Oh, I don’t know about this. No ADS, no grinding for levels and trinkets and shit, no Battle Royale item-quality nonsense… I think L4D is a breath of fresh air these days.
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I’ve always felt the level design is exceptionally boring – like, you advance a bit, ok, ok, you advance a bit… then what. not a winner in that regard
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having played all of 2 hours of it my major complaint was that it has zero encounter design, since it’s all supposed to be “directed” and different every time. But that doesn’t really take advantage of the level design, what little there is, so it didn’t feel very special to me.
i didn’t feel like i was in conversation with the game at all, i guess.
my honest recommendation is to just play sven co-op maps instead. that seems to be the closest antecedent, weirdly enough, but those are much more interesting and strange and varied.
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but honestly 2008 was not a great time for games in a lot of ways, so i can see why this was kind of a big deal
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Melty Lumina is weird. It feels strangely intimate to have a live input feed while spectating.
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There are more obviously designed moments during the levels, but I do agree with you and Felix that there is a feeling of just moving down a hallway with zombies coming at you for large portions of them. The designed moments usually involve restricted movement played against the way monsters can climb walls and ignore a lot of obstacles, points where you have to hold out (not always a finale), and L4D2 gets more interesting with environmental conditions like smoke and rain and flooded portions. The level design in the sequel is often more interesting.
The least satisfying thing about L4D, imo, is how substanceless the combat feels. Melee in the sequel improves this a bit but even then it just never felt good to me. Shooting hordes of zombies is like shooting nothing at all.
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That’s’a Valve
They were making VR games all the way back then, in a way.
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The nonstop effusive praise (and post-Psychonauts 2 longing for more platforming, and a sale) got me to bite the bullet on A Hat in Time which…it’s fine, I guess.
The sense of humor and tone is fucking dire, though.
Saving up my hat bucks or whatever for the trinket that renders the dialogue unintelligible.
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This is a big part of it yeah. At the end it’s like “you killed 1635 zombies” and I’m like, when? There were no piles of bodies or zombies clogging hallways or hordes ascending walls like army ants. If your zombie shit is not thematically interesting then it better look and feel cool, and this is basically clearing weeds with bullets.
Tanks are cool tho
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I’m always curious about this because it isn’t negative to me either way but I know a lot of people who prefer it strongly one way. Typically it cuts across controller/kbm and what shooters you played first but there are definitely far-reaching design implications:
- does the “view” reset on each shot with a high recoil weapon?
- is your aim sensitivity reduced or independently adjustable from look sensitivity?
- does your movement speed or ability availability change when aiming?
- is there a hip fire penalty in “the math”?
I think games with ADS excel with a sense of presence and embodiment (CoD4, Titanfall, D2) and hipfire-only games feel “arcade-y” like comparing sim car handling to OutRun. Which is weird in e.g. Half Life 2 when the kinesthetics evoke Serious Sam in my mind.
yelling loudly and possibly while nude that coop in L4D is just there for you to learn maps and then you play versus, the real game
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was never cognizant of that here but v supportive of this argument in general so I buy it
even if you stay coop only, the two difficulties below advanced are more or less a non-starter and expert is probably the best and most rewarding arcade-y experience (you go down in 5 hits, tank hits are an instant down, friendly fire is suddenly the most dangerous thing)
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Reusing maps across modes tends to make things feel flat. I’m sympathetic to the demands but in e.g. Reach I prefer the Forge World maps with a single asset pool and more focused PvP design to the campaign/firefight/multiplayer triple-duty maps.
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really? i hate most of the forge maps in reach, and i actually like a lot of the MP maps they (assumedly?) pulled from story mode. sorry i’ve played a lot of MP halo but basically no story so i don’t know for sure but
- sword base
- powerhouse
- countdown
- boardwalk
are all maps i remember fondly. reach mp maps are all kind of weird and unintuitive but in an interesting way that i grew to appreciate. there’s something satisfying about figuring out the best paths and rotations through their weird layouts.
i HATE the cage and any new forge map they made, and the rest of the default forge maps were remakes of old maps, so they’re “fine” but the GREY on GREEN aesthetic hurts readability a lot imo
edit: oh if you’re talking about big team maps then i probably agree. i also don’t play big team much.
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ironically, L4D1 had separate versions of the campaigns for coop and versus (the game notably launched with 2 of the 4 campaigns open for versus play), where the versus versions add geometry to facilitate player infected spawns and create more opportunities for hilarious scenarios. they didn’t fully implement single one-size-fits-all maps until L4D2 and even then, both the devs and the official community patch have added stuff for versus play, where it’s generally accepted that survivors are way overpowered
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Yep. I played a few hundred hours of L4D1 at the time and was genuinely enthused the whole time. It has to be put in context that in 2008 games like Destiny that are both co-op-first and more interesting combat+level-design didn’t exist yet. I had been craving some proper coop experience for like a decade and “why does nobody make coop games?” was A Thing I Thought About A Lot.
By the time L4D2 came out, it fixed some obvious problems with L4D1 (particularly the melee as mentioned already), but I was already burned out on the format
Another 2008 game with coop I really loved was Bionic Commando Rearmed, and I look at that today and I’m a little baffled even. If that showed up in my Steam recommendations today I’d glance at it for 0.5 seconds and swipe past it. The game format is even not well-suited for coop at all (split-screen camera)
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you could really tell Valve and Turtle Rock had ideas considering the turnaround from 1 to 2 was literally a year (the stamina meter for shoving and “endless” crescendo events are good actually)
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god it feels so weirdly good to see this as an opinion like 15 years after people yelled at me about feeling it in Source games (specificlly Valve ones, as other people have done some OK stuff with Source).
I mean, even I feel that way about L4D and I’ve always felt that the sound design makes up for in in HL2
1 Like