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Left 4 Dead 2
Most forums threads on this are pointless flame shit.

Not that I'm not expecting that here, but it'd be nice to hear some opinions anyway.

I'm enjoying the demo quite a bit - despite the shortness. The variety in just about everything is refreshing, as is killing a witch with a guitar to the back of the head.

My general impressions:

Tier 1 weapons are pretty lame, but they always were. At least now they feel more unique and suited to particular purposes.

Tier 2 weapons are great, without exception. The Spas auto shot is a laugh, even though it doesn't feel as powerful as the L4D1 version.

The changes to throwable weapons are pretty good overall - the pipebomb having a shorter range and the bilebomb outperforming it in the 'horde summoner' category being a decent modification.

Melee is dangerously fun - brawling typically gets you shot up by your team-mates. Kind of dissapointing that it doesn't seem possible to time a 'perfect strike' ie. 'Dead Stop' on a Charger. The big problem with the melee is the camera. Despite the HUD warning it's very easy (thanks to the blood all over the screen) to not know where your attacker is. It should be third person cam I feel.

The Jockey is great, his supposed ability to leap from survivor to survivor will cause havoc in versus.

The Spitter seems more at home in the enclosed areas of L4D1, but its only a map and a half in the demo, so we'll see. She also has the potential to be very nasty in Versus.

The wandering witch is ok I spose. Really I'd have liked to see a completely new non-playable, whilst keeping the original witch. Will be interesting to see if day/night affects how the witches behave.

The Charger is great - I wouldn't change anything, except maybe how light the ragdoll seems when he's killed. He often floats towards the team when killed in mid charge.

The various reskins to the original SI are businesslike. It'd be nice to see some proper reskins as well though, not just modifications /re-imaginings of the original meshes. Might cause some confusion but I doubt it - they each move in a very specific way.

The new health systems are generally welcome, although defib seems a bit pointless. The Adrenaline is much more tactical than the pills and very useful for the new style crescendo event.

AI Director2 seems pretty functional, although the demo maps don't seem to show it's ability to mix stuff up so much, although we have ended up wandering around in circles (in a good/terrifying way) a couple of times.

[Edited cos most people are playing the full now]
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That's funny, I just read a blog post about that:

http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/wold-members-tutorials/nexusdog/l4d-campaign-design-why-less-is-more.php

I'm going to attempt a few survival maps to get my feet wet and see how I like it. I'm enjoying it so far but, admittedly, I haven't had to mess with the nav mesh yet. 
Can't Check 
But does the navmesh work by voxels? 
 
No, floor aligned polygons. 
Fugly Then 
Voxels are the future... 
 
How are voxels better for navigation purposes? I don't really know much about them but I suppose if you had flying creatures I could see some advantages of a 3D space flood fill ... but other than that, I don't see why you'd need them. 
 
3D Dot Game Zombies 
Last Man On Earth 
Quite fun. More strategic/stealthy and somewhat challenging on higher difficulty.

This would probably also make for a good 2on2 versus mod. 
 
I was trying to play that mode but as a fairly new player to L4D2 ... what can I do about the Jockey? When I'm alone, he basically rides me until I fall down. Is there a way to shake him off if I'm by myself? 
Nope 
The thing about Hunter, Smoker, Jockey, Charger, is that if they 'get' you by yourself you're screwed. But you can try to knock him out of the air with your gun-bash-thing before he rides you. 
 
That kind of makes this "last man on earth" game type a little janky then, doesn't it? That means that the game is loaded with insta-fail - if I don't nail that jockey before he gets to me, I'm done. Seems like they should have told the director not to spawn that sort of thing for that game type. Just give me zombies I can handle alone. 
 
Oh, and thanks for that tip, I hadn't considered trying to melee him. I'll give that a shot. 
Insta-fail 
That's the whole point of that mode. Keep your eyes (and ears) peeled and take out the special infected before they can get to you.

You can be incapacitated once (at least on Normal) - when your health is down, they will let go and you can heal. 
 
Yeah. Just seems like it would be more fun if I was defending against waves of zombies and not trying to skill shot one-hit-kill specials. 
So Errr.. 
Play the regular campaigns then? 
 
You don't agree that it seems silly the way they've implemented this mode? Maybe I'm weird then. I can't stand having to sit there while the jockey spends 30 second twiddling my health down low enough so I can fall down. Waste of time, IMO. 
 
Sure, but it's a gimmick mode after all. I didn't find waiting for the health to get low this annoying.
Those mutations seem more like quick scripts to get the job done instead of sophisticated mods, so I take it that's why they didn't make the jockey inflict more damage, remove unneeded items etc. 
 
Sure, sure. I know. I was just venting because the idea of it really appealed to me and then the FIRST THING that happened upon spawning into the map is a jockey jumped on my head. Kind of soured my experience... 
 
Willem you're not alone, I think the mode is pretty fail too. Had they added some mechanism to escape it would have been better, but the game is centered around coop, and taking that out leaves a hollow experience. 
Last Man On Earth 
is fucking shit.

Valve took all the coop out of their coop game and still expected it to be fun?

Well, its not =) For all the reasons posted above really.

Now, it would have been better if they had removed all the special infected, and just had regular zombies, and perhaps taken away some health kits to balance it some.

Shooting regular zombies = more fun than shooting special infected.

Im waiting patiently for the chainsaw massacre mutation! 
Mutations 
I'm waiting for this mode :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-fDfxF1Oe8 
Voxels 
How it works is you throw them at the collision mesh and they build the AI area by averaging what is a walkable surface or not - no worrying about tears, holes or folded collision mesh.

Old technology applied in a new way.

For the LastMan mode the Jockey hanging onto you does have a gameplay effect, just not a very good one - whilst he's riding you around the level the other specials have time to get close enough to kill you when the Jockey lets go.

Tbh I wouldn't reccomend the mode if you're new to the game - you need to know the maps pretty well. Same as Vs really which can be very frustrating for newcomers. 
Tank Run 
Looks great. But its apparently chainsaw massacre next. 
Chainsaw Massacre 
Cool, gore galore. Easy with human players (even tanks go down in no time), pretty hard with bots, because they act even stupider than usual. The melee-only mode undermines their AI - instead of following you no matter what, they often off for every single zombie they see and subsequently get in trouble, or just stand around for a special to incapacitate them... 
Hm 
I preferred the last mode much more tbh - the chainsaw noise and its b0rky collision detection are annoying too.

I think with a couple more modifications this could have been great. Maybe remove all specials (including the witch) and x4 tanks and normal zombies.

Oh, and remove all medkits / pills and replace with adrenaline. 
Ie. "Chainsaw Speedrun" 
 
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