boomercharged.net

I will buy the game, of course: I enjoy the core experience of L4D at the end of the day, and can’t resist. That said, a long complaint for me was that L4D lacked ‘legs’ as a game in some ways in the greater online context. Particularly, Versus was extremely hard and unforgiving for a simple pick up and play experience: It got to the point where I did not versus unless I had four friends on and willing to play: All my friends are adults, have jobs and other engagements that come with being married or just… well, adults. It’s not that common that we’re all available AND want to play L4D.

Here are some things I think should really improve to make it a more attractive pick-up experience.

1). Infected absolutely must become a less stressful experience. The current infected playstyle is both bizarrely inverse of what it feels like it *should* be, and extremely demanding on the player: MUCH more than Survivor. The short version of the story is I’m playing a god-damned Zombie–yet I have to coordinate ten times harder to even approach doing damage to the Surviving Team. Zombies are absolutely *reliant* on their teammates for any effect at all. It allows too easily for ’steamrolls’ goes against their initial design (that Survivors weren’t supposed to make it to the saferoom that often). The coordination should be what the humans require: it’s supposed to be the one advantage they have. A friend of mine (who is a staggeringly better than most gamers either of us see) puts it another way: “It doesn’t matter how good I am in L4D when I’m infected, and I can’t even compensate for bad ones. ” The need for absolute coordination is WHY we see such disparate pugs.

EVERY zombie hit should be felt by the survivors, even a little. This will also have the net benefit of reducing the scores of each game (the end difficult modifier will SEVERELY punish a player for even one dead or critically wounded team-mate, which can both make comebacks impossible and more importantly, push the perception of a total shut out, which frankly just encourages a rage-quit.

The only thing that will change this is the new infected: We shall see.
2). Less Jesus corners, less total defense points. At no points should Survivors be almost completely safe. This is pretty obvious: They take out bottle-necks from single player mode to try and balance things out for pretty much this reason. I won’t go into details, and only say: The new infected are trying to fix that, and I think the Spitter is going to end up being *very* effective for it. I hope the other two do as well (though I think the Jockey Zombie is actually just going to be a MUCH better version of the Hunter, using the same opportunities but *dragging them away*).

3). More, better, content.

Yes, here’s the thing that might make some people bitter. Call the whole dispute whatever the hell you want, but the fact is, L4D got a new mode that… frankly, hasn’t really held up, and a new course that is short. The maps have not been tweaked AT ALL, save fixes of obvious exploits, and more importantly, we haven’t been given much. Even DLC would be nice at this point because it would give us reason to *go back*. Say what you will, but I didn’t come back to the original L4D for nearly 8 months until Crash Course: I was just done, I had experienced all the content and the MP did not have the pick up and play appeal of TF2. Tightening the Maps, if not just creating a better game, would have brought me back for a little while just to check things out.

Basically, the tenor is this: Valve gets another chance with me with L4d2. I enjoyed it enough to purchase a sequel, but I am, by this point, pretty bored with it. If L4D2 does not impress me, blow me out of my chair, bring me back in, whatever-there’s no chance they’ll rope me in for a sequel. The fact I’m STILL debating over picking this up as several games I want loom high over my head–when normally Valve games are no-brainers–is really telling.