If your team is on the ball, and provided you aren’t playing at max difficulty, your fellow team members will easily dispatch the baddies, but the encounter will have you on edge for a good minute or two.
You’ll yell for help, and that’s right when a Smoker will wrap its long tongue around another player. You can be making your way through the opening level’s city streets, getting increasingly nervous about how you’ve not seen a special infected for a while, when you’ll hear the telltale audio cue and, seconds later, get pinned by a Hunter. In Left 4 Dead 2 it will, on some occasions, actually alter the level layout, but for the most part it’s all about injecting tension and maintaining pace. A superbly detailed technical analysis of it exists, but the most important thing to understand about it is that it’s not out to kill you, even if the infected and special infected it spawns might have murder on their minds. The Left 4 Dead AI Director, on the other hand, is far less predictable.
Stumble across a small 3 x 2 room in Crypt of the NecroDancer, for example, and there’s a strong chance there’s a hidden chest somewhere in there. Procedural level generation is one way of ensuring that a level never plays the same way twice, but more often than not, you can recognize patterns in the way that levels are laid out. To appreciate why Left 4 Dead’s AI Director was (and still is) so appealing, and why its Back 4 Blood incarnation is such a letdown, you have to appreciate how and why it stands out. But compared to the AI Director in Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, Turtle Rock’s previous co-op zombie shooters, the big brain that’s supposed to be running the show has scrawled “tension” out of its mental dictionary.
Has anyone seen Michael Bay recently? Because after tackling Back 4 Blood, I suspect Turtle Rock Studios has him strapped to a chair and is using his brain as the template for its “Game Director.” That’s not to say Back 4 Blood is terrible it’s perfectly playable, particularly if you can get a half-decent team together.
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