It’s all good fun until Wizard shoots the food
At the beginning of March, Rockstar shared the news that GTA Online set a new all-time high for player numbers in 2020 – not a bad achievement for a game that’s been running for over seven years. At the same time it revealed that over half of the players who took on the game’s most recent heist chose to do so alone. And on one level, yes, this feels like something worth celebrating: the option to run these types of mission solo has been requested countless times among the game’s enormous playerbase, and here was proof that (a) Rockstar was listening, and (b) it wasn’t wasting its energy creating a heist that could scale successfully between one and four players. But at the same time, isn’t the data also saying that in reality a huge amount of players aren’t interested in the Online part of the game’s title at all? That what they really want is more singleplayer GTA?
We get it. When your teammates include the one who always barges his way to the best stuff first, the one who sprints in blindly and is ripped to pieces immediately, and the one who can always be relied on to turn up on time but is mostly useless because he couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo, it tends to chip away at the desire to play games together online all of the time. But equally, where would we be without the ability to connect with friends in this way at this particular moment in time?
For this issue’s cover game, working effectively as a group is something of a prerequisite – the clue is right there with the number in the title, just as it was with the duo of zombie-slaughtering classics on which it’s built. Turtle Rock Studios sure has taken its time with Back 4 Blood, but our experiences so far – resulting in only a modest number of fallings-out – suggest that the wait will be worth it. Our hands-on report begins on p54.
Finally, spare a thought for Ed Logg, who had to go to war with Atari’s marketing department (why is it always the marketing department?) in order to pave the way for the likes of Back 4 Blood via the trailblazing Gauntlet way back in 1985. He tells his story in Collected Works (p68).