[2021] I put 32 hours into the EA Beta and here are my thoughts

Note: I took a bunch of time off from work because i needed to, so i have forever to f*ck around. So while I am gainfully employed, i get to cosplay as an underemployed college kid for a few weeks.

Background: 33, been playing fps games since Q3A. PC platform. I did not play Versus mode, because multiplayer modes always need a much longer time to bake, usually a few months after official release. Didn't want to sour my impression on it. Recruit and Veteran difficulties, pubbies and real-life friends.

TL;DRMy final impression is that campaign mode need some polishing and some balancing, but is fundamentally an enjoyable experience and worth sinking time into and learning. It isn't perfect, and it never will be - but in all honesty I genuinely enjoy the game and would have no issue recommending it to someone.

Things that are Rad

• Setting! Its moody, atmospheric, horrifying, desperate, and grimy. 5/5 nailed it. Really enjoy the big setpieces too.
  • Shoutout to whoever designed the fog system. It's perfect. It obscures far away information! It creates a moment of tension when something is moving into sight! it increases dread when the unknown lurks within! It filters sunlight spectacularly! Love love love the implementation of fog here.
• The card system is absolutely brilliant. It's a bit of a slog during beta, but that's a consequence of the cards providing a very long-tail acquisition arc over the time of a players career and not necessarily being balanced towards New Player Experience right now. I completed 7 or so supply lines, and Ive built nearly-invulnerable melee tanks, snipers that can one-shot armored bruisers, a heavy gunner that can carry ammo for the whole squad and also make use of suppression fire in chokes, and a medic that is capable of patching over any skill deficiency in a team of randos. Really spectacular stuff.
• The amount of content and banter between the cleaners. Still find some new ones even today, which is awesome.
• Crossplay! Injects two whole other platforms' worth of players into the ecosystem, ensuring that theres always a match to join. Also, the voice-to-text feature, which pretty rough around the edges, is still genuinely useful to someone who keeps their multiplayer voice receive levels muted.
• (some) Balance Design! A lot of things in L4D/L4D2 were OP(infinite downed pistol ammo, medkits healing too much, automatic callouts of special infected). Flip side, a lot of the infected abilities in l4d/2 were way UP(Boomer in general, smoker tongue react window, hunter movement arc predictability, tank health pool). I really dig that the most dangerous thing about the special infected this time is that you *have* to manually call them out in order to ping them. Information/awareness is awarded, and lack thereof gets you dead.
  • I might be misremembering downed weapon ammo? I definitely recall seeing a fixed pool of ammo while I was incap'd, though it may have been for the Belgian.
• Emphasis on being slow. Ratchets up the tension, and I like that.
• Sleeper zombies. You bastards found out a way to put actual jump scares into a game where everyone is carrying a munitions depot on their back. Bravo!
  • Honestly I would be completely ok with increasing the Sleeper's activation range by like...20%? Or make them regen somehow.
• Resource Balancing/Loot drops. Sometimes its hit/miss but more often than not on Veteran you will run out of ammo/health/tools and be forced to scrounge for suboptimal solutions unless you play the game lean & slow. I absolutely love that the game doesnt prevent you from going guns-blazing, but in fact allows it on credit - your pray-n-spray now is your showdown with a Bruiser armed only with a glock later.
• Guns! Sound(and some viewmodels[Belgian wtf]) notwithstanding, the look great, they feel great, and they play great. Id like them to be a little more impactful physics-wise(PKM knocking common off their feet, AA12 deleting torsos, The Belgian sending common flying) but these are minor complaints for guns that have clearly had a lot of effort put into them. Not even mad about mag sizes.
  • Since 'the gun you use' is literally the most impactful decision/tool you can employ in an FPS, i get why so many of the guns seemed nerfed into the floor stat-wise - to make room for card-based buffs without totally cratering balance. Hipfire, ADS aim speed and all other stats seem sticky and slow and sh*tty out-of-the-box, but once appropriately tweaked, they perform as expected or better.
  • Specifically, this nugget of feedback refers to how the guns perform in-game, their objective ability to do their task per the game's balance.

Things that are meh

• Weapons, while diverse, feel like airsoft, and its almost entirely because the bass has been mixed out of the guns, or just being drowned out somehow. The tinny, mechanical, high-end sounds of near every gun sound great, but there's no *boom* that makes players feel like theyre handling a tool of zombie annihilation. Notable exception is the PKM, which even though I would rather run an M249, the PKM feels like i have a fully automatic cinderblock launcher in-hand. Girthy.
  • Killing Floor 2 pretty much is the gold standard in 'I hold your unmaking in my hands' weaponfeel with the AA12, Stoner LMG, Vektor, Desert Eagle, and the Barrett 50. I am aware the actual guns sound nothing like that, but that's why i built a $2,000 PC instead of buying a $4,000 gun.
  • This, in contrast to the previous gun note, refers to how they feel in-game. The emotional weight of using each weapon. Do I feel like a badass? Do I want to run screaming into a horde letting loose a torrent of bullets? That's what im talking about here.
• Special Infected are mechanically diverse, but share a same 'base' model and silhouette, which is utterly indistinguishable between variations during combat. Moreover, the variations' mechanics should be fleshed out a bit more to make them more distinct - 5 second thoughts on this: Stalker has limited cloaking, stinger's ranged attack has +++blind effect(which can be removed via bandage or something else), and hocker's ranged pin is pretty solid. This also needs to be backed up via Variation-specific Ridden callouts when they spawn so experienced players know whats coming.
• Corruption Card draws. 1-1 to 1-4, you get maybe 1 corruption card, and 1 challenge card. 1-5 to 1-8, you get a half-dozen corruption cards, with more drawn mid-game. I understand why that would be done, but doesnt it make more sense to give the Director 1 card per stage like the players do?
• Infected Spawn rates. The director goes kind of insane with the spawns occasionally, conjuring up 3+ armored bruisers and retch as soon as you open the safe house door. I recognize this is supposed to be tuned to the card system, but i always felt like the director wasn't taking the team's level and loadout into consideration; leaving the safe house with 50% ammo because we got mobbed from the jump by near-endless specials is kind of a buzzkill.
• Im mixed on the Retch range of vomit. I like that is way farther than a Boomer's bile(allowing it to pose a greater threat in more scenarios) but may need to be tuned a little shorter - dude can hock a loogie on you across the map, and I need a scope to hit him at that range. Maybe only apply the movement speed debuff in a narrow strip down the middle of the affected range? Would make direct hits feel consequential, and allow cleaners to feel they responded appropriately more if getting winged didnt feel the same as getting hit directly.
• Comm wheel. Has a lot of good commands, but needs some more nuance as well. Things I kept wanting to say was 'Lets fortify here', 'I need healing/ammo'(I know they say this by default, but many squaddies...dont listen), specific special ridden logos when spotting instead of Generic Red Skull, 'We need a tool kit to unlock this', 'Is everyone ready?', and trap-specific(alarm door, horde pustules, etc) callouts when spotted - Lots of squaddies see my warning pings and then proceed to open the alarm door anyhow.
• Trauma system. I like that it discourages speed running and chugging pills, but its a little vicious right now. Needs to be tuned and balanced.
• General lack of 'savior' mechanics - pins, etc, that need other players to free the affected player from. These lead to a lot of great moments in previous pve coop games, and while theres a few here, more is better.

Things that are Bad

• Supply Line progression. Very little information provided in-game about what it does and what its for, and once you complete the first one, it opens up the whole system. This needs to be tuned with some essential early-game card drops to show new players that no, they are not awful at this game, it's that its balanced around having certain cards in play that they did not have at the time.
• UI re: Team Cards/Benefits. One of the coolest cards I found was if someone gets incapped, your team gets 10 seconds of infinite ammo - basically a free magazine or two. Chances are, if people are being incapped, resources are very low. Which would make this card massively impactful if anyone knew it was happening. Its during combat, so to borrow a design idea from Hugo Martin, you gotta tell the player and tell em quick: When a team-based conditional card procs(Avenge the fallen, Inspiring Sacrifice, etc) just throw GIANT BLOCK LETTERS ON THE SCREEN WITH A TIMER. If everyone's playing the conserve-every-bullet game(common), this card is near useless even though its a MASSIVE game-changing tool.
  • Same, but less so with cards that remove capabilities from a player. My Ammo Mule support deck gives me +200% maximum ammo, but I can't pick up support slot items. Give me an icon above my head telling my team im gimped. I can type it out(or macro it) but itd be cooler if I didnt need to. This shouldnt apply to minor debuffs like -5% damage resistance, but strictly for meaningful team dynamic-shifting deck impacts.
• Does the levels you're able to select from as a 'start' point for a new campaign run differ based on difficulty? I could never select 'Tunnel of Blood' or 'The Crossing' on Veteran, nor could I select 'Hells Bells' on Veteran despite completing all of them. No problem selecting them on Recruit. Whats up with that?
• Lack of stagger. If The Exploder That Is Always There At The Ladder To The Trucks In Resurgence 1 climbs up and youre positioned wrong, you are f*cked with 0 recourse. Stagger on hit is minimal, and meleeing an exploder is a suicide mission. Unless you're prepped for the spawn, you cant dump enough ordnance into him to kill him without getting caught in the blast. Make it so melee is a guaranteed stagger except on Ogre, so players can react immediately to surprise threats and reposition. Adjust stagger animation/duration to be shorter to compensate. Bonus Round: Have this apply to non-knife melee only, so that choice now becomes more meaningful in gameplay.
• Bot AI. Whole sub is filled with this, and rightfully so. I dont need to add anything here.
• 'Blind' Effect from Exploder/Retch/Stinger. Its inconsequential right now. Needs to be hit with the buff bat a few times so that it is very bad to get hit with one of these. Maybe adjust the stinger projectile to be a lot brighter/apparent, or tune the Stinger 'launch' sfx to be way higher in the mix to compensate; People know they f*cked up if a sploder/retch gets them.
• New player experience/information. Very little is communicated about the attachment system, the rarity system, what the various tool slot items do(what the f*ck is a stun gun?) and what they do, what alerts Crows(apparently, NPCs running through them does not), when you deal damage to a friendly or not, trauma system, unlocks/progression, why you sometimes die instantly instead of being downed - all of this isnt communicated, or if it is, no one is paying attention and those tips/prompts need to be around for the first 2-3 supply line unlocks.
• Difficulty curve. Ive got no beef with recruit and its disney ride nonsense, but on veteran and above things like 'if you dont run into the tunnel when the ogre spawns, your entire party is going to get wiped', or 'holing up in the obvious place to hole up in during the grain silo horde will get you dead most of the time' and 'you need to f*cking RUN AND DO NOT STOP' for the boat finale and the tow truck set piece after the house. People assume that the spawns for the last two set pieces are normal and will stop, but they sure have looked infinite to me. No communication to the player about this, and no guaranteed voice prompt that cleaners state that they need to run. Lots of deaths from a turtling team on these levels. Im filing this under 'difficulty' rather than 'information' because it seems like some of the design here is reliant on the philosophy of 'do this mission 100 times, f*ck up 99 times, then figure out how to correctly do it on the 100th' which is...a proven system to drive playtime, though frustrating for everyone.
• Gore. And im not saying this about the aesthetics, either - Several gameplay cards affect how many bullets it takes to put down an infected, and without a meaningful gore system(or some other intuitive visual non-menu/stat signal of damage taken) to estimate how much damage we've been doing, it just feels like i have to run a timer of how long I hold a click on their head before they fall over. If special health didnt vary, this wouldnt be as necessary, but its always difficult to understand how many resources youll need to kill a given zombie in the second half. If I peel off half a bruiser's head with a shotgun blast, I know im on the right track.

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