Back 4 Blood has met with considerable praise in its early days, but a number of issues have cropped up as more players dive in, including its lack of a versus campaign mode, frustrations around the lack of progression in solo play, and the huge leap in challenge between its Recruit and Veteran difficulties. This last is of particular note because all difficulties are unlocked from the start, leading many players to treat Veteran - which realistically is more of a "hard" mode - as the default difficulty for experienced survival FPS players and Left 4 Dead veterans. Unfortunately, this has led to more confusion and frustration than anything else.
Back 4 Blood's cooperative multiplayer action focuses on its various Cleaner characters, each with unique abilities, who team up to take out its zombie threat known as the Ridden. Decks of cards can be built for each Cleaner, which add further powerful customizations as the cards are drawn during gameplay. Because the game is designed to be undertaken with a team of four, players will have to either find a dedicated group of friends to play with, or they'll have to queue up to find random players using the game's Quickplay option in the campaign menu. This can lead to a rather wildly different experience than playing with friends or a dedicated group.
Things are made even more difficult by the wide leap in challenge between Recruit and Veteran, and the fact that many of Back 4 Blood's core card and gameplay concepts aren't particularly well explained to newcomers. Knowing when to take a Tool Kit or Defibrillator, or stock up on Razor Wire versus grabbing Pipe Bombs isn't the kind of information that new players tend to have figured out early on, and more obfuscated systems like Trauma damage are things some may not even fully grasp by the time they've finished the campaign on Recruit.
Back 4 Blood's Veteran Difficulty Should Require Unlocking
Not everyone likes the idea of a difficulty level being locked behind an arbitrary wall. In console versions of Diablo 3, players were required to clear easier difficulties before moving on to harder ones, a serious issue when those early difficulties posed no challenge. Back 4 Blood avoids this problem by making its Recruit, Veteran, and Nightmare difficulties available right from the start, but doesn't do an especially good job of letting players know what they're in for - or what those difficulties mechanically represent.
Even if developer Turtle Rock sticks to keeping all difficulties available for everyone without requiring a Recruit campaign clear first, it would do well to at least issue proper warnings about difficulty expectations. As it stands, there's a small bit of text when starting or joining a Back 4 Blood campaign that doesn't call much attention to itself. It would also do well to have some messaging around the fact that substantive card decks should be unlocked before attempting Veteran, and that coordinated team deck strategies are necessary for victory in Nightmare. There are a lot of reasons that unlocking harder difficulties through campaign progress or card acquisition would make sense, but some clearer messaging would still go a long way.
Back 4 Blood's Veteran Difficulty Varies With The Team
One of the easiest problems to diagnose with the game's difficulties is how much they can vary in terms of their actual level of challenge. The mechanical details certainly have a variety of nuances that require some player knowledge and attention, but even aside from how many Mutations spawn in Back 4 Blood's Ridden swarm, or how much damage friendly fire does, the ability for players to easily coordinate things like who should take a Tool Kit or which cards each Cleaner is using in each deck can be the difference between success or failure.
Because accomplishing these things with a dedicated group is so much easier than it is with random players from a Quickplay queue, Veteran difficulty can prove to be a wildly different thing to different people. For a dedicated team, Veteran might be doable after only a few cards are unlocked, but two friends playing with a pair of Back 4 Blood's bots could be another story, let alone a team of random players who found each other through Quickplay. And these situations are compounded if players have misunderstood what playing on Veteran actually entails.
Back 4 Blood Players Assume Veteran Is Normal Due To Supply Point Decrease
It's debatable whether Back 4 Blood's Veteran difficulty should be considered a "normal" or "hard" mode, but the fact remains that given its current balance, it's effectively the latter. It's true that it is "normal" in offering the base Supply Points as reward, with an expanded pool of Corruption cards to offer challenge variety, and it doesn't give players the healing and damage bonuses that Recruit does; but that may give new players a false sense of security when trying it out. In particular, it's an issue that Turtle Rock shows players that they'll get 50% fewer of Back 4 Blood's coveted Supply Points when playing on Recruit, leading many to think that their time would be better spent in Veteran. In fact, it's much harder to earn early Supply Points that way, as more player deaths and party wipes will lead to far fewer Supply Points than players will get through victories and successful optional objectives on Recruit.
Back 4 Blood's Veteran Difficulty Requires Knowledge & Coordination
Instead of going into the expected level of base challenge, new players attempting Back 4 Blood's Veteran difficulty will find a significantly more brutal version of the game, all without having enough powerful cards in their deck to support them through it. Even worse, they won't know the game's maps and events well enough to survive. Party wipes are common enough in Act 3 of the Back 4 Blood campaign on Recruit, but upping the difficulty while still attempting to learn the nuances of the maps (and the actions needed to complete them) is a guaranteed bad time.
Even aside from that knowledge, Back 4 Blood has some nuanced features like Trauma damage, and there are variations in how its different healing items work that many players won't understand during their first run through the campaign. Once the difficulty is bumped up to Veteran, knowing the right time to use Pills instead of Bandages is critical, or how long to put off using that last First Aid Kid, as is having more coordinated play with teammates so that resources aren't wasted. Birds and Snitches need to be eliminated before alerting the Horde if they can't be avoided, dedicated roles for medics and snipers should be established, and deck strategy should be discussed.
But because this isn't always possible, especially in pickup games via Quickplay, a rebalanced Veteran difficulty could be a huge boon for players forced into the queue while they attempt to finish Back 4 Blood's story campaign (or who are just having trouble finding a full group). An intermediate difficulty level might also be an option, even if it risks spreading the player base a bit thinner. For those struggling to make their way through the significantly more difficult challenges of Veteran - especially when their Quickplay teammates don't understand what they've gotten themselves into - any balance improvements would be a most welcome change.