Left 4 Dead 2

The Game Room
81

More likely a quirk. I end up having to validate just about every game that I pre-load for some reason. But if I download it after the release date, it works just fine. I just blame the encryption process. Still, it’s faster to validate the files than to try to download the game on opening day, so it’s all good :slight_smile:

Played 3 of the campaigns now. Lots of fun. Better design across the board. It seems more difficult too, but I’m sure some of that comes from unfamiliarity. Still, the game doesn’t seem to be nearly as linearly obvious as the first one. it’s obvious that they placed a lot more emphasis on things like the visuals of the burning building and the swamp. It gives a much better atmosphere to the world.

The weapons are a nice modification. Multiple varieties of each basic type give a lot of choices. And there seem to be legitimate differences between them. Not major, but more than just a simple model adjustment. Also, I don’t feel as hemmed into a single gun. I often take the shotty and then pick up a sniper or AK later on. That seems more natural to me in this game. Also, so far I’ve just been playing on normal, but it seems like there is a lot of weaponry lying around. Maybe there is less on higher levels?

And finally, the special infected. They’re a lot smarter from an AI perspective. Better at concealing their attacks, and protecting themselves from being attacked. Also, they tend to attack in groups, which makes them much tougher to deal with. I’ve seen smokers pull people toward boomers multiple times, and chargers and jockeys almost always seem to be together.

I haven’t tried versus yet, but I will soon. I have to say, I think they’ve made a number of changes that will alter the balance of the game. The level design seems less likely to allow people to survive by default. Things like the spitter and the running cresendo events will force people to abandon corner camping tactics. Additionally, I think weapon selection will require people to re-think how they deal with things like the tank, especially if people aren’t as tied to the shotgun because it’s damage rate isn’t as insane.

Anyway, those are my quick thoughts.

82

That’s good to hear. Left 4 Dead ended up being a pretty half-baked game without a lot of legs. It’s good to see that they addressed those things.

83

Anything that prevents the corner camping is good.

Personally, I never took the shotgun for the tank all that much. Unless you’re in really cramped conditions, a couple steady clips of M16 ammo in the face tends to work wonders on the tanks.

-Joe

84

That’s true, but many people tended to corner up and force the tank into confined areas so they could kill him with 4 close range auto shotguns. Which lead to the tank pacing outside throwing things in to prevent from being quickly slaughtered. Or waiting for a boomer or some other infected to help break up the formation before attacking.

Either way, I don’t see that being an effective strategy now. Though, as I said, I haven’t actually tried versus yet.

85

Hmm, did it not have “a lot of legs”? We had regular SDMB games going for 6 months and less frequent ones after that. I always saw people on my friends list playing it. I thought it was pretty well liked.

86

Oh, it is good now. The spitter is NASTY. I think I’ve taken out more people, and been taken down by, spitters more than anything.

I suspect the combo of “charger drags poor guy a ways away into a corner followed by acid spit on the guy being pummeled (and then laying there while standing up)” is going to constitute a nearly guaranteed takedown.

-Joe

87

Nah. It started off pretty nicely, but fizzled pretty hard on other websites and on my Friends list. Even a friends list I have just for that game wasn’t holding onto it that strongly.

88

Yeah, i played my first versus game last night. I have to say that the variety of infected are much tougher to stop. Multiple times I saw the charger or jockey split one person off of a group and take them fairly far away. Or have the spitter divide a group with people on each side of the puddle, making them easier game for other infected.

Alternatively, you can just have the jockey ride one person all the way back to the safe room before anyone notices :smiley:

89

Shut up! I . . . needed ammo anyway. Yeah, that’s it. :wink:

90

Random thoughts about VS.

The smoker feels like the odd man out. The jockey does his job so much more efficiently. I’m not sure about this, but it feels like the tongue breaks more easily than in the first one.

The charger is effective, but it’s difficult to perform an effective assault with it. Many times have I got stuck in some small detail (branch, chair, etc) in the scenery while charging.

The tank is no longer the round stopper it once was. It still is an important part of the infected strategy, but the survivors just have more firepower and tactics at their disposal to stop it.

Health no longer matter in the points. If you’re in the red, just heal instead of carrying that medikit all the way to the safe room, dammit!

91

My VS thoughts -

A lot of the infected are extremely effective in their particular areas, but useless in too many others.

Spitters - Can range from either devastating (everyone is gathered around trying to protect or stand up someone who is on the ground) to semi-useless. I’ve noticed that it seems a bit inaccurate at times - sometimes it seems to shoot high, sometimes low. But as long as you can get a decent shot off you’ll do some damage.

Chargers - Great if you can catch someone a little bit alone and drag them far enough to make them extremely alone. Even better if your team is coordinated enough to keep a quick rescue from happening. That being said, as pointed out above, they are currently WAY too easily tripped up by lawn chairs and the like.

Jockey & Smoker - I disagree that he makes the smoker kind of superfluous. The Smoker (who is WAY harder to tag someone with now, and his tongue does break way too easy) can shoot from a distance, the Jockey needs to get right up there, and much like the smoker (but harder) you have to catch someone alone or there isn’t much point. Thing is, with the smoker you can pick off a straggler from a distance, and if there’s some action going on you can drag his ass back a long ways. A Jockey needs to start the ride from up close, and IME so far gets his ass shot off really quickly.

Boomer - Great as always, but the hordes seems smaller. At least mine do.

Hunter - Great for stragglers, but I’ve always hated them. I did notice that I seemed to back up a tree accidentally, so I was able to climb a tree with no arrows on it.

Tank - Definitely less effective, but that’s more due to people figuring out how to kill them over the last year in L4D1.

As for survivor weapons, the AK-47 is by far the best in the game IMO. 40 round clip, good RoF, great for sniping.

I think the biggest problem from the perspective of the infected in VS is that there are way too many environments that are extremely open. It makes it easy to spot smokers and chargers, and boomers get capped before getting close enough.

-joe

92

I think the spitter is the most powerful. There are so many situations they’re useful in.

Your boomer hits their team, they can’t see where to even see the spit, or what direction is easier to get out of it - you do significant damage to all 4.

You get your smoker or jockey teammate to pull them around a corner and then a spitter puts up an acid path seperating them from the group.

They try to rescue a downed teammate and you can deny the whole area, damaging them and preventing a rescue.

You get another teammate to incapacitate them in a spitting pile and you will do damage very very fast, they will be incapped in no time.

You can use it as a tactic to delay them or split them up when there are narrow areas to cross, or herd them into a trap.

I think the spitter is good enough that you’ll actually want to try to run off and recharge rather than spit once and die, just to ensure you have a spitter around.

The jockey can be really deadly on maps with areas where you can fall though - you can run them right off the sides of bridges and ledges.

The charger is just really fun. It’s just enourmously satisfying to hit someone like a truck.

I agree that the AK-47 is powerful, the first shot is pretty accurate and it kills normal infected in one shot. Auto shotties are still very powerful - not as much in the first game it seems because they don’t have that retarded infinite penetration, but you still jarringly unrealistically load them like speedy gonzalez where your hands move faster than human hands can possibly move.

I don’t like the SCAR, mostly because I don’t like 3 round bursts and video games never model them accurately anyway. With most rifles on a three round burst setting my understanding is that the burst setting is a limiter - meaning that if you hold down the trigger you will fire 3, and then it will stop. But if you only hold the trigger enough for 1 or 2 rounds, it will only fire 1 or 2. It’s not pull trigger - get 3 rounds on all fire control designs. But every video game I’ve ever played models it that way - 1 click, get 3 rounds. I don’t actually know which type of fire control group the SCAR uses so maybe the game’s implementation is correct, but in any case I don’t like it - you chew threw ammo fast, the follow up shots aren’t accurate enough to hit a zombie from a distance, and generally I can’t find a reason to like it over the AK.

93

I’ve been sticking mostly to assault rifles and sniper rifles (and my beloved magnum!), so I haven’t dealt with the auto-shotguns much.

But the non-autoshotgun blows. I’ll take a Magnum or my twin pistols over that POS any day.

-Joe

94

Yeah, I don’t like the standard shotty anymore. For tier 1, I tend towards the uzi, but mostly just use melee/dual pistols. I haven’t really settled on a tier 2. The autoshotty is good, but the scoped ar15(I think?) tends to be more reliably useful.

BTW, does anyone have a break down of which weapon model is is actually which gun? I’d like to use the correct names, but I’m not 100% sure on all of them.

As for another thought on versus, making the health bonus go away was a BIG deal. Makes the entire campaign a closer match even if one side gets to the end and the other doesn’t quite make it. Only ~100 pt swing. instead of 1000. More fair that way.

95

Anyone tried realism yet? VERY cool.

Besides the commons being harder to kill (but not too bad), it’s amazing how used to the outlines you’ve gotten. I got seperated from one of my team and it took us a couple minutes to find him. The only change I think they should make is the health bars - they shouldn’t be visible for your teamates.

We actually had a bot with us, and he got taken down in a big fight. I had to use the audio of Nick bitching about us getting him up to allow me to find him. I had to wander though bushes and everything. It was a very tense moment!

-Joe

96

I have mixed feelings about this. I felt the survival bonus was too much (ie if you made it 90% of the way and they made it 100%, they would outscore you by like 10x+), but on the other hand, if health doesn’t matter at all, how do you break ties on matches where the survivors all survive? It’s not common now probably, because it’s easier to play infected at first. But once we get better at the game we’ll have 4 survivor games regularly, which will lead to a lot of ties.

So I’d rather have them adjust the system so that the survival bonus is not gigantic, but the bonus varies by health.

I’m dissapointed by the way that they left out difficulty levels on versus. I still want to play versus on advanced once everyone is more familiar with the game and better at playing the campaigns.

97

One thing that really bothers me is the stupid weapon reload animation. The weapon’s not loaded until the whole animation has run its course. Take the SCAR for example. Gun’s empty, you take out the magazine, put in a new one, then press the bolt release. You’d think the gun’s ready to fire after the bolt is released, but no. You have to wait for the animation to finish before the ammo indicator shows you have a full clip. This is very annoying.

Let’s say you’re reloading the SCAR. Immediately after your character presses the bolt release, and the gun makes the sound that a cartridge has been chambered, you climb up some stairs. Now because the animation was interrupted, your ammo count shows zero and you again have to go through the entire reload animation on the top of the stairs. Grrr!

98

When I first saw the “realism” mode, I was really hoping it would be a mode the game more in line with what I’d hoped it’d be - more of a coop survival horror than a shoot 'em up. Unfortunately it’s basically the same thing without as many interface niceties and more weighting towards headshotting zombies.

I’d like to see a mode where you had more realistic guns (no carrying assloads of ammo and reloading faster than a crack special forces operator - more realistic weapons like pump shotguns and semi-auto rifles and not so many auto weapons would be good too) and ammo and health supplies were scarce and hard to find. No infinite ammo piles, and no picking up a full stock of ammo when you get a new gun.

To compensate for this, you wouldn’t get giant waves of infected where you just went nuts with an autoshotty and blew away dozens in seconds. Zombie encounters would be less frequent, and less in numbers - but zombies would tend to be more prone to ambushing and would hurt you more if they got their hands on you. You’d spend most of the time carefully, slowly advancing, trying to scavenge what little bits of ammo and medical supplies that you could, always worried that a zombie might pop out of the closet you’re opening because if he gets his hands on you, it’s going to hurt, and you don’t know when your next stash of supplies will come.

That’s what I was hoping L4D would be more like in the first place. There’s not really much suspense or horror in the game - it’s really more of a zombie-themed shoot em up run and gun. I still like the game, but it’s wasted potential. So when I saw that there was a “realism” mode, I was really hoping it was something like that. Oh well.

Realism mode is good, but one thing I’d like to see them implement is so that voice chat is actually modelled as being a part of your physical character. If you’re 50 yards away from someone, they wouldn’t hear you as well… but you could also locate someone by the sound of their voice because it would take a directional quality.

99

This site says gamestop will have L4D2 PC for $30 at gamestop on black friday. I know there are a few L4D regulars who haven’t gotten the game yet because they don’t have the money and refuse to sell their blood or sperm or children. Well, here’s your chance to save a few bucks and get the game. Says they might extend the sale until saturday too, but I’d go early if you’ve got nothing else to do (I doubt it’s gonna be a crowd like walmart or something) and grab it before they run out of stock.

100

As someone who was concerned L4D2 would not offer enough new stuff to be worthwhile in its own right, I now give it my official stamp of awesomeness. The 8-man SDMB versus game we had tonight on the swamp campaign was one of the funnest versus games we’ve had. The scoring is mostly improved - my main concern is that since the survival bonus doesn’t include a health bonus, if we become good enough that we regularly survive the campaigns (as we did most of the time in l4d1) then we’ll run into a lot of ties. But otherwise the progress bar works better, and they have the progress bar running during finales too, so it won’t be an all or nothing thing like it was in l4d1.

Scavenge is something we all need to practice, and I’m still working out strategies, but it’s a game mode with a lot of promise. I’m liking it a lot.

I hope the current server situation is temporary… it’s not uncommon to get matched up with a server where everyone has a 400+ ping. What I’m guessing is… a lot of clans and other providers that ran l4d1 servers haven’t switched over yet, and there are a gazillion people playing, so when it searches for a dedi it can’t find anything good for everyone and then ends up dishing us off to a server in zimbabwe.