimally intrusive UI… That’s the fucking point in having a computer and interface involved: it doesn’t have to be reduced to a small set of human-parseable rules presented as text.
I didn’t enjoy it at all, but you’re right about what people wanted. L4D is so simple in its core concept and streamlined in its gameplay, but it still has a ton of depth. That’s what people want.
I just generally need more games I can just quickly play. Why do I have to spend 30+ minutes just to play anything? I love Rocket League for the ability to quickly do a few games with the friends while we consider what to play.
I really wanted it to be good, too. They tried to modernize the mechanics so much that they lost touch with what made L4D fun in the first place.
Yeah, with L4D I can just jump in. Within 60 seconds I’m in a match and playing. It’s an arcade shooter so comparing B4B to L4D was wrong.
It had the worst gunplay ive felt in a long time and the atmosphere of the game was destroyed by all the rainbow coloured glow effects and animations. That game was so full of really weird design choices.