I've just tried the new Survival mode for L4D and I must say I'm very, very disaapointed.
I thought it would be a good idea (they almost have a mini version of it in the campaign with the various spots you have to defend and when it comes to holding out for your escape route) but I found numerous issues when playing it that just made it agonising to play for an extended period of time.
Firstly, most games with a survival mode throw preordained waves of increasing difficulty at you (so you can get better as the horde does), L4D by contrast just throws everything it has at you from the word go (in one case our whole team was either pounced by hunters or grabbed by smokers within 5 seconds of the assault starting). This wouldn't have been so bad if they'd also remembered to include the occasional break or moment of silence to heal up and reload or grab supplies (as it stands, no such oppertunity is given).
I understand that L4D prides itself on the AI Director but this is clearly one case where it is simply just inappropriate (or has been executed in a suitably crap fashion).
Next, the gameplay itself needs to be revised for survival to work. Many features that were introduced to keep players from carelessly running straight to the finish line in campaign just serve to cripple the team when they have enough against them in this arena, at one point one of my teammates was incapped on the ground about 7 feet in front of me, I run over to help him only to stop dead in my tracks because a solitary zombie is punching my back. Upon dealing with said dead guy my character was grabbed by one of the numerous smokers present and lunged at by one of the hunters that was there before finally being swarmed by zombies and a Tank (as you can guess, I was a lost cause by this point, even if my friends did try to rescue me there would be little that they could do).
You might be saying to yourself 'I'm sorry to break this to you Mal, but I think you've just had a bad run of luck' but this happened almost immediately in every game for 12 games consectutively (we even tried it on different maps just to be sure).
Credit to Valve for making this but I think they made some serious mistakes in development that could easily have been avoided.
I thought it would be a good idea (they almost have a mini version of it in the campaign with the various spots you have to defend and when it comes to holding out for your escape route) but I found numerous issues when playing it that just made it agonising to play for an extended period of time.
Firstly, most games with a survival mode throw preordained waves of increasing difficulty at you (so you can get better as the horde does), L4D by contrast just throws everything it has at you from the word go (in one case our whole team was either pounced by hunters or grabbed by smokers within 5 seconds of the assault starting). This wouldn't have been so bad if they'd also remembered to include the occasional break or moment of silence to heal up and reload or grab supplies (as it stands, no such oppertunity is given).
I understand that L4D prides itself on the AI Director but this is clearly one case where it is simply just inappropriate (or has been executed in a suitably crap fashion).
Next, the gameplay itself needs to be revised for survival to work. Many features that were introduced to keep players from carelessly running straight to the finish line in campaign just serve to cripple the team when they have enough against them in this arena, at one point one of my teammates was incapped on the ground about 7 feet in front of me, I run over to help him only to stop dead in my tracks because a solitary zombie is punching my back. Upon dealing with said dead guy my character was grabbed by one of the numerous smokers present and lunged at by one of the hunters that was there before finally being swarmed by zombies and a Tank (as you can guess, I was a lost cause by this point, even if my friends did try to rescue me there would be little that they could do).
You might be saying to yourself 'I'm sorry to break this to you Mal, but I think you've just had a bad run of luck' but this happened almost immediately in every game for 12 games consectutively (we even tried it on different maps just to be sure).
Credit to Valve for making this but I think they made some serious mistakes in development that could easily have been avoided.
