Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Bad Neighborhood
Rōnin 1 Oct, 2015 @ 3:10pm
Suggestions/Review
I initially wanted to write a comment but didn't have enough room to fit what I was going to say.
So here you go.

Pros:
The atmosphere was nice and eerie. The darkness was definitly nice and gave the neighborhood that "bad place to be" feel.

Most of the map was well done, especially the school and park areas. It felt like i was walking through a realistic suburban town, and the school looked like and actual school with the park actually being an open field.

The safehouses were nicely done, each one being unique and having different supplies.

The map itself was pretty open, giving that true feeling of being in a town, without it being ultra linear, with goodies on the side, benefiting players who explore.

Cons:
Special Spawns are way too clustered together. Often times I would see a boomer, a jockey, a hunter and a charger right on top of each other. This really got in the way of certain parts of the map and often times was just overkill (IE the tank fight at the school yard, the witch spawn points, the gaunlet in the sewers.

3 unavoiadable witch spawn points? That's insane, espeically if people play on expert. It was a bit douchey to have witches placed JUST under the sewer lid in the Streets level, and just above the ladders in the Sewer level. It was also uneeded to have a witch put far out of play in a fenced off area just before the second witch above the ladder in the sewers. I got incapped in the sewers because of the witch right above the ladder since there was no room to run nor was there enough time to react. Also, having specials spawn RIGHT next to the witch is insane as well, really unnesscary since you could just kill of the specials at the right angle and the witch is already stuffed in a crammed area.

Too many tank spawns in the sewers. You shouldn't have to fight one just before the elevator and then right after the elevator. While I was able to handle fighting the tanks, two of them in a row in a crammed area is overkill. Also, the second tank glitched through the door, so it was easy to take potshots at him just before he started attacking

Item/ammo placement is REALLY terrible. I only found about 8 ammo batches in the whole campaign, most of which were hidden away off to the side. People who don't explore get severely punshied by this and can make the level insanely hard. The bots also stuck with pistols most of the runs, making it much harder to beat the campaign. The lack of pills and throwables (pipe bombs, bile bombs etc) also really made certain gauntlets really hard, especially in some situations where they really could've been useful. Weapons shouldn't be hidden out of sight, especially the 3 magnums I found (2 of which were hidden),which is really punishing for shotgun savvy players who need it to dispatch enemies afar. Out of all of them the first safehouse was the most understocked, only having a SMG, and 4 medkits with just 3 melee weapons.

The First level should not be a rush gauntlet, it should introduce you to the campaign and help you adjust to the surroundings and get used what the level will be like later on. The minute I walked out of the safe house and saw "Quickly! Rush to the Saferoom" confused me, and being in a understocked safehouse really didn't help the cause.

The map was a little too open at times, especially at the exit of the sewers leading to the safehouse. I kept thinking I needed to jump the fence when I was actually supposed to run up the hill. Some guidance markers at times really would've helped.

The darkness was a little too exesscive at times, making it hard to navigate some parts of the map. While it is realistic since the map had few street/park/stadium lights, it made navigation harder at times and left some really nasty surprises, especially with the special spawning issue.

Some items glitched in the safehouse, to the point where I had to constantly adjust my self to take the ammo from the last safehouse before the Park Finale.

The escape pilot seems a bit drunk and if damage could be taken from the heli he probably would have killed everyone. Though that just seems to be from the choice of animation more than anything.

Now I'm not the best at Left 4 Dead 2, so some of these pro's and cons may seem noobish, but take it as you will. I personally think the map is nice but some of the spawning mechanics just really throw it of at times, and make it a bit unfair (at least for me). Hope you like what I wrote.
Last edited by Rōnin; 1 Oct, 2015 @ 3:19pm
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Showing 1-3 of 3 comments
Hurtcules  [developer] 14 Oct, 2015 @ 5:33pm 
Hello [mR]Danp1970,

Thank you for taking the time to play and write this discussion. I'm sorry for the late reply.

I can see the issues dealing with the tank and witch spawns as the AI system will pick a tank or witch to spawn randomly near the end of the level, but I will take another look at them and can prevent them if they are an issue. Although from the playtests I did, which quite was a lot, I was happy with the difficulty. If players are having trouble, though, I did include a good amount of heavy weaponry around the map that can be found easily by exploring a bit, such as m60s and grenade launchers.

There are a good amount of special infected attacks as a lot of the main complaints originally about this campaign were that the difficulty was far too easy. I’m not great at Left 4 Dead, but I was able to clear the map on expert without too much trouble, maybe a couple level restarts, but I feel that is a part of the core game itself. Fail and retry until it becomes really easy and predictable.

The placements were heavly playtested and the amount is what I found to compliment the difficulty the best. It's designed to make players try and conserve ammo a bit, but ammo will be found when it's needed the most, or if players decided to look around a few corners.

Near the final safe house, when you get out of the sewers I do want to add a sign there as you're correct, it doesn’t lead you very well into the house even with lights over there.

Again I really appreciate the feedback and hopefully I can get some time to update these issues.
ZilIBOBA 17 Dec, 2016 @ 12:01am 
109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055109.237.108.215:27055:steamsalty::steamhappy:
When you copy content from one saferoom to another I generally find it easiest to copy the infochangelevel with it. That way you have something to square up from one saferoom to another. .The info_landmarks are what control where things end up so when you copy your saferoom you need to make sure you copy it along wth all the items. When you paste everything to the other safe room, square it a;; up using the info_changelevel. Works really good.
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