Developer Turtle Rock Studios recently posted a video where it separates its upcoming game, Back 4 Blood, from the highly-renowned Left 4 Dead franchise that it worked on with Valve. The team was then known as Valve South while it was working under the publisher from 2008 to 2010. It received recognition in the video game community after the release of both its zombie FPS games.
Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 were both extremely well-received, and both developer and publisher found success from the release of both games. Unfortunately, there was an internal conflict that caused both parties to separate, which led Valve South to change its name to Turtle Rock Studios in 2011 and was re-founded as an independent company.
After establishing its own place in the industry, Turtle Rock worked on Evolve with 2K as its publisher, making it the team’s next major project following the Left 4 Dead series. However, it wasn’t able to reach the same kind of success and its servers had to be shut down in 2018.
After that, the team did a couple of VR projects with Oculus before announcing that it will be returning to its roots: eliminating zombies.
Announced during The Games Awards 2020, Back 4 Blood is set to be published by Warner Bros. Games. The upcoming title touts itself to be a game that uses a new and improved version of the co-op shooter formula utilized in the studio’s initial major titles.
A long time has passed since Left 4 Dead was released — ten years, to be exact — and the differences and improvements made to Back 4 Blood can be clearly seen just by its graphics and visuals alone. In addition to that, the new first-person shooter will apparently make use of a new card-based loadout system to keep its gameplay exciting and fresh.
At this point, Back 4 Blood is garnering a decent following, especially since many excited fans were able to sample the game during a closed alpha preview. Needless to say, they enjoyed it thoroughly and the title received positive reviews.
In a recent official video by Turtle Rock, which you can check out above, the studio talks about its plans for Back 4 Blood. From the team’s discussion, it’s clear to see that they want to leave Left 4 Dead behind and move forward from there.
Turtle Rock Studios describes Back 4 Blood’s characters as seasoned veterans when it comes to the zombie apocalypse. As a matter of fact, some of the survivors are even immune to the infections, which is most likely going to be some kind of perk that will help the player.
With that in mind, this means that Back 4 Blood is more about cutting down a multitude of zombies rather than locating a safe house to stay in. One of the developers from the team even described the game as being about “kicking zombie ass.” Although, this doesn’t mean that fans can’t play as mutated infected in this title because they most definitely can.
Back 4 Blood has its own unique infected zombies, but they aren’t the only features that Turtle Rock Studios is trying to enhance. While the studio claims that it wants to provide players with a completely new experience with Back 4 Blood, it’s hard to argue that it’s pretty similar to the Left 4 Dead franchise and it would be understandably hard for the studio to completely separate itself from a series that brought it so much success.
