So, Turtle Rock announced an end to support for B4B a few months back, and personally, it’s been a few months longer than that since I touched the game. I’m very curious to hear people’s thoughts on that game as a whole now that the dust has settled.

Obviously, ending updates for your horde shooter after just over a year isn’t what most of us would call a “good move”, and imo a lot of what content they did put out was pretty mediocre. But I thought that last expansion expansion was a lot of fun, by far the best stages in the entire game, and a huge shame that the playerbase got way less time with them than all the other content.

The Tunnels of Terror were a neat concept on paper as a way to add content, but they added so much time to a normal play session that a lot of people weren’t willing to put up with (I personally had a lot of trouble trying to get people back into B4B for this specific reason), and the way you had to grind them out to unlock the cool new skins was infuriating for a lot of people who didn’t want to put quite that much time into the game.

And the friggin’ deck building system. It was a decent idea, but maybe not for this kind of game, or at least it was poorly implemented. To the point that, when Turtle Rock changed the entire system to allow you to draw your full deck at the beginning of a campaign, it felt kinda like an admission they screwed up and didn’t know how to actually fix it. So many cards felt mandatory, especially at higher difficulties, which turned the first few levels of any campaign into a painful slog where you were just waiting to draw enough core cards for your build that the game actually felt playable.

Call it a skill issue, maybe it’s just me, but there were a lot of balancing decisions made throughout B4B’s lifespan that I can’t describe in any way other than they reminded me of a “That Guy” Dungeon Master in a D&D game (for those who know what I mean by that) who just wants to “punish” his players for not playing the game the “correct” way. The particular ways in which certain player strategies got nerfed, or enemies buffed, or the way certain bugfixes got prioritized in the patch schedule, just came off as weird and almost…spiteful to me, at times, in a way I’ve never felt from another live service game.

Despite all that, I had a lot of fun with my time in Back 4 Blood. I think there’s a certain weird charm to it, I like all the characters well enough, and there were plenty of fun level environments, even if some assets were re-used way too much. Maybe I’m just a sucker for some good old-fashioned zombie apocalypse survival action. But I really think B4B got dealt a bad hand (sorry), and could still be going strong today if it had been led by a dev team that was willing to commit to continued content drops for another year or two; and buff more, nerf less in balance patches.