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Robert Tamayo

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Weird Powerup in Back 4 Blood

I was playing Back 4 Blood again tonight, and the strangest thing happened. As I said yesterday, the game kept crashing on me. I guess it was overheating the GPU or something.

So when another bug happened, I figured it was something to do with the game again. I went online to figure out why I could no longer aim down my sights. It was the weirdest thing.

But the weirder thing is that it wasn't a bug - it was a feature!

It's strange that in a game about shooting zombies with guns the developers would throw in a powerup that makes you permanently unable to look down the sights of your gun. Apparently, I had picked up this "perk" sometime while clicking on everything in sight. The consequences stayed with me for the remainder of Act 2, which comprises about 25% of the game or something like that. 

The tradeoff was that melee kills suddenly became very powerful. Except I didn't have a melee weapon, and couldn't find one for a half hour or so.

For the final part of the Act, I was presented with the option to buy an additional "buff" that would nerf my melee attacks. Good thing I was paying attention that time!

The developers considered the game a "rogue-like" with miniature skill trees and progression that would change every round. I think this particular "skill" was a little detrimental. It literally forced me to play with melee weapons, as I lost one of the key abilities of any modern first person shooter. Suddenly I was playing a literal hack n slash, attacking gigantic bosses with a baseball and a knife as there weren't many other options. 

The moral of the story is this: one ability should be able to make one build work, but it shouldn't make every other build and playstyle worthless in exchange.

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