How Valve Carried Left 4 Dead (Back 4 Blood Sucks)

Comments · 519

• TH

  @TheRyderShotgunn · 3 years ago

  Oh, man. Zoey&apos;s back story is fucking rough, man.<br>To those who don&apos;t know, there&apos;s a short comic series leading up to the release of the sacrifice mission that basically showed what the 4 characters were up to when the apocalypse hit, and for zoey, she had to shoot her own father because he got bit.<br>However, it gets worse, because later on in the story they end up on a military base and meet a doctor who tells them the immunity gene runs on the father&apos;s side, meaning that since zoey was immune, her father was too.<br>Yeah, I know, girl has it fucking rough.

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• EG

  @EgrichSMG · 3 years ago

  Fun fact: you can turn off the overseas censorship in the game files. It&apos;s a toggle value.

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• EL

  @electricbayonet2 · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAzVAtdArPo&amp;t=1258">20:58</a> &quot;Who the fuck shot me?!&quot; <br>&quot;Watch where you move in the future!&quot; <br>This exchange is a good example for highlighting yet another great detail of L4D (which B4B, naturally, screwed up). <br> <br>In Left 4 Dead, there were audio cues to alert you to friendly fire...and that&apos;s what their purpose was: to alert you to friendly fire. The game understood that you weren&apos;t supposed to be doing that, and that if you wanted even a prayer of playing at higher difficulties you needed to check that shit at the door. <br> <br>I can remember being frustrated at the AI shoutouts to friendly fire, but I also remember being satisfied in seeing how my friendly fire rates dropped with each credit sequences. It&apos;s not like I was <i>trying</i> to shoot them. It was carelessness, and I wanted to avoid that in the future. The fact that the AI survivors were unable to actually shoot you in normal difficulties just made it better. <br> <br>But Back 4 Blood? Apparently, they just didn&apos;t get it. They couldn&apos;t resist the idea that your character would need to snark back despite probably being in the wrong, because why not? &apos;Borderlands&apos; exists in a universe of satire and psychopaths, but who cares about internal consistency? Let&apos;s just have everyone be a bland, snarky OC that drops lots of profanity instead of actually being memorable.

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• QU

  @QueenAleenaFan · 2 years ago

  &quot;Yep, that&apos;s me.&quot;<br>You know, if Back for Blood was done like a comedy...I could see that upbeat way of dealing with the apocalypse working.<br>Even Ellis, Louis, and Zoey, despite being generally upbeat, were grounded.

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• AR

  @ariezon · 3 years ago

  Experimental Psychologist is self-explanatory. He&apos;s the one doing the experiment on the player&apos;s behavior, hence the name. In that brief clip, he was explaining that the player doesn&apos;t cooperate as much as the developer wanted and his task is to find out why and how by doing countless experiments. I don&apos;t remember how many experiments he did but the Special Infected is the result of that experiment.

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• KA

  @kabob0077 · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAzVAtdArPo&amp;t=520">8:40</a> Because he&apos;s wearing his Ear Protection, which <i>makes sense</i> from a gameplay standpoint with this zombie type not able to actually hear the Pipe Bombs. It&apos;s more than a reskin of the Common Infected because it actually has special gameplay properties.

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• AB

  @abnegazher · 3 years ago

  Government: Censor/Bans game.<br>Me, a Brazilian: &quot;Come all you young sailor men, listen to me! I&apos;ll sing you a song of the fish in the sea!&quot;

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• AN

  @AndragonLea · 3 years ago (edited)

  What really strikes me about all of this is that Valve spared no expense. They invested actual hard work and thought into every aspect of the game design, from the looks, stories and voice lines of the characters to the environment to lights and shadows to sound design to level design to hiring actual effing psychologists to find out why people are reacting the way they did and to help design the game to incentivize players to use the right tools at the right time.<br>Some people might say that nobody will notice all those details... And they&apos;re not exactly wrong. <br>My counter point would be: just about everyone playing the game will notice SOME of those details and even the ones you didn&apos;t notice at the time feel really jarring in their absence in B4B. <br>It matters.<br>You can save a bit here or there, but if you cut it all you&apos;re left with a loveless, hollow shell of a game and people will take note and act accordingly.

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• NP

  @NPPolter · 3 years ago

  Actual Reaction and giving own comments, nice to see that

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• GA

  @gamerz1172 · 3 years ago

  Honestly if they didnt advertise it as &quot;From the creators of left 4 dead&quot; the game would have gained an extra point on its review scores with that alone

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• 9A

  @9another632 · 3 years ago

  My biggest red flag that i noticed since the Beta<br><br>Was the severe lacking of interactions between characters, they were all generic voicelines<br>Nothing specific towards someone on the team.<br>That amount of characters and ZER0 feeling that they are a team

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• IA

  @Iambored26 · 3 years ago

  Jim french did a excellent job expressing emotion as bill, rip jim French

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