![]() One card, for example, significantly boosts the reload speed of your guns but it also takes away your ability to aim down sights. (After playing through the alpha, beta, and several hours of the full release, I can definitively say this game provides a very healthy dose of challenges.)īut there’s a twist: the cards can also have negative effects. The goal is to build a deck that best suits your playstyle in order to progress through the later sections of the campaign, especially on higher difficulties. As you play and replay the game’s four-act story mode, you’ll earn Supply Points that you can use to buy new, more powerful cards back at your base. There are 152 cards to unlock in the game, each with its own unique status effects. “We started to develop the system, the idea of how it worked, how you might build decks, what building decks would do to different styles of player, and we quickly saw that ‘oh, this is cool.'” Naturally, the card system was a big one for us,” O’Driscoll explains. “During the course of development, things just came out. The biggest discovery for the team was the card system, which allows players to collect and build decks that affect their stats and abilities in-game. It’s what was missing from Evolve.īut according to O’Driscoll, many of these new mechanics found their way into the game in an organic way during development and playtesting and weren’t planned from the start. ![]() And what do all of these new mechanics have in common? They’re all designed to boost the game’s replayability, to keep you coming back to unlock new loot and cards. New progression and loot systems tons of customization options, including attachments and skins for your weapons and even a card deck-building component have been implemented to freshen things up. While the core premise - four survivors known as “Cleaners” must fight their way through hordes of alien parasite-controlled “Ridden” - will definitely make Left 4 Dead fans feel nostalgic, the game also introduces new ideas that help modernize the co-op experience for a new generation of players. “It’s why I think we went back a little bit to that, ‘well, what’s a core thing that people remembered and enjoyed and found fun,’ and it was, ‘let’s go back to that classic co-op gameplay, four versus the computer.”īack 4 Blood isn’t just more Left 4 Dead, though. And sometimes those things work out, sometimes they don’t,” says Turtle Rock executive producer Matt O’Driscoll over Zoom. “ Evolve was certainly trying something super new. Fortunately, Back 4 Blood is a true homecoming for the team. Perhaps Turtle Rock had strayed too far from its strengths with Evolve. After a last ditch effort to boost the player count by making the game free-to-play failed, publisher 2K Games decided to shut down the title’s servers in 2018. While the game was critically acclaimed at launch, a lack of story content, an underwhelming progression system, and a gameplay loop that eventually lost its charm meant that Evolve‘s playerbase fell off pretty quickly after the first few months. Instead, the team took a risk and learned a few things along the way.īefore Back 4 Blood, there was 2015’s Evolve, a four-player-versus-one asymetrical online multiplayer game where a team of hunters try to capture a massive monster before it hunts them down. After all, when Turtle Rock was re-founded as an independent studio in 2011, many expected the developer’s next project to be a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead. The studio’s fans might say it took them long enough. Now Turtle Rock Studios, which is still made up of many of the same designers who worked on the original Left 4 Dead, wants to give it another go with the aptly titled Back 4 Blood. What if they took the basic idea of horde mode and added plot, colorful characters, innovative AI designed to make each playthrough feel dynamic and unique, and objectives beyond just surviving so that it felt like you’d gone through an epic (extremely gruesome) journey by the time you finally reached the extraction point? The result is one of the best horror games of the 21st century. environment) experiences in Halo 3: ODST, Gears of War 2, and Call of Duty: World at War manifested themselves as more straightforward horde modes where teams of four or five would hold out as long as they could on maps riddled with zombies, aliens, or monsters, developer Valve South (later re-established as Turtle Rock Studios) took things one step further. In the late 2000s, cooperative multiplayer games that pit you and your friends against waves of AI-controlled enemies were all the rage, and Valve’s Left 4 Dead was the king of this subgenre.
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