Left 4 Dead: Generic live service edition
:deeper-sadness: Wish Valve made more games
Valve is a proof that a horizontally organized video game company where the workers have independence to pursue their own projects works even though its basically Gaben's personal corporate fiefdom.
Valve only exists because it got lucky with Steam before needing to bring on investors, so it's been insulated from market forces by a big ass money printer. I want to believe that their model could work for any dev studio, but I honestly doubt it.
Remember back when Valve was a game developer instead of whatever the fuck it is they are now? Those were some nice games.
Alyx is supposed to be amazing but it's behind a very costly hardware wall :kitty-cri:
Also, isn't Gaben's current project trying to jack our brains into the Matrix?
Alyx really is amazing, and if you don't have VR I suggest you give the no-VR mod a try, but half the reason Alyx is so good is because it does VR better than almost any other VR game out there.
I think that's literally every major tech company's current project.
There's a reason I'm still playing L4D2 in $currentyear… partially because my PC is a 2012 machine running Linux but also because it's a stellar game
back 4 blood looks janky as hell in comparision, no kidding
Aside from the jank, everything just looks so ugly
It's all just snarling bald grey monsters
Most of what was highlighted was "valve polish", and while it is a lot it's also understandable that if you're developing with a smaller team on a smaller budget those are the things you cut first because they take a lot of time to implement.
Valve never made L4D3 because they already made the perfect zombie game
Back 4 Blood is a ripoff without the soul or polish of L4D.
It is however still an enjoyable game, and the card progression is actually a nice addition that opens up a lot of creativity around builds.
I had a bit of fun with it as something to kill time with friends. Nothing revolutionary, but also still basically enjoyable and a laugh.
Counterpoint: Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 only had one female character each, while Back4Blood has 8 characters and an even gender split.
Honestly, I've been playing a fair bit of Back 4 Blood since grabbing it half off and I haven't run into any pathfinding or animation issues so far, and back when Left 4 Dead was new and I put hundreds of hours into it sitting in the library at my college instead of going to class there were tons of animation and pathing issues there too. It's a nice nostalgia trip with some QoL things like being able to aim or run, instead of being stuck speedwalking everywhere and hipfiring; I tried going back and playing Left 4 Dead 2 a few months ago and it just feels so janky these days.
So were the L4D and L4D2 casts. Though that reminds me of the worst thing about B4B: unlike in L4D you can't use the console to bind a say line command with the death scream or horde alerted audio to your fire button so you'd just constantly be screaming while you're shooting. It was so obnoxious but so funny.
i pretty much refuse to play any game that doesnt have a female lead character i can play in it
disco elysium im looking at you :trans-sad:
Yeah I couldn't play Disco Elysium because it came out right around the time I started my transition and I had already spent decades pretending to be an alcoholic depressed dude. Really killed the vibe of the game for me.
Same, with rare exceptions. And with coop games, because most of my friends are the same way, that becomes a problem with character driven games where it's like "ok, who gets to play the one female character and who's getting stuck with the gruff old guy or the burly biker?" because so many of those games just make the bare minimum of characters and make everyone choose a different one. Like Vermintide 2, where you've got 4 players and 5 characters to choose from, with only two female characters and to make matters worse everyone has a radically different kit and playstyle too so no matter what someone's unhappy.
That's probably the most redeeming thing B4B has going for it, that there are enough options no one gets forced to play one that'll make it unpleasant for them.
Capitalism breeds innovation. Here's B4B, a supposed "spiritual successor" to a classic that ends up feeling like a cheap ripoff. It brings nothing new to the conversation other than a few new maps, new voicelines that aren't imaginative and guns..? the rest is pretty much L4D copied and pasted with little to no thought given to it.
The industry keeps shitting games like these, lacking imagination, creativeness, any sort of magic or spirit. Capitalism makes the gaming industry produce games like if it was an actual factory, an actual assembly line, you just mass produce games. What happens when you mass produce is that you lose quality, eventually the "average game" is going to be shit but it's price wont reflect that, it'll be sold as it was a gem or something. I think the problem goes far beyond B4B, an insanely shitty game, this is industry-wide.
Well, it's natural with Capitalism anyway. Bland, boring and useless shit is produced over and over again, everything is commodified, arts, music, all mass produced and the quality just keeps dropping.
I wasn't sure if it was just me getting older, but games really have felt bland as hell for a long time now. I wish people had the time to make the games that they actually wanted to make.
Don't forget about cosmetics, microtransactions, battle passes and other lovely live service features
Wish Valve made more games
After paying a grand to play Half Life 3, same.
