Func_Msgboard: Left 4 Dead 2

Posted by ijed on 2009/11/04 13:53:11

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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#1 posted by Zwiffle on 2009/11/04 14:55:08

Well my experience with the demo has been largely unhealthy.

I preordered, and so I had access to the early demo.

I took a half day off work to get home around 3:00pm to play the demo, because surely Valve would release the demo by then. Well they didn't, and when I went to sleep the official release time was "1:00 am CST" so I figured I'd wake up an hour early and get some time in with it.

Well they changed the time again to like 3:00 pm CST, so it would have to wait til after work.

Then they changed it to like 8:00 pm once I got home.

So eventually I get to play it, but the game is unplayable because of the uh, I forget which option it is, but Dual Processing or whichever is turned on and it destroys my performance.

But at the time I thought rebooting may work, and it turned into this huge thing where my compressed air nozzle got caught against something while trying to clean my case out with it and it got stuck behind the case fan, but hey I found my mechanical pencil that I lost months ago resting snugly on my video card, so I guess in the long run it helped.

So anyway it's still unplayable and I give up. Only later do I find by disabling that option that it becomes playable, but unfortunately now L4D2 demo frequently corrupts my graphics and I'm forced to reboot like 5 minutes into the demo. I've beaten it once (in single player) without having to reboot because of this graphics issue, and it does it consistently.

I am not pleased.

Yeah

#2 posted by ijed on 2009/11/04 15:09:58

4 delays in total, all so we can betatest for them, for free :P

But I wanted to discuss more about the gameplay since there's plenty of complaining to read elsewhere.

There's been quite a few updates to the demo and Steam, pertaining to the demo, over the past couple of days though - maybe your issues have been resolved.

This Is Interesting

#3 posted by Zwiffle on 2009/11/04 16:33:55

http://kotaku.com/5396591/play-versus-mode-in-the-left-4-dead-2-demo

#4 posted by ijed on 2009/11/04 18:13:06

I saw that over on the forums, looks pretty neat - I saw a video of a charger making a double kill, so I guess it'll be weakened some.

Internally the game is wide open - in L4D1 you could play Verus via the console for the two campaigns that didn't have it. Just screwed up a handful of sphere maps.

I'm wondering if the backwards compatability feature that may or may not be included is possible now, before its released.

Copy and paste the maps and a command from the console. Maybe LoadMap.

Balancing Changes

#5 posted by Preach on 2009/11/04 19:57:25

I do like the changes to tier 1 compared to the original. They've done something I always thought would make sense in l4d1, which is to make the sub-machine gun the weapon with the lasting supply of ammo. In the original the shotgun is much better in all combat bar vs a tank, but is also takes much longer to run out of ammo. Now you can't just use the shotgun throughout the first map, you have to make use of pistols too.

Making melee weapons replace the pistol slot seems like the best way to balance carrying one, much better than the rumour that you had to carry them like physics objects and drop them to draw a gun. Personally I love my pistols too much, especially now there's a magnum to consider, so I don't think I'll get much use out of them. Still, my opinion might change as I play more.

On backwards compatibility: I heard that the bsp format has changed between the games, which would mean playing old maps might take some work...

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