No, it’s not just you. Yes, Back 4 Blood is hard, and also, yes, the game is still spawning way too many special infected. Turtle Rock, the devs behind the popular zombie shooter, admitted that Back 4 Blood is currently harder than it intended and has plans to address various issues behind the unexpected high difficulty.
During a stream earlier this week, Back 4 Blood’s devs explained that the rate at which special Ridden spawn is still far too high, even after a patch earlier this month tried to knock it down. At first the studio thought they had fixed the situation involving AI spawn cards, but it seems another problem is still in the game causing more special infected to spawn, leading to more frustrating missions for players.
“We identified another major cause of the unintended increased difficulty,” explained Turtle Rock in a Reddit post summing up the stream. “And we are actively working on a solution. We will nail this and continue crafting a game that improves over time.”
Another annoying issue that was leading to increased difficulty involved trauma damage. This is damage that builds up over the course of a mission and which is harder to heal. While trauma damage is intended to make missions harder, it was confirmed by the devs that players were receiving way too much across all difficulty levels of the game. A recent server-side patch has fixed this for online play and Turtle Rock says a full update will fix it for offline singleplayer missions soon.
Turtle Rock also acknowledged that right now the most popular and effective character builds to beat harder missions involve decks built entirely around speed and stamina, letting players “speedrun” levels. This is leading to a lot of frustration among folks grouping up with randos as many of them are just running off alone right at the start of the mission, leaving everyone else behind. Turtle Rock didn’t go into detail about how they plan to address these “speedrunners” but did say future patches will aim to change this current meta.
Meanwhile, Back 4 Blood’s player numbers have started to dwindle, even dipping below Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam. Perhaps these changes and future updates can bring back some frustrated or annoyed players.