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That video is completely out of date.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’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That video is completely out of date.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.