The game’s loot system is one of the biggest contributors to this problem. It’s annoying enough when a teammate snags a great item from under you in a battle royale game, but it’s downright frustrating when you have to deal with that in a game like Back 4 Blood that is supposed to emphasize cooperation at all times. Most of my matches saw at least one random teammate go off on their own to grab a high-value item. Even if that didn’t immediately contribute to a team wipe, it almost always contributed to a competitive atmosphere that hindered the cooperative experience.
Back 4 Blood seems more interested in demanding teamwork through sizable difficulty spikes than it is in encouraging it organically through gameplay and map/enemy design that inspire you to work together. Of course, part of the reason that’s such an issue is that Back 4 Blood’s difficulty settings aren’t where they need to be at the moment.
The Gaps Between Back 4 Blood’s Difficulty Settings are Too Wide
There are three difficulty settings in Back 4 Blood: Classic, Survivor, and Nightmare. They’re essentially supposed to be the game’s “easy, normal, and hard” settings, but in reality, they’re closer to “tutorial, hard, and nearly impossible.”
None of the game’s current difficulty settings do enough to prepare you for the next difficulty setting. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if players who regularly have to play with A.I. bots or random teammates find themselves stuck in Classic mode. Unfortunately for those players, Classic mode proves to be so easy that it barely lets you explore the game’s best ideas.
On the other end of the spectrum, “Nightmare” mode seems to have been balanced to appeal to the most coordinated and skilled squads. That’s nice, but it does mean that randomly matched teams have a very slim chance of succeeding in Nightmare mode, especially since the game doesn’t do a great job of teaching you to properly work together as a team before that difficulty setting just throws you into the water and forces you to sink or swim.
Back 4 Blood’s Animations, Audio, and Presentation Elements Already Feel a Little Outdated
While Left 4 Dead and Back 4 Blood are ultimately different games, it’s obviously hard to talk about one without bringing up the other. I mean, just look at the names and the developers.