The alarm doors in Back 4 Blood have been reworked. However, what they do now, players just find ridiculous.
In Back 4 Blood, the main focus is on defeating a lot of zombies. Of course, the zombies should behave realistically so that the gaming experience is not spoiled. However, the latest patch has “improved” a small detail. The culprit is an almost insurmountable issue in game design.
What is the problem? Since the last patch, there has been a change to the alarm doors. They can no longer be opened by regular zombies unless there is an incoming horde.
This means that players now have to open these alarm doors themselves, triggering a horde, or use a toolkit to bypass the alarm.
A generally sensible change to give alarm doors more significance in the game – but it simultaneously leads to problems.
Because alarm doors can no longer be opened by zombies under normal conditions, some absurd sights emerge, like the clip from Ibutterz420. There you can see the entrance to a police station where dozens of zombies are milling about – but they simply cannot get through the glass door.
This is also commented on by some other players, such as MeatloafAndWaffles:
“It’s unrealistic for zombies to break alarm doors without triggering an alarm.”
Yeah, but masses of zombies struggling to open an alarm-secured glass door while NOT triggering the alarm is obviously much more realistic. /s
What is actually the problem? The underlying problem lies with alarm doors in Back 4 Blood. When players carelessly open them, they trigger an alarm that attracts a horde. At higher difficulty levels, a single horde can wipe out the entire group. So this is a danger that must be avoided.
The previous strategy was to “lure” zombies from the other side of the door so that they would smash the alarm door, which did not trigger an alarm. Of course, that made little sense – because how should an alarm door know whether a zombie or a human broke it down and why should it react differently?
The answer lies clearly in game design. It simply feels “bad” for players if alarm doors could be triggered by zombies that they could not deactivate beforehand. For the same reason, zombies are also unable to trigger alarms from police cars – it simply feels “unfair” from a gameplay perspective, even if it would be realistic.
What do the developers have planned now? Actually, this new “feature” is more or less a bug. The change that alarm doors can no longer be torn down by zombies is intentional, but it should have come in a later patch. Along with it, a new player card was planned that would allow alarm doors to be opened safely without having to use a toolkit every time.
Since the change to the doors went live, but the new card is not yet available, there is now this strange situation where zombies can be held back by glass doors indefinitely.
How would you solve this issue? How could alarm doors and zombies interact without it feeling “unfair”?
