HomeFeaturesBack 4 Blood
How Turtle Rock Studios are reinventing the zombie co-op shooter in Back 4 BloodThey already did it once; how hard can it be?
They already did it once; how hard can it be?
“That’s because you were off on your own, and you weren’t watching your corners,” says Brandon Yanez, adopting the tone one might use to tell a toddler that it’s their own fault they fell over when they were told not to run around the pool. It turns out the Sleeper was designed almost specifically to punish over-confident fools like me. “That character actually came from a want to keep players together. We added the Sleeper as basically a trap,” Yanez says.
Back 4 Blood Gameplay and Impressions | Better Than Left 4 DeadWatch on YouTube
Back 4 Blood Gameplay and Impressions | Better Than Left 4 Dead
I ask Yanez if he needed to be careful in what he says, or risk rockets being launched from Gabe Newell’s yacht down in New Zealand, but he laughs. “I think it’s fine,” he says. “There’s no animosity or anything. We’re all just game developers who’re trying to make fun products for people.” Despite this, though, he doesn’t once say the words Left 4 Dead in our conversation, but often refers to “the genre”, as in “we’re fans of the genre.”
Back 4 Blood has modernised the formula, with things you expect in 2021 like sprint, and ADS (aim down sight) on guns. The bigger differences are elsewhere, like in the roster of characters, who have passive stat buffs and abilities that allow you to create different builds. I’m already a fan of Holly, who has buffs to stamina and starts with a massive baseball bat. Yanez says he likes playing healer-y builds, so is often Mom or Doc, “running around trying to keep everybody alive.” There, too, they iterated: some classes, like the healer types or tactical damage-dealers were “no-brainers” that they got in pretty early.
Brandon Yanez, pictured here not bragging about making well good guns.
The weapons, meanwhile, are something that Turtle Rock have really built from scratch, and according to Yanez it took a while. “That stuff is complicated, the spreadsheet for all those guns is, like,massive, you know? Like, I go cross-eyed when I look at it,” he says. “I think we did a pretty good job. Obviously in the future we’re going to learn from what we learned here and make it even better.”
This is, it turns out, entirely too modest a thing for him to say. The guns in Back 4 Blood are fabulous to play with, weighty and wild, and rivalling anything you’ll see from other devs renowned for their gunfeel like yer Bungies and Respawns. It’s only at the end of the interview, and after I have commented on how brilliant some of the guns are, that Yanez reveals the weapons are something he worked on specifically. “When I hear that they feel good or they, like, feel weighty, which is subtle but was actually hard for us to achieve, hearing that is - I get a little swell of pride.”
Then there are the cards, which add a bunch of different buffs. You put together a deck before you play, and then get to choose one card from a shuffled draw of that deck between stages. It can change your build a lot. For my favourite Holly, for example, I’d want to add stamina buffs for more swings of my bat, and the card that gives me HP back for every melee kill.
Yanez says the card system wasn’t even in the original design. It came up because the AI Game Director can decide to throw different things at the players: fog, darkness, poison in the air, changing what spawns where. “As we played more and more, Chris [Ashton, one of Turtle Rock’s co-founders] and I were talking about, ‘It would be fun if the player could influence that RNG,’ and so we started to build a system that allowed the players to choose things,” he explains.
Early iterations didn’t work; they tried scavenge cards that added a lot more items to the world for players to scrounge. “The player didn’t feel that as much, they didn’t know that that bandage came from their card. So we started to scale those back and do bigger things.” He gives the example of the combat knife, which changes your unarmed bash into a blow with a melee weapon. “That stuff really evolved over probably the last year and a half.”
If you play the right deck with the right character, and pull some nice weapons with all the best attachments, it’s possible - but rare - to have an OP run where you “feel like the action badass,” says Yanez, though he adds that it’s taken them a while to get the balance right so that you don’t feeltoooverpowered all the time.
Fortunately, it doesn’t look like this will be a problem for me any time soon. Over the weekend I played some more of the beta and became very well acquainted with the friendly-fire barks of all the characters, and discovered my arrogance in the face of the horde was not enough to get me past theOgreon middling difficulty. I, who once laughed in the face of expert-level zombles in Left 4 Dead! I’m getting there though; I’ve started recognising the different noises and rumbles the Specials make long before they appear. I’ve putting together specific card decks for different characters. I’m seeing how Turtle Rock have worked to reinvent something they already invented once before, and I can’t wait to see it in full when it arrives on October 12th.
