After a year-and-a-half of no news from Turtle Rock and Warner Bros. on Back 4 Blood – the upcoming co-op zombie game got its first trailer at The Game Awards 2020. Just a few days later, Turtle Rock dropped a half-hour gameplay trailer.
Here’s everything we know about Back 4 Blood:
Release date
Turtle Rock and Warner Bros. officially revealed Back 4 Blood at The Game Awards 2020 with a June 22, 2021 release date.
Trailer
From the trailer, it seems that Back 4 Blood is the latest in the Left 4 Blood franchise in all ways except the title.
Gameplay
The Back 4 Blood gameplay showcases 30 minutes of team-based, zombie-slaying fun mixed with some developer insights. We see a good variety of environments, melee combat and gunplay, player characters, and of course zombies.
Throughout the footage, you can see a few things that Back 4 Blood doesn’t have in common with Left 4 Dead. A new big guy that looks like a Tank mixed with a Boomer can be seen in the trailer, and you can also see the new “roguelike” card system in action.
Features
Turtle Rock has been pretty clear about Back 4 Blood innovating the Left 4 Dead formula since the beginning. As a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood will still see you mowing down hordes of zombies, but it also promises to build on that with lots of new features that will set the new IP apart. Early on in development, the community manager wrote in the FAQ: “you’ll be able to shoot up a lot of zombies like in Left 4 Dead, but there’s a whole lot of new stuff in Back 4 Blood which makes it unique.”
Post Launch Paid Content
Microtransactions are a huge concern for players when it comes to the release of a new multiplayer game. As such, Turtle Rock did make mention of the topic in its FAQ, saying there could be additional paid for content after release, but at the moment they’re focusing on the base game before thinking ahead to any sort of DLC: “Right now, we’re focusing on making the best, most fun and exciting game we can. We’ll figure out the post-launch stuff later, but if we do have paid post-launch content, like microtransactions, we want to do something that the community feels good about.”
The game will be available to play on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and Microsoft Windows.