Back 4 Blood – This is how the “Left 4 Dead” sequel is doing 1 year after launch

Back 4 Blood turns one year old. How’s the zombie shooter faring that many have dubbed “The Legacy of Left 4 Dead”?

It’s been almost a year since Back 4 Blood was released – in October 2021. The game came with plenty of hype and promised to refine and improve upon the popular formula of “Left 4 Dead” to deliver a proper zombie splatter game. to offer experience.

Shortly after the launch, however, there was a lot of criticism. The “Versus” mode in particular fell out of favor and was not well received by many players. Old veterans from L4D wanted a “campaign versus”, which the developers gave a rejection.

Other issues at launch, such as an unreliable difficulty, minor and major bugs, and a complex map system that newcomers could not easily figure out, created more problems.

How is Back 4 Blood doing now? How has the game evolved since launch, what are the player counts, and how does the gameplay feel now?

MeinMMO author Cortyn accompanied Back 4 Blood during the first alpha tests and played the game regularly through the beta, the launch and also the following year. With just over 400 hours of gameplay and an exaggeratedly large hand to melee weapons and the Desert Eagle, a few thousand zombies have already been killed. Only the tendency to “fear grenades” in front of one’s own feet remained.

What has changed since launch in Back 4 Blood?

A lot has changed in the game since Back 4 Blood was released. Here is a quick run-through of some of the biggest and most important innovations:

• 2 DLCs were released, each expanding the campaign.
• The “card draw system” has disappeared from the campaign.
• There are new maps, both for players and for the enemy AI.
• There are “fire cards” that can only be used once.
• There is a new, extremely hard difficulty level “No Hope”.
• There is now a solo mode.
• Numerous new enemy types.
• Lots of new weapons.

At its core, what Back 4 Blood aspires to be has changed little: a co-op zombie shooter where you can massively customize your character and where each run through of the campaign aims to offer a new experience. However, a few key changes have impacted the gaming experience since launch.

The deck system has been completely overhauled

Even if this sentence is used far too often in gaming: Back 4 Blood has become a different game a year after its launch. And this is mainly due to a change that the developers implemented a few months ago.

You probably remember the “deck building” mechanic. You create a deck before the match, draw a few cards in the first map of a campaign, and then another on each map.

The system is gone, completely. Instead, you now create a deck of 15 cards and draw it entirely on the first map. So you build a character with skills, strengths and characteristics and then play it at full strength for the whole campaign.

Getting rid of this mechanic has made the game feel much smoother. For one thing, you never have to think long and hard about what cards to draw at the beginning of a game, and for another, a few weird incidents have been eliminated. It was often the case that the first maps of a campaign were particularly hard because you didn’t have many maps – the later maps then became much easier.

That’s history now. The difficulty now curves nicely and gets progressively harder (with some spikes) as you progress through the campaign.

However, during a campaign you can still find cards and buy them for copper. But you have to explore the maps a bit and think carefully about whether the copper might not be better suited for a weapon in the next safe room.

Overall, the whole deck mechanic feels much smoother and makes more sense.

DLC brought cool “Risk and Reward” mechanics

The first DLC “Tunnels of Terror” has also integrated very well into the gameplay. Because the “Tunnels of Terror” were not a separate act of the campaign, but an extension for all previously existing maps. On every map of the campaign there is a chance that you will find a tunnel entrance. Access is optional and does not have to be claimed.

However, if the team decides to do so (the decision must be unanimous), you will skip the rest of the current campaign map and instead end up in one of several underground maps. It’s teeming with zombies and weird effects.

If you look particularly carefully, you can also find skeleton totems in the tunnels, which can later be exchanged for special cards or cosmetic items in the shop.

You can leave the tunnels at several starting points, but they can always be found in different places. A “short detour” into the tunnel can also turn into a 20-minute struggle for survival.

Entering the subterranean vault is therefore always a matter of consideration. Because on the one hand there are sometimes lucrative rewards such as legendary weapons, totems and additional copper, on the other hand the tunnels are often riddled with traps and can also mean the end of the campaign if you don’t find an exit quickly.

More of everything with DLC 2

The second DLC “Children of the Worm” also made the whole game better. There is a new act here that has relatively few maps, but they feel quite crisp and integrate well into the story. But the most interesting are the new enemy types, the “Children of the Worm” – a mixture of zombie and human who have founded a strange cult.

The new enemy types actually only belong to the last act, but they also appear on the higher levels of difficulty in all other maps, which again significantly increases the variety.

The third DLC is still pending and will probably appear in the coming months. However, there is still no reliable information on this.

What do the player numbers say?

It is difficult to make concrete statements about the current number of players, since Back 4 Blood’s players span multiple platforms. In fact, in addition to being available on Steam, Back 4 Blood is also available on Xbox Game Pass, but also on the Epic Games Launcher or on the consoles connected to Crossplay.

As a rough guide you can take the Steam player numbers – but keep in mind that this is only a fraction of the total.

Player counts on Steam have shrunk by nearly 90% in the months following release. From the initial 65,000 simultaneous players at the daily high, there are still almost 7,000 today.

On average, between 2,500 and 3,000 players are playing Back 4 Blood at the same time via Steam.

If you wait for new players in co-op mode, it usually takes 2-3 minutes – if you play at very unusual times (such as early in the morning), it can take a little longer.

Basically, however, Back 4 Blood still feels alive, the waiting times are quite short and via “Quick Match” you can usually get into a game with a few seconds of waiting.

What is your opinion on Back 4 Blood? Have you checked back in the last few weeks and months?