Back 4 Blood will be always-online at launch

Shooting a gun at a gnarly ridden monster — (Image credit: Turtle Rock Studios)

In response to a question about whether Back 4 Blood could be played offline in solo mode with AI team-mates, developers Turtle Rock replied, "We're looking into ways we could support offline for the future but you will need an internet connection to play at launch." That's a shame, because both of the Left 4 Dead games support offline play and some players were hoping Back 4 Blood would follow suit. It also won't have split-screen play at launch, with Turtle Rock noting that, "We'd love to support this in the future but won't be launching with it."

Hopefully both features come in post-launch updates. Turtle Rock did earn some goodwill recently by announcing that DLC will be accessible to all players in a party as long as the leader owns it, as is also the case in games like Vermintide 2. It's a relief to know that DLC won't fragment players.

Back 4 Blood is due to come out on October 12, and it will have a PvP mode that lets a team control the zombies.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.