La big update November will have brought its share of changes and balances in the different game modes of Back 4 Blood. Unfortunately, some nerves and bugs deployed with this update made the game much more difficult than expected according to players who complained to Turtle Rock Studios.
The developers have decided to respond in order to reassure the community and promise that work will continue to make the cooperative survival game as balanced as possible.
Blood and tears
Back 4 Blood has been out for a little over a month now and players have had time to get used to it, whether in terms of characters, favorite weapons or card builds. But the November update deployed a few days ago (balancing the PvE campaign and nerfing melee weapons in particular) brought many changes, which ultimately made the game more difficult than expected. Following numerous complaints, the developers decided to respond via a post on Reddit.
"Sometimes a little difficulty can add a lot of replayability, but so far we've encountered issues and bugs during development that are making the game much harder than we anticipated. […] The difficulty has to be our little cub in the Back 4 Blood campaign. It must be “just right”. We want it tight. We want it to be stimulating. We want you to narrowly arrive in the vault with a horde at your heels and feel that rush. We don't want it unmanageable. We don't want it unfair. »
The Turtle Rock Studios teams have listed four main points they are already working on in order to respond to complaints. A way to reassure the community and prepare them for the changes that will be made in future updates of Back 4 Blood.
Fix bugs and work on balancing
The first cause of the excessive difficulty of the game is the too regular and excessive appearance of the special infested. This problem has been known for a long time and the developers thought they had managed to fix it with the November update, but that was not the case. They are therefore working on a solution after having identified the problem that was driving these too regular spawns.
Another point, the traumatic damage, which reduces the maximum life points of the characters, was caused too quickly because of a bug. After investigation by the teams, the bug could be corrected but only on the multiplayer server side. People who play the game offline will therefore continue to have this bug until a downloadable patch is deployed.
Surely many of us have experienced this concern at least once: starting a campaign game with strangers online, and noticing that one of them has made a specialized speed run build and has therefore decided to trace through the level, leaving you to struggle behind. The developers will work on this aspect, without however giving us any guidelines.
Finally, the nerfs to melee maps brought by the November update didn't really sit well with the community. But the studio justifies itself by indicating that it is necessary to make adjustments and balancing, considering that melee weapons were too powerful. They also tell us that changes to the maps are planned but that they will only happen on large updates in order to give the dedicated teams time to properly test the changes made to each map. A way of reassuring by saying that if a change is made in the future, it will have been deemed relevant.
