Back 4 Blood patch fixes nightmarish difficulty spikes
Turtle Rock StudiosSurviving a zombie apocalypse is a lot harder than many Back 4 Blood players imagined due to the game’s sporadic difficulty spikes.
UPDATE
Turtle Rock has released an update for Back 4 Blood nerfing some of its most difficult moments. The hotfix improves the game’s unpredictable difficulty by reducing the spawn rate of some of the game’s elite zombies.
Players have called for certain enemies to be nerfed on the hardest difficulty settings, or for less of them to spawn at crucial points. Turtle Rock has since heard the cries and made the relevant adjustments to fix the Back 4 Blood’s balance.
Turtle Rock StudiosBack 4 Blood Hotfix
The patch notes provide more details, explaining how the game has changed.
Single player campaign changes:
- Roaming special spawn rate decreased on all difficulties.
- Adjusted Supply Point earning rates for Blue Dog Hollow: The Sound of Thunder to better account for level repeats.
Swarm mode changes:
- Bruisers max health reduced to 800 from 850.
- Bruisers damage reduced to 15 from 20.
- Bruiser Burst delay to 3 from 2.65.
- Bruiser Weakspot multiplier increased to 1.65 from 1.5.
- Tallboy damage increased to 20 from 15.
- Hocker Projectile speed to 2500 from 3000.
- Hocker Projectile cooldown to 7 from 6.
- Stinger Projectile spread reduced to 20 from 30.
- Stinger Projectile speed increased to 5500 from 5000.
Turtle Rock StudiosOriginal story below
Despite releasing to positive reviews and successfully capturing the spirit of Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood is having some problems when it comes to balancing its difficulty. The issues are ruining the enjoyment for some players, who have asked developers Turtle Rock to make the game’s spikes more consistent.
According to various subreddits that have appeared since Back 4 Blood’s release, the game spawns an unfair number of elite enemies at certain points, in turn meaning players are unable to progress any further.
Many of the criticisms are aimed at the game’s Nightmare difficulty, which is supposed to be very hard, but not literally impossible. Players report tooling up with health and ammo, then being killed as soon as they leave the game’s safe rooms.
Warner BrosDivision amongst Back 4 Blood community
Some players are telling those who are struggling to simply improve their skills or lower the difficulty level, but others are arguing that the gameplay is not balanced, and that only certain parts of the game feature these stumbling blocks.
So I tried Back 4 Blood. It feels like the difficulty in the game is incredibly unbalanced, they had it right during the beta but Veteran now is a just a slog, we didn't even make it through the first act before giving up. @TurtleRock you may wish to reconsider your balance 😅
— Ben Euden (@Euden) October 13, 2021
The same problems are also being reported on the Veteran difficulty setting, which is supposed to be slightly easier than Nightmare.
Back 4 Blood has got to be one of the most unforgiving games I’ve played in a while, still stuck on the second mission playing on the “Normal” difficulty.
— Tomp (@BeardedSpartanT) October 13, 2021
Many of those who purchased Back 4 Blood at launch will be fans of Left 4 Dead, therefore experienced zombie slayers. If vast swathes of community are reporting problems with difficulty spikes en masse, then it’s likely to be the game in need of adjustments, rather than the players needing to get better.
It remains to be seen if Turtle Rock will nerf certain aspects of Back 4 Blood in an attempt to appease some members of the fan base. Or if they will take the From Software approach and simply encourage players to “git gud.”
