So long ago, I played L4D (single player) and I beat a lot of the missions on the hardest setting (couldn't beat certain levels though - Rooftop of first campaign was one I think). But I could still beat every level on the 2nd hardest setting at the least. It was challenging and the fact that you have to start each level all the way over when you die is great (like old video games, not all this saving every 2 seconds that FPS's have now).
Since sc2 beta has been down, I've been playing L4D2 and I've noticed that the Expert setting is just impossible. I only beat the first level with it and each following level even on the 2nd hardest is almost impossible (some levels took me hours and hours to beat). I think the main reason for this is the lack of CPU Ally AI.
They are retarded as fuck.
They never pick up items/weapons when you want them to (often they will drop a good gun and pick up some trash gun just because it has more ammo), and they seem to always jack your health packs/pills when you need them most. They heal injured allies over you even if you have less HP. They never take priority to help you when you are stunned/down and a few too many times they just be bugged? and stand around while you slowly die and they are doing nothing at all. They always walk into your line of fire. The very worst part about them though is the fact that they do not follow closely enough and will not retreat when you do. For example, you are in a hallway and come to a multiway path break, and trigger a zombie attack. You throw a molitov in front of yourself andthen run to a closet/room to funnel. They just stand their ground and get fucking raped. Often times they will even stand in the green goo or fire on the floor and die even faster. It's just terrible.
These games are really fucking awesome but it just sucks and makes me feel terrible that it takes me 2 days (like 5-6 hours) to beat the mall level because the retarded AI won't follow me as I try and turn off an alarm that is causing a nonstop zombie wave. Or as I go up an escalator and get snagged 3/4 the way through a level that they don't come up and unsnag me.
I mean it's not like the enemy itself is hard, it's the fact that the ally AI is just terrible.
Other than that fact, L4D2 is superior game. More diverse enemies, weapons, less items around, Insanely good graphics/gore. It's like valve didn't give a fuck about single player this time and only focused on the multiplayer.
Anyone else played it on single player and have any tips?
I bought this last week and have been playing it on expert co-op with my friends online and on LAN in a few weeks. Loving every bit of it but yeah NPC AI isn't that great and not suitable for expert play at all. Requires a lot more ingenuity and creativity/positional play then the AI can provide.
Co-op however we're having a BLAST. Loved every second of L4D and L4D2 is just bigger, more and better then the original. Just a great game!
In short, play it with randoms if you have to but else grab some friends of TL or IRC or something and go massacre it up . Especially the new melee weapons are so cool lol.
I didn't play a lot of L4D or L4D2.. but I can recall that they are not meant to be played with AI allys. Most of the time I remember catching the AI getting itself killed and things similar to that.
I distinctly remember them also facing my character while I was facing the direction of zombies coming in as well, and them not turning and shooting. I don't remember any trick that helped them react quicker either. It really is the bastard child of Valve, L4D series.
I've played L4D2 on singleplayer once and will never again. It just becomes boring to me. The game is best played with friends, any reason why your not doing that?
And it's true that the AI sucks, but one thing their good at is spotting enemies far away behind bushes, where a normal person never could be capble of doing that.
And have you tried using the commands? Maybe they work!
This is gonna sound like trolling but, don't play single player =p
In fact, I only had fun with it during the "Last man on earth" mutation, now THAT, was awesome. You can probably re-create it with a custom server (that's if you are not playing on 360) and give it a go, I guarantee you are going to have a great time.
It is hard when you don't know the maps very well, but it gets easier. Try getting some friends to team up with, it's the whole point of the game. Playing "Real Deal" and "Realism Versus" with my mates on skype is ace.
On July 01 2010 23:10 NonFactor wrote: I've played L4D2 on singleplayer once and will never again. It just becomes boring to me. The game is best played with friends, any reason why your not doing that?
And it's true that the AI sucks, but one thing their good at is spotting enemies far away behind bushes, where a normal person never could be capble of doing that.
And have you tried using the commands? Maybe they work!
Well I don't exactly have steam or a server to play on with public. And It'd probably be difficult to round up some friends IRL to play with (and I'd need to setup hamachi or something? which I don't know how to do). PC version btw
And you're right about the AI shooting into darkness lol. That's the only thing that is good about them.
On July 01 2010 23:10 NonFactor wrote: I've played L4D2 on singleplayer once and will never again. It just becomes boring to me. The game is best played with friends, any reason why your not doing that?
And it's true that the AI sucks, but one thing their good at is spotting enemies far away behind bushes, where a normal person never could be capble of doing that.
And have you tried using the commands? Maybe they work!
Well I don't exactly have steam or a server to play on with public. And It'd probably be difficult to round up some friends IRL to play with (and I'd need to setup hamachi or something? which I don't know how to do). PC version btw
And you're right about the AI shooting into darkness lol. That's the only thing that is good about them.
Experts pretty much impossible on single player, but if you have a couple of friends playing with you its definitely doable, a pc cafe near my house had a competition going on for who could beat each level in the quickest time on expert with their friends , and some of the times were pretty ridiculous, like 1 minute 30 seconds for some of the easier levels I think, and only 2 minutes something for the hardest levels.
In L4D2 there are no more closets to abuse, not as many corners to back into, zombies actually know how to flank, AND levels are designed such that infected literally come from every angle every fucking minute. How the fuck do people beat L4D2 in expert?
Also, I forgot to mention something. I don;t know if it's just me or my computer settings or something. But it seems like the hitboxes of zombies are smaller/don't match up. Lot of times I have a clean headshot but it just goes through their lips or ear or something. And I confirmed the weird hitboxes on that gnome game. Anyone else notice something like this in L4D2?
did you happen to notice that the "single player" maps are also multiplayer maps? you're playing multiplayer but with bots on your team, you should know what to expect
fucking lol, i'm on the carnival level atm. whole team had full HP, pills, ammo, health pack, pipebomb (and garden gnome). Totally stocked up. Was on the green astro turf above where the carosel is. All my team jumped down (didn't even go near the jump down point yet, just sniping heads). All the sudden a charger comes, and nails me. They just stand around while be bashes me unmercifully over and over. So I alt tab because its gonna be a while and the game crashes. Yes!
Expert realism with three friends is the only way to go. Everything below that is way too easy and practically beats itself. Don't really know about the SP though. Never actually played it because it just doesn't compare to the fun of the coop mode with friends.
On July 02 2010 00:22 Butigroove wrote: Buy it on steam for $10 gg
The best thing you could. There's no substitute for playing with real people. It makes the experience a lot more fun. I remember playing L4D2 single player and being so bored.
It might go back to $10 on the last day of the steam sale. So be patient.
L4D2 versus seems way more fun and challenging. I have only played it a bit, but there's just way more variety than in L4D1. Maybe it lacks a bit of the atmosphere that he first had, and the characters are significantly worse except for the black guy. I hope they make the old characters playable in L4D2 in the future.
All in all, it feels like L4D2 is the game they wanted to make the first time around and it just got rushed out the door or something. It's a shame the way they treated the first game by releasing the 2nd so quick, it really damaged the community and the way people see the games.
Stop playing single player with the bots!!! L4D and L4D2 are meant to be played online with a full team of human players. Versus mode online is quite possibly the most fun thing ever, for those who don't know what that mode is its very simple - you play the campaign as normal, except you are playing against another human team. Both human teams take turns playing Infected and Survivors on each level. The team with the higher survivor score wins the round (in the event of ties, the damage dealt as Infected is the tie-breaker).
AI is so retarded sometimes man. Like you get grabbed by a smoker and instead of giving a gentle lovely melee hit to free you they like, walk all around the map to reach the smoker and melee kill it, arrgh so much rage Multiplayer is where the gold is at, but if you play with pubs, multiplayer makes you apreciate bots sometimes. I mean, bots can pull off hudge snipes of shit you didn't even knew where there, and more importantly, they never friendly fire. On expert dificultys, my main cause of death is friendly fire, always, and with pubs it's even more agravating. Play LAN or online with friend, it's what the game was designed for
In my experience, single player on expert will take either a lot of time or very little. There are two methods I use when running levels:
1. Rush ahead, get to the saferoom ASAP
This method usually works because the director (L4D/L4D2's AI controller/management system) works such so that the level becomes more difficult as more time passes by. Additionally, the director will adjust the zombie spawns depending on the conditions of your allies and the number of zombies currently in the map. On expert, if you rush ahead and your partners get incapped behind you, you will usually be able to fight/didge a minimal amount of zombies and get to the saferoom easily, provided you can dodge tanks (or there are no tanks) and you can fend off specials quickly. This is mainly due to the fact that there is a limit on the number of zombies that can be on the map at any given time (which I think is smaller at the beginning of the level), and if your partners are behind you and incapacitated there will be the max amount of zombies spawned attacking them instead of you. Here's an example of a youtube user who does expert runs with the 'rush ahead' method:
I've used this method in L4D1/L4D2; basically, spend a lot of time retrying with bots until they somehow pull through for you and you can beat the level. These runs usually take a long, long time, for the bots suck really hard and it'll be pretty much you carrying the team. However, they make pretty good snipers for specials (because they have perfect aim), so what I usually do is worry about getting the common infected killed the most so long as I have the bots to snipe the specials for me. On a whole, though, this fashion of running levels is much more tedious and frustrating than the fast method, but with due diligence it is very possible so long as you have the time and patience to deal with it (as I'm sure you already know, lol).
On July 02 2010 00:37 CharlieMurphy wrote: what exactly is realism anyways? (sounds kind of ironic for a zombie game).
Single player l4d2 is as real as it gets, this shit is impossible.
You can't see other people's silhouettes... probably not that big of a deal with bots, but with humans it can get rather nightmarish quickly.
I think expert is doable with a good group of 4, but I don't think it is at all possible with anything less than 3- Left 4 Dead you could do it with 2 with a lot of work, but it wasn't insane. The charger and the spitter can incap too quickly.
Do you really want single player? ^_^ l4d1 was fucking awesome, didn't play l4d2 yet except for trying it out a little. but charlie! l4d was all about the multiplayer i don't understand why single player?
A friend of mine who just passed, may he rest in peace, was a beast at l4d2. He could beat all the campaigns alone. I just picked l4d2 on that $30 bucks 4pack steam offer, and I love it. The AI is really stupid but playing with friends is a lot of fun. We tried playing on expert and didnt go very far T_T that shit is hard.
I know in left 4 dead original there was a console code that made the AI survivors act independent of you, as in if you weren't there they would just do the level by themselves. If I am not mistaken it would make them act a bit smarter because what messes them up is their orders to follow you. Something to look into, I'm not going to google it, probably won't take to long to find though.
EDIT: However, you have to follow them around, and if they do decide to do something stupid, you either make a mad dash for the end and die, or stick with them and die.
Bought L4D2 on sale, played for a couple hours, I don't see so far what is so good about it. Probably just not my thing. I prefer exploration and positional combat, but everyone is just rushing ahead like crazy, no time to appreciate the level design. Also, screw the flashlight idea, the darkness doesn't add anything but leave you with annoying tiny visible area.
EPT
. Especially the new melee weapons are so cool lol.
