Back 4 Blood’s developers think the game is too hard

Back 4 Blood is a hard game — even the developers at Turtle Rock agree. In a recap posted to Reddit of the studio’s November update stream, Turtle Rock said that it will scale some of Back 4 Blood’s more punishing systems back to easy its brutal difficulty curve.

The studio said it still wants players to struggle, but ideally in a way that feels fair, rather than frustrating.

Difficulty needs to be our “baby bear” in Back 4 Blood’s Goldilocks story. It needs to be “just right.” We want it tense. We want it challenging. We want you barely squeaking into the saferoom with a horde hot on your heels and you feeling that rush. We do not want it unmanageable. We do not want it to be unfair. That is our mission.

To achieve its goals, Turtle Rock said it will pair back several aspects of the game’s difficulty. Ridden Mutations will spawn less frequently in the future. The studio has also recently fixed a bug that was causing players to receive Trauma damage at an unintentionally high rate.

Turtle Rock gave a more nebulous description around its plans to increase build diversity. Specifically, it said it wants to empower players who would rather take it slow than speedrun through a map.

With the Trauma issue solved and a fix for Mutations on the way, the team will continue to monitor difficulty through player builds and other metrics. If anything, this recap showcases Turtle Rock’s interest in polishing Back 4 Blood with player feedback — even if that means nerfing fan-favorite builds, or other initially unpleasant changes.