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There is a type of Special Ridden in Back 4 Blood called Sleeper. It is a torso enclosed in a fleshy pod which, in the Freudian nightmare of my brain, is a kind of dentata, half barnacle, half vagina. The Sleeper will launch itself at you without warning, trapping and ripping you apart with teeth and claws to do serious damage. The first time I was ambushed by someone, I swore with such depth and vehemence that it shocked the coworkers I was playing with, including my real boss.
“It’s because you were on your own and weren’t watching your corners,” says Brandon Yanez, adopting the tone one might use to tell a toddler it’s his fault if he is. fell when told not to run. the swimming pool. Turns out the Sleeper was designed almost specifically to punish overconfident fools like me. “This character actually came from a desire to keep players together. We added the Sleeper as a trap,” Yanez said.
Back 4 Blood is Turtle Rock Studio’s upcoming four-player co-op game, featuring a PvE campaign and PvP Versus mode. Let’s take a look at the details and say the two boil down to human survivors, called Cleaners, versus zombie mutants called Ridden. Special Ridden like the Sleeper are additional monster monsters that are cast by the AI Game Director whenever you need – or at least feel like, as the case may be – an additional challenge.
Yanez is head designer at Turtle Rock, which he says means he does “a little bit of everything”, moving from department to department to make sure everyone stays tuned, although it also does some system work and some creative design. He looks up and looks away as he ponders his answers as if he has a bed sheet pinned to his back wall, and generally comes across as a kind, intelligent, and thoughtful man who prefers to leave the interviews to someone. one more so that he can continue making a game. Back 4 Blood is a curious case that needs to be talked about anyway, as it’s pretty much agreed that it’s an almost direct successor to the Left 4 Dead series, initially developed by Turtle Rock. But the IP still belongs to Valve.
“We’re not going to rehash something we’ve done before or someone else has done.”
I ask Yanez if he should be careful what he says, or risk rockets being launched from Gabe Newell’s yacht in New Zealand, but he laughs. “I think it’s good,” he said. “There’s no animosity or anything. We’re just game developers trying to make products that are fun for people.” Despite this, however, he didn’t say the words Left 4 Dead once in our conversation, but referred to the “genre” often, as in “we are fans of the genre”.
Of the Left4Likes that were announced recently, Back 4 Blood is the one that most superficially resembles Left 4 Dead – the four-player gang working through levels from safe house to safe house, the AI director, the zombies. (although Yanez has said he thinks they are technically not zombies). It’s hard to fully credit Yanez when he says that as a studio they “always want to bring something new to the table, so we’re not going to rehash something we’ve already done or that someone others have already done “. After all, doesn’t Back 4 Blood look exactly like this? Doesn’t his name suggest a comeback, maybe even revenge, of sorts? But my overconfidence, the reason I kept getting fooled by Sleepers, was because I’ve played Left 4 Dead for countless hours, I assumed Back 4 Blood wasn’t much different, and I was stunned by that assumption.
Yanez describes Turtle Rock as a “very iterative studio,” so they try a lot of things, keep the songs that work and throw away what they don’t. A bunch of what’s in Back 4 Blood is partly tinkering with archetypes that they already knew would work, and partly building things from scratch with a lot of play testing. The Sleepers are an example of the latter, an answer to how gamers may behave. Then there’s something like the Crusher, a Special Ridden giant with a big club arm. They already had monsters that would grab players, but needed one that also fulfilled a sort of tank role, so it was more difficult to get out and you would have to use an item to escape, or you would have to use an item to escape. other players concentrate fire and save you. . Enter the Crusher, a variant of the Tallboy that has a catchy hand.
Back 4 Blood has modernized the formula, with things you’d expect in 2021 like sprinting and ADS (aim down) on guns. The biggest differences are elsewhere, such as in the character roster, which have passive stat boosts and abilities that let you create different versions. I’m already a fan of Holly, who has stamina buffs and starts off with a huge baseball bat. Yanez says he enjoys playing healer builds, just like mom or doc, “running around trying to keep everyone alive.” Again, they reiterated: some classes, like types of healers or tactical damage dealers, were “no-brainers” that they entered fairly early on.
“The others came over time because we found pain points,” Yanez explains. “Like, ‘Oh, it would be cool if Karlee could see the dangers through the walls’ – this comes from our play tests, and from players getting caught by the sleeper or coming around the corner and stumbling over birds.”
Weapons, meanwhile, are something Turtle Rock really built from the ground up, and according to Yanez, it took a while. “This stuff is complicated, the spreadsheet for all these guns is, like, massive, you know? Like, I squint when I look at it, ”he says. “I think we did a really good job. Obviously in the future we are going to learn from what we have learned here and make it even better. ”
It turns out that this is quite too modest a thing for him to say. Back 4 Blood’s weapons are fabulous to play, heavy and wild, and rival anything you’ll see from other developers known for their weapon feel like your Bungies and Respawns. It’s only at the end of the interview, and after commenting on how shiny some guns are, that Yanez reveals that guns are something he’s worked on specifically. “When I hear that they feel good or that they feel heavy, which is subtle but was actually difficult for us to achieve, hearing that I feel a little wave of pride.”
Then there are the cards, which add a bunch of different buffs. You set up a deck before playing, then choose a card from a shuffled draw of that deck between stages. It can change your build a lot. For my favorite Holly, for example, I’d like to add stamina buffs for more swings of my bat, and the card that gives me health back for every melee kill.
Yanez says the card system wasn’t even in the original design. This happened because the AI Game Director can decide to throw different things at players: fog, darkness, poison in the air, change what appears where. “As we played more and more, Chris [Ashton, one of Turtle Rock’s co-founders] and I was talking about “It would be fun if the player could influence this RNG”, and so we started to build a system that allowed players to choose things, “he explains.
The first few iterations didn’t work; they tried scavenging cards which added a lot more items to the world for players to pick up. “The player didn’t feel it that much, they didn’t know that this bandage was from their card. So we started cutting them down and doing more important things.” He gives the example of the combat knife, which turns your unarmed hit into a hit with a melee weapon. “This stuff has really evolved over the last year and a half probably.”
If you play the right deck with the right character and shoot great guns with all the best attachments, it’s possible – but rare – to have an OP race where you “feel like the badass,” says Yanez, although he adds that it took them a while to find the right balance so that you didn’t feel too much mastered all the time.
Fortunately, it doesn’t look like this will be a problem for me anytime soon. Over the weekend I played the beta a bit more and got to know the friendly fire barks of all the characters really well, and found that my arrogance at the horde didn’t wasn’t enough to get me past the Ogre on medium difficulty. Me who once laughed at expert level zombles in Left 4 Dead! I’m getting there though; I started to recognize the different noises and growls that Specials make long before they appear. I have set up specific card games for different characters. I see how Turtle Rock has worked to reinvent something they’ve already invented once before, and I can’t wait to see it in full when it arrives on October 12.
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