Why Back For Blood Failed 

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the fact that only 3 people that worked on left 4 dead worked on this game and they decided to still market it as "from the makers of left 4 dead" shows how little faith they had in the stand alone ability of the game

> No mod supported. > Dev abandoned the game. > "From the creators of L4D" -> only has few people involved.

Honestly, if Turtle Rock hadn't disallowed mod support for Back 4 Blood, it would probably still be alive today. Most of the issues in this video could have easily been resolved with mods.

*unnecessary camera noises*

Yall remember when donkey xote’s tagline was “from the producers who SAW shrek”? At least that was more honest than Back 4 Blood’s tagline

The special infected in this game were way too tanky and numerous, while the regular infected weren't numerous enough. The special infected also didn't feel inspired. They needed some kind of theme or tone to build their world and characters behind that just didn't feel strong or unique enough in the actual product.

I think another thing that hurt the game is the price. You can get Left 4 Dead 2 for you and three friends with money left over for one copy of Back 4 Blood.

Back 4 Blood is what Left 4 Dead would've been if Turtle Rock approached a company like E.A instead of Valve

Evolve was pretty good as a concept its a shame what happened to it

Just remember that most of these games studios you loved usually don't have any of the same developers that it did ten years ago when they made some of your favorite games.

To be honest, I forgot this game exists.

nice video, maybe a bit less of those camera shutter sounds would be nice

The video could have been 1 minute long. I was one of the few that stuck with it for a very long time and played at high levels throughout my time with it. The REAL reason the game died wasn't the card system, people loved the cards. They liked using them, creating TONS of different builds, using them, collecting them , etc. was fine for everyone. THE REAL REASON the game died was simple, it was this: Normal difficulty was far far far too easy and then the next difficulty up (Hard) suddenly spiked the difficulty by 10X and for 99% of players it completely trashed and dumpserted them and just wasn't fun. Turtle Rock did not adjust this balance complaint at all and let it simmer for months which of course caused the player base to bleed away rapidly. It was purely the difficulty scaling that ruined it, nothing else. The guns, the cards, the levels, the enemies, the heroes, etc. were all fine and well received by the playerbase. Another straw that broke the camels back was the "reward system" was also out of whack, you didn't get rewarded more for playing well, kills, not taking damage, helping teammates, etc. You were rewarded for getting from safe house A to safe house B as fast as possible, so people created builds that were pure speed and just sped to the end, leaving their teammates behind and Turtle Rock did nothing about it for a very long time and it ruined quickmatches as well.

It still chuckles me when I think back to how I need to "pay copper" to heal at a first aid station

It was such a let down. I remember getting so hyped up and just … gah. We need a true left for dead 3.

Can't trust a developer that puts "from the creators of Left 4 Dead" when only 3 developers from that game were left. Shameless lies.

World War Z is a better L4D successor than B4B. Turtlerock’s attempt feels shallow in almost all aspects of the game.

I do think Turtle Rock as a studio could make some really long lasting and promising games. Their previous titles such as 'Evolve' and 'Back4Blood' obviously have a good foundation to build upon in terms of concepts but they under-cut on their delivery.

Bro this game was so freaken hard when it first came out.. it was like playing helldivers 2 but the second you spawn theres 8 chargers and 5 titans... thats why most people quit

Back 4 Blood's biggest sin for me was that they made the guns feel weak. Equipping certain weapons would slow you down, I remember the recoil not being very fun to fight, and the mags started at a very paltry amount. I remember the M1911 being my favorite weapon to use (it could 1-tap zombies with a headshot without requiring sniper ammo) but that's about it. You also had to worry about swapping weapons late in a run to keep up with the increasing threats. Doesn't matter if you really like the M4, if you have a "common" M4 and there's a purple M249, you're going with the M249. Plus I don't think the weapon attachment system was very fun, or necessary. Left 4 Dead had an arsenal of weapons that all felt punchy, thanks to the sound design, excellent zombie ragdolls, and high damage. The only time you would be required to change weapons would be if you ran out of ammo and needed a primary desperately. And there was only 1 attachment to worry about, the laser sight.

“The game’s servers are still running, for now..” is such a depressing statement that can be said about all of our favorite online games. It seems like the biggest thing one day as we all have our fun, and before we know it, we’re hearing about how the servers will shut down next week, wondering where the time went

I think one of the major issues was the lack of progression in single player mode at launch. I couldn't experiment with the card system or characters because everything was locked during my first and only run of the campaign

As someone who played both WWZ and then this game, All I can say is that I still play WWZ to this day and quit B4B a long time ago.

Didn't mention that Turtle Rock opted not to have mod support which killed a lot of enthusiasm before the game even released. Even now they won't do it because they want players to buy their precious DLC.

that card system was so lame

Idk why but "way back in 2003" hit me like a Mac truck. God damn that was forever ago. I'm old now 😢

"The team who made L4D" bro it's literally just 2 or 3 guys from that team that worked on Back 4 trash and they themselves shot themselves in the foot by advertising it the way they did,the morons overhyped and underdelivered while also trying to suck the ppl dry for all they're worth with huge prices and insane amounts of paid extra content similar to EVOLVE so imo it's a fully deserved failure good riddance. They were pathetic and greedy beyond words with Evolve and tried to do it again with Back 4 trash and if that's how they see games and gaming i hope they never ever make videogames again.

You’re really leaning hard on the visual crutch of on-screen text shown one word at a time. I always thought that’s supposed to give emphasis to key phrases or quotes, not to illustrate the first sentence of every other paragraph in your script.

Evolve was the warning sign that B4B was going to be a disaster. TTR got too big for their own briches and tried to capitalize on something that came out a decade ago.

In the broadest of strokes, B4B failed because it was the the complete opposite of L4D in one important aspect; longevity. L4D has organic longevity because its both (1) fun to play and (2) not monetized. B4B honestly had some pretty fun gunplay aside from the weak gunfire sounds, but it was built from the ground up as a storefront for microtransactions first, and a video game second. This hampers longevity because a game built with that value system absolutely has to be actively and frequently maintained by the developers. Without constant support the player base will get board and quit because the core gameplay loop is built around the in-game shop as opposed to being built to be fun to engage with.

We played Back4Blood a bunch in our friend group as a simple "Sit down and shoot zombies" game After the DLC's they released and the changes to the card system it was actually really solid and fun ! And then they announced that they will stop supporting the game :( It could've been so good

Back 4 blood is like eating oreos dipped in water. It is essentially the same thing but completely soulless.

Hey big man love your videos, that picture taking sound needs to go asap

The biggest issue for me was the unbalancing of the game difficulty at launch, other than that loved it and had some good memories made with new friends etc.. Now they even hired SwingPoynt as a Game Designer, he was one of the best B4B community members and content creator other than player, I don’t think B4B is over, not to mention that the critics reviews aren’t even bad, especially for being a coop game, that just recently the genre is having a comeback, B4B is also essentially the best L4D like available for consoles, especially PlayStation, since Valve doesn’t care about updating their games or porting new stuff to other platforms. If everything goes right and they learned the right things, a B4B2 could be amazing imo.

One thing that you didn't say in the video is that they didn't allow the ability to mod the game which contribution to it failed, one of the reason peoples still play L4d2 to this day's because there are ton of new mod campaign keep getting add into the game, also you can mod weapons stats and make custom model and sound for weapons, player character and enemy which increase the replay value by a lot.

I couldnt even get past the 2nd level and my childhood was left 4 dead 1&2

One thing I'd mention is to reduce the whole picture/flash effect in editing, not even two minutes in i heard it about 20 times

Honestly B4B was like RE6 in a way. It wasn't a overly terrible game, but compared it to what it was supposed to be and the game itself just falls smack dead in the water. I completely forgot it existed for a moment

I was an outlier of sorts bc B4B was my first shooter game and I got into it just recently with a dedicated full team of others to play with. We're going through the story together, and I agree that the difficulty spikes and card system are hard to manage without looking up guides that were all posted years ago. There's also some struggle finding quickplay partners in some modes of the game because of how the search system is. I wouldn't say it's completely dead of a game, but it's very much so close to that. I've had a lot of fun so far with it even though I do see issues with it, since for me it's good enough to enjoy a game that brings some enjoyment or value to the player, or gives someone a reason to connect with others. Comparison can be the thief of joy, but only if there's something else you would rather spend your time with. It's not a game I'll play forever, but I love zombies and co-op and one more experience doesn't hurt~

The shutter sound effect sucks stop using it its really annoying

actually, valve carried l4d. maybe a few employees who worked on l4d was turtle rock

Robokast after adding a picture sfx every transition

Valve did most of the work with Left 4 Dead, Turtle Rock only came up with the foundational concept and gameplay. I reccomend checking out Crowbcat's video on B4B, not only for proof but to see how badly B4B was handled.

No mod support and an overfocus on making the game a live-service model. Also, the game didn't change or improve upon anything, which is a massive feat considering L4D2 was 12 years old by the time Back 4 Blood was released. I had about 30 hours on record, but I never did figure out the card system.

Him: "Bro, I bet you didn't know that L4D and L4D2 were worked on by Turtle Rock as well, you know, that company that became a household name after the resounding success and industry shake up of the first game?" Me: "..."

Still playing this game and helping players. It's still a fun game. There are many elements that didn't go well with the lifespan of this, developers, the fans. All sides had egos.

The state of the game now is how it should have launched. Me and a couple friends who compekted L4D 1 and 2 were super excited for B4B but the extreme difficulty put us off of it. We have recently come back to it and it's great now. Being able to have your full deck right off the bat and higher supply point drops makes the game soooooo much better. It's a shame that it's dead in the water now. Imo this is how the game should have launched.

It's a fun game nowadays, but only if you play on Recruit with a build made to resist and heal Trauma damage and get ammo more easily, while having a competent team. But even with these things I'd still find myself running low on ammo because of the bullet sponge enemies, and my hp being limited to half of its usual capacity because of trauma damage if i keep playing nonstop from one act to the other. The game is fun, but there's a lot of unnecessary and questionable design choices that sucks the fun out of the game

Seems that Valves control is what made this companies game so great

So the ultimate edition is like 11$ on psn is this any good on ps4 or is it a ghost town now and will take forever to find a game like good old dead space 3 did lol

From the creators of L4D, when you check the list there were like 5-6 ppl LOL... BRUH!

Solace by day. Robokast by night. Keep up the good work man.

I remember playing it during the beta, I thought it was ok but I'm not too into zombie/PvE co-op games so I never really played it since then

The reason me and my friends stopped playing it was the combination of the difficulty and all the card modifiers that made it impossible to complete missions sometimes

I played it and it was fun for a while but the thing that really killed it was the amount of special zombies it would constantly throw at you. It wouldn't be that bad if the special zombies didnt have a crap ton of health and just died in a couple shots. If you wanted to grind cards and currency the vest way was to literally just run through the level as fast as possible and avoid zombies. Which got boring fast. And another thing that i kinda didnt like is that each character was a different class and focused on certain things. Kinda wish i could just play a character i think looks cool and is funny without having to worry if im fulfilling my intended role correctly.

After slogging through some of this game I reinstalled left for dead 2 and the difference is evident The latter feels like an evolution The former feels like devolution

I had fun with it once I got the card system down it has a lot of elements to enjoy. It's a jack of all trades but a master of none. Not very polished but it has a lot of interesting ideas

personally the best memory i have on this is game is me and my friends were just duking it out in the training area

Valve did most of the work on L4D Turtle Rock only came up with the concept. Crowbcat made a great video showing this. Turtle Rock doesn’t understand how to create detail.

The constant flashing screen with click sound is the reason this video is just disorienting to watch

Great video! the only criticism is that I disliked being flashbanged every time you popped the crumpled paper text background onscreen.

I remember trying the demo with 2 friends and we never got to finish more than 1 act because the difficulty ramped so fast we just got swarmed in certain areas, to then have to restart once we'd get past the hurdle because the NPC would stop moving or get stuck in ridiculous places.

I 100%'ed the game, my main issues with the game were the following 1- Making decks, it requires cards, which requires pointless grinding, it means there are meta decks which you have to use, you kinda need money cards, which no one wants to use which means coop with randoms is one of the worst experiences i've ever had. 2- Corruption cards, too random, unfair combinations making you wanna rip out your hair out of frustration 3- Limited continues, yes, you die twice?, retry the entire campaign again. Sure there are checkpoints, but that means you don't get proper upgrades and you'll just die, especially on higher difficulties. Even so, you might have to redo like 3 maps again, just to get to a certain spot to try again and you might die twice again meaning you have to redo it AGAIN. Why, just why, with so much bullshit going on in this game where you can die from full health to your entire party falling dead on the floor in literally 1 second, you can't give limited continues. There are other issues with the game, like day 1 game breaking bugs never being fixed, but these are the main issues i had. However, long story short, the game feels like it was designed to waste your time. I have spend a lot of time playing computer games in my life, but never did a game feel like i was wasting time as much as this one.

Short answer: live service😂

I remember back in the Beta test me and my friends gave them some recommendations one being a shove mechanic as there was very little breathing room sometimes in close quarters unless you used a melee build and they absolutely did not take that criticism well, I did not buy the game after that due to how little they seemed to care about community feedback.

I think a big factor is that Back 4 Blood is too “live service”-ish and “looty shooty”. As in, it’s really hard to just jump in and have some casual fun. A brand new account feels very different power level wise compared to a fully decked out account. And the progression systems are confusing, so if the weapon modification system, like not being able to unattach a scope you don’t like. Meanwhile, a game like Helldivers 2 captures the “L4D feel” much better. The progression is clear, and you mostly unlock more and more unique side grades, instead of pure power level ups. Do an experienced player can do pretty well on a lv 5 account, compared to a newbie trying out a lv 50 account. Meanwhile, the jump in and jump out coop experience is much smoother, you can just join someone else mid mission and help out. The in game ludonarrative even supports this feeling of “SEND DUDES!!” atmosphere of “The cavalry is here!” when you receive help from a random person. So yeah, I think the core audience of L4D probably didn’t really like the “MMORPG”-ish feeling of B4B.

crowbcat made a great video about this, really puts the whole turtle rock making l4d into perspective

I actually really liked the card system. For me it added verity and let me experiment with diffrent builds.

I love how the most replayed moment is right after the sponsor ends lol.

I remember buying it on sale on ps4 and it ran so bad and there was such a really bad input delay, then I played it on xbxo series s and it ran fine

I played the beta and was so confused as to what was going on like 80% of the time, the servers were down constantly, the controls felt weird to use, well ofc this is a beta so I waited until release and saw that nothing was fixed at all, gave up then and there

Those word cuts are annoying

i bought the game on playstation when it came out and got the platinum for it and that was about 400 hours of work really testing my nerve but 6 months later i got a computer and l4d2 was the first thing to get installed on there I've loved that game as a kid and now i have 10000 hours in it to show plus a yt channel

B4B had some serious potential... It didn't deserve to get abandoned.

First few levels were good especially the bar defence section. But the rest was a slog especially the bit where bosses spawn constantly and the final boss which is a grind fest.

Day one gameplay went like this: You are stunned. You are stunned. You are stunned. You are dead. uninstall...

one of my biggest gripes is the awful reloads for every single gun

I remember being so hyped when I saw the trailers for back 4 blood. I remember wanting to like it, cuz i'm simple and love zombie games. But I remember how.... wierd the controls left. Too slow and off, like the kind of control sensativity you'd see in an off-brand b-shooter, then i'd try fixing it, turn up the sensativity and it felt too twitchy. I remember thinking it must just be me, cuz I had switched over to PC gaming and I played it on ps4/5, thinking I just lost my touch for shooters on console. I'm glad it wasn't just in my head. I still have it, I still wanna play it and finish it someday, since I put the money in anyways... but... we'll see.

Long before the release, I wrote that the game would be poor. Not everyone wanted to believe 🤣!

That’s the thing with devs now. They don’t care about the longevity about games anymore they just wanna release it make a quick buck and vanish and repeat with a new game

Lol Turtle Rock is like that partner that says they can do better without you and falls flat on their face as soon as they leave

That snap sound in every transition is extremely grating

unpopular opinion: But I think back 4 blood is a really good game. If they could've made this into a live service game I bet it would be in a good place right now. A polished PVE shooter with tons of content and support is what we need!

I liked back 4 blood :(

I still remember simps vehemently arguing that they weren't claiming this was a successor to L4D... People are insane

When this game first released I was obsessed it was so fun. Came back after a while after an update and everything was extremely easy.

One thing that I was hoping for in B4B, is a "Classic Mode" type of option. Like, no cards, perks, etc. (every character's identical, in terms of performance) and no ADS (with some accuracy tweaks to make up for it)

I loved everything about Back for Blood when I played it. I was sad that after I finished the story there wasn't much to do as no one was playing it.

On release, I couldn't marchmake with anyone. Uninstalled and refunded. A few months later bought it again on sale. I couldn't match make with anyone again. I uninstalled and refunded. That's my story

You should do Why "The Anacrusis" Failed as well.

The biggest this imo was the Trauma me n my homie always joke about, “don’t worry we got a card that if we melee a zombie we get back 0.01 of our health back very op”

No campaign versus mode still blows me away. What a disaster of a misstep…

One thing that really drew me to B4B was the Ridden themselves. Just the idea of the zombies being alien parasite worms controlled by some higher intelligence is still awesome to me. I still watch the Templin Institute's lore video on the Ridden from time to time. As for the game itself, I had fun, but I can see a lot of the criticisms as valid. I still hope we do eventually get a Back4Blood 2 so they can fix what didn't work and continue the story.

I loved evolve. Sad it didn’t hit its stride

That camera shutter flash transition is rather annoying to me. Just my opinion that I thought you may want to know.

The original card system was awful but they changed how it worked too later after launch. With an update you started with your entire deck so you could really specialize in something from the start instead of getting a single card from your deck at a time over the course of the campaign.

The ability to aim with iron sights didn’t do it for me either. It’s such a small detail but the charm of L4D was that every gun was hip fired save for some being able to tighten their crosshairs.

I have a family member who works as an artist at turtle rock and I knew the game was going to be trash when it was like 3 months until launch and all he was doing was designing DLC loot box cosmetics.

Perfectly depicted how I felt about the game Coming from L4D2 which I enjoyed a lot on Xbox360 back in the days, I was hyped by Back 4 Blood but immediatly felt lost in all the "forced" roguelite mechanics, the game itself felt a bit off like it was missing something. Returned to L4D2 just to check and somehow I clicked with it immediatly whilst haven't even touched it for 10+ years