Yeah, it's fun how different a tierlist like that would look for versus. No Mercy is another example that is much much harder in versus, mostly because of all the death charge spots in the last 2 maps.
@@Irydion versus suffers immensely in most campaigns for the infected have barely any spots to spawn at. maps that have alleys with a lot of verticality are the best
@@512TheWolf512 It's not the lack of spawns. There's plenty of good places to spawn. However the game is old enough at this point that most people know where those spots are so they know to look there. That's the issue. There are good spots they're just predictable.
versus special infected benefits a lot from high places which dead center have a lot, campaign ai special infected cant use the benefits as good as real player
Getting the gnome is mandatory the same way en passant is forced. Sure, technically anyone can play without it, but only cowards and noobs actually do so lol
Cold Stream is definitely the most consistently mind numbing campaign. That staircase room with the water is BURNED into my brain. I usually play on advanced instead of expert, and on that difficulty you don't get a lot of people using as many "cheese strategies" so it REALLY can grind the run to a halt. Great video, great list
Can you give us tips on how to deal with the mob in that part? Me and my friends usually just rush to the safe room and leave anyone who gets incapped since it can get very difficult to save them especially with the amount of zombies that can interrupt anyone who tries to revive another teammate.
@@ytstickman1532usually for me, i jump between railings and staircases instead of walking down them all. also jumping on zombies kills them while also giving you a jump boost letting you kinda goomba stomp your way to the safe house if you jump enough. overall keep bashing and jumping on their head. i haven’t had too much trouble since i figured it out.
18:40 - It's also worth mentioning, that after the first tank, every tank wave spawns 2 tanks, which adds to the difficulty and often catches players off guard. 22:27 - Fun fact: Hard Rain is also the only campaign that doesn't spawn ANY ammo piles outside of saferooms, so if you're wasteful with your ammo, you will easily find yourself running out. 23:59 - I am flattered uwu 24:28 - Last Stand 1 is actually the 17th longest map in terms of raw distance traversed, at 0.63km long (If you include the most efficient event solo path it's 1.05km long). The longest maps for that metric are The Sacrifice's 2nd map and The Passing's 2nd map, which are both 0.84km long. Dead Center 2 gets an honorable mention for being the longest non-DLC map at 0.69km without the cola event, and 0.94km with it. 27:15 - One of the team members (Simplex) did actually upload the original release version of the campaign, as well as the original dev build version (where it was only 1 map) to the workshop. 28:11 - Dark Carnival 1 is also not guaranteed to spawn bile. There's a 24% chance that NONE spawn, which means you either have to restart, or deal with the event without a bile. Map 5 on the other hand is guaranteed to spawn 1 bile in the area before entering the stadium.
Honored to have you watching! I'm so happy to hear about the original on the workshop, God bless that. Thanks again for your hard work and all the fun niche facts you share on the subreddit Also yeah now that you mention it I've never seen an ammo spawn in hard rain. Also love to read about the actual running numbers. I'm actually shocked to read that Dead Center 2 is longer than Parish 3. But I guess it's hard to mentally map these numbers out when you consider things like running up stairs and snaking around corridors
its actually nuts that you mention that hard rain doesn't have ammo piles between safe rooms because I've genuinely never noticed, which could mean two things, 1) I'm so good at ammo management and 2) I'm not so attached to any one primary that it bars me from just choosing another one Edit: there's a 3rd thing, just remembered that primary spawns are basically their own ammo pile for that specific gun
@@Oswaldo_Godoy Yeah I was reacting the same way, then I realized I tend to stick to guns that happen to frequently be made available so I just refill lol. I do usually find myself needing to settle for something new at least once or twice per full Hard Rain campaign though -- yet somehow I NEVER noticed at ALL that there are no extra ammo piles! Wild how that's just escaped our notice until our illustrious overlord Jaiz pointed it out here lol
This is adorable and charming lol, thank you for sharing it. If anyone enters this thread intending to pick on you for it, they're a coward and should go find a hug lol
For me it was the Hard Rain one (or whatever it's called) not because i couldn't see anything, but because i was very scared of witches back when i was a kid and neglected to play it
Same for me, i did my very first playthrough of Hard Rain (or as i like to call it, Witches Central) with 3 of my friends and my god, is it frustating. That one factory where there's a shit ton of witches inside made my heart skip a beat and the hard rain (pun intended) after you got the gas was making me anxious as hell.
The (L4D2 specifically) Death Toll has always been particularly difficult for me. Mainly because of the Endless horde run to the saferoom activated by the forklift, and the finale is really difficult for finding a good place to make your stand, with the house having so many entrances and the dock being a good place for chargers. Then again… the last time I played Death Toll was over a year ago on the Iron Man mutation on advanced difficulty.
Defending the house together by sitting on top of various appliances with friends is just such a funny yet awesome thing. Even if it can easily go from "we got it under control" to "we're all dead", I just love it purely for how much it fits my childhood dream of an apocalypse. Also playing with the mutation that only allows one player to leave makes it even more hilarious seeing everyone working together and immediately change to absolute aggressive the moment evac arrives.
during 4th grade, one of my friends suddenly told the group to not eat recess so we could play at the lan cafe after class, l4d2 is the first multiplayer game and the first survival horror ive played, i miss that feeling so much of going through the campaign, we kept going down the difficulty level because none of us had PC's at home and we were really bad at gaming
When you said you rated green yellow and red i knew i will not be able to tell what im supposed to look at but thankfully you did include blue a bit later on so i was able to understand what i was looking at. Thanks mate.
Id say the passing has the easiest finale since you have the L4D1 survivors giving extra firepower and supplies. As long as you stick together & take the most remote gas cans first before things heat up you're very unlikely to fail.
Every lobby I've been in, especially pubs, never accounts for the fact the difficulty ramps up when you complete the objective. Very few occasions did I see anybody else trying to grab the further ones first alongside me to prevent the slog that is pushing for them after your allies rushed the closer cans first.
My top 3 hardest based on Expert Difficulty: Honorable mentions: The Passing - long chapters and generally brutal finale. Though I did play this on expert with only one buddy of mine and both of us have rudimentary L4D2 experience so, case to case basis applies a lot. Cold Stream - some tight corners and very easy to get overwhelmed in the stream trench taking account the incredibly stressful finale too. Easiest to hardest: Hard Rain - honestly what makes this difficult is the incredibly high spawn rate of hordes, from the get go. You're gonna get worn out before you even get to the sugarmill and the sugar mill itself being incredibly long complete with one crescendo event with a chance of a tank in the sugarfield combined with witches is like playing Minesweeper and Space Invaders at the same time. Keep in mind that on expert you're down one tank punch and past tense with one Witch swipe so good luck making it through that if your team is on autopilot. Swamp Fever - you have swamp that slows you down, foliage, and at least one run event in the third chapter where a lot of things can go wrong especially if a special infected ambushes your team. The hoard is relentless and unless you have pipe bombs or bile jars it can get pretty rough. But the most brutal is the finale as dealing with two tanks obliterates the stairs strategy and leaves you exposed to special infected. Hunters and smokers have put me and my team in chalk outlines just as the dual tanks spawn. Dark Carnival - for all the reasons stated in this video and adding a more deceptive rescue placement in the finale itself. You have low amount of bile jars and you're gonna be thrown into one crescendo event after crescendo event. My most viable strategy for the Chapter 4 run is to equip a melee weapon while running to the saferoom and pray your teammates packed a bile bomb and a pipe bomb because Valve decided to use this map to remind players of their blueballing from Half Life's surface tension. I haven't played Last Stand yet, but I might in a later session. Hopefully some players are brave enough for it.
Update on this; I have played Last Stand on Expert and while it's not beating anything on the main top three. It is gonna be the hardest of the honorable mentions. Two very long levels with few kits in between and slow but constantly spawning horde in the scavenge portion with the finale. Keep in mind that each run is filled with RNG so results may vary. I got one run one time when a gas can fell into the world itself and then a tank spawn during the generators in Chapter 1. People have criticized this map but honestly it shows its peak during stressful difficulties.
Personally I tend to frequent expert realism games as much as I can because I realized that is the best way to improve. Although I am still not good enough to do it on singleplayer with bots haha. Good video.
yeah in expert realism the last stand is the hardest because of the fact that if your teammates die, they die half of the run ESPECIALLY if you play single player
ill add my input, during covid once it first hit, me and a group of friends did a 4 man run of all the l4d2 and then l4d campaigns that were out at the time, on extreme realism. from just that experience, which was limited, the finale for dead center, the dark carnival finale and 4th(?) level, the sacrafice, and by far, hard rains second mission and its finale. were the missions we got stuck on. i would say, maybe of like a fully combined 80hours of playtime, maybe HALF was spent on hard rain. that mission broke us. it was fun but god damn I am convinced that it is not possible to make it to the crescendo event without losing two people at minimum. so yeah heavy rain is easily the hardest imho.
@@BrandonFlint-ro2nsevent on 2nd chapter where you run inside of a drain where stream can just flush you to the other side is pretty creative, especially on versus if someone gets grabbed by jockey or hunter
Last Stand is well designed sounds like the biggest joke ever. Generator event in 1 chapter is ass because of getting swarms of zombies while activating gens in dead ends, it should've been just like normal "hold your ground" event. Getting gas cans in the final through trees and from the shore is not well designed as well, and the addition of two tanks after second tank is out of place. Overall Last Stand is designed even worse than Cold Stream
@@tourbean790 Exactly, the Last Stand "campaign" immediately stood out as 4ss from the moment it was released. It's not hard because it's well designed, but rather because it's a cheesy unlit corridor full of noclip trees to give zombies a cheap advantage, along with events that are blatantly harder than vanilla crescendos and finales. They've got the excuse for those since it only has 2 maps, but that's all the campaign offers, a pair of challenging fights. There's no flair to it, it has the "poorly lit crawl through a random mish-mash of assets" feel that all the worst custom campaigns on the workshop have. Uninspired. The most memorable thing about it is the lighthouse, which is just a repurposed survival map. There's a dozen other custom campaigns which would've better served the game if made official. Last Stand's only advantage is the loose lore connection.
@@TheAlexRhodes Exactly my thoughts. Last Stand survival map in l4d1 never had in mind that there's gonna be a realism mod without character outline. That's another reason why this clustercluck of the campaign is bad. Also there's an metal tank theme that has absolutely zero purpose to exist in official campaign, it wouldn't even fit in l4d2 roaster of campaigns (Dark Carnaval would fit kinda ok but still it's awkward). I even made a mod that replace it with generic tank themes (just put "Metal tank theme is NO MORE" in workshop page). I would rather play Cold Stream and Crash Course
i loved the video! ❤️ i also agree with your number 1 honestly i spent 2 and a half hours on cold stream by myself (with bots) in advance and i restarted 13 times, when i eventually got to that helicopter the feeling of finally winning and getting the achievement is so good, after dying nearly so many times when the helicopter was in my grasp.
Dark Carnival isn't one that i regularly struggle with, even on expert. Idk if it's just because i played it to death with my brother because it was his favorite, but outside of versus mode, i can do DC borderline blindfolded. Now, make no mistake. The rush event before the stadium is HARD. It requires either using the bile jar strat you mentioned, good pipe bomb placement, or a good amount of luck to navigate easily. However, I've found that good timing with a melee weapon and having one teammate designated to sniping special infected, an even middling team can get through it consistently. Personally, id give it as a toss up between Hard Rain and Cold Stream. Hard Rain has resource management on a higher level than any other campaign, is full to the brim with witches, and the visual disruption that starts half way through makes the return trip TRICKY. Even with good rng. And then Cold Stream has so many areas where the whole team can just get shut down and trapped all at once. And thats to say NOTHING of the stairway of nightmares.
On chapter 2 of the sacrifice, you could jump on the side of the boat instead of going to the hill and latch on to the boat's edge to effectively let yourself and others skip the whole crescendo event and let your run to the saferoom more easier... but to be honest I'm not really sure it applies to every server since I only have done this on one specific server.
And you need to know that The Last Stand was going to be one chapter only until I say "hey, we should add AT LEAST one saferoom" xD Imagine running from the beggining to the lighthouse just to die there and start all over again
Yo this is a fantastically thought out video. I was super engaged the whole time, despite being tired and ADHDaf. Love it, will definitely support any other content you make about L4D or any of my other interests
Great video! Kind of funny actually, I decided to pull up reddit while watching to see what other people thought of some of these chapters and managed to find a comment you made going over which chapters you thought were hardest. I was reading it and thought that this person had very similar opinions before realizing it was your account lol
Just here to say that I really, really appreciated the green -> blue fade on the overview difficulty image, so many people use Green/Yellow for these things and it makes it super hard to parse sometimes
Without watching, my first instinct for hard campaigns is probably Cold Stream or Dark Carnival due to the running crescendo events. Edit: I watched it and yup! Great video!
nice video . can't say i agree on the placement of every single mission but i wanted to say a few things about the last stand campaign : the finale was actually nerfed twice (should be easy to find when / how by looking at the patch notes) i think both times the intensity of the permanent horde during the scavenge part was reduced or at least it was absolutely reduced the first time : i got the realism expert achievements for that mission a few days after the release and the finale remained like that for a couple months if not more and,yes,it was absolutely brutal compared to how it is now but you didn't mention a very important detail : there is a bile that always spawns in round 1 @ the generators event so one survivor simply has to save it for round 2 when there's a second guaranteed bile on the lighthouse . it's even possible to get a third one in round 2 but very rare in any case,with 1 or 2 biles,even at full original difficulty,4 survivors should really have no problem beating that finale and that's why i really disliked those nerfs besides,people can always play it on normal or advanced if expert is too much but more experienced players enjoyed the extra challenge so removing that option for them was a choice i truly didn't understand and lastly,cold stream became a lot harder not too long ago when they removed the option to skip that event at the end of round 2 another change i don't really understand : i would leave all shortcuts / skips in there or fix them all . fixing one but leaving others make no sense imo
The exact spawn chances for biles in The Last Stand are: 0.27% chance that only 1 bile spawns; 97.86% chance that 2 will spawn, and 1.87% chance that 3 biles spawn in map 1. 85.13% chance that only 1 bile spawns; 14.7% chance that 2 will spawn; and a 0.17% chance that 3 will spawn in map 2. So, other than the guaranteed biles, you're very likely to have an additional bile, which gives your a total of 60+ seconds where you don't have to deal with hordes, which should be more than enough time to collect all the gascans.
in Expert Realism for me the hardest is the last stand because there is no reviving in rooms, only safe house, and because of the fact that it is 2 chapters only, if your teammate dies, they die for 50% of the run. Cold Stream is kinda alright in Expert Realism, the only spike in difficulty is cold stream, but the gimmick is just bring the chainsaw from the truck for the stairs part and pipe bomb for the tunnel part, if there is vile jar, tunnel part is a walk in the park
The bile jar in chapter 1 isn't even a guaranteed spawn either. It's entirely possible you'll play through the whole campaign and not see a single one.
I always as a kid saw Ch 3-4 of Hard Rain as the hardest, I think just simply because the storms scared me to death and made me panic. Considering to reach that point I would have to go through Witch hell I would be on-edge. Mind you that was when I was a kid and I played on just advanced.
Dark Carnival is my favorite campaign, but in my experience, Crash Course has been hellish for me. I don't know what kind of luck I've had but I've only completed that campaign a few times on expert, while the rest I've finished many times when I'm with randoms. Randoms on crash course make me tear my hair out, they either get downed or get caught out of position. I think the length tilts people as you mentioned, but I love that campaign anyway.
Great video! I love the detail you go into explaining the campaigns to prove your points. (Also Death Toll is the best campaign; your opinions are based)
Me and my friend cheesed barns on expert since not everyone is required to be around the trigger area after dropping from the roofs. I basically shot from the other side of the fence at the area shortly after the bumper cars, while my friend with the 2 bots ran to the safe room. Often, most of the commons will just ignore you, with a few getting in your way. Most will just go for your teammates. You just need to be aware of some SI trying to get you. You also need to get an SMG or a gun with really high ammo capacity and just use your secondary weapon before the point of no return when dropping from the roofs. That way you wont run out of ammo early. If all goes well youll be shredding the hordes that go for your team specially the ones coming from the front and help them when SI attack. Youll probably go down at some point and be a sacrifice. But if your team manages to get to the safe room, the infinite horde stops and you have a chance to live, or die in the safe room to preserve your weapon. Youd probably want your team to not help you on the way back and risk failing the level though.
The last stand campaign before they fixed the special infected spawn rate was the most difficult expert realism campaign and borderline impossible to compete. There are literally special infected around every corner spawning every 2 seconds
My greatest achievement in L4D2 is the actual achievement Connecting Flights. At the time I didn't have the best computer/internet connection so I would sometimes drop/be kicked due to inactivity in multiplayer games. Despite this I found myself planning the game nights for a group of friends on a forum I was on. And even with friends it was hard to get more than five people to agree to a game and stick with it all night. So the fact I managed to play a Versus game on Dead Air from start to finish with a full team on both sides with nobody leaving/dropping is one of my top 10 awesome things I've done as a gamer. This being all the way back in 2013.
Me and my brother just bought this game last summer sale on steam and tried to do a rerun on all of the campaigns like we used to do way back 2009, and man the new cold stream campaign really kicked our ass.
The Parish has always been one of my favorites and it never felt that difficult depending on tank spawns. That was until I got probably the worst Tank RNG in one play session: The first one was in the Alarmed Cars section that as soon as we went up the ladder to the cars, three of us were instantly downed and had to restart. The second one was right before it in the tight houses that also caused us to restart. We skipped past the Bridge tank but another tank spawned right after it and killed one of us and launched someone to the helicopter with only 1HP. Yeah, maybe Parish is a bit rough.
I was so suprised to hear you put crash course as the easiest finale but then I remembered that chapter 2 is only a real pain in the ass on realism with respawns. If you go slow, you risk more time spent fighting the hordes and specials and this might burn through your resources so you end up with none left for the finale (having to use some or all medkits at the finale even before starting it) and if you try to rush or go too fast, you risk having a teammate fall behind and get killed and are now fighting the finale with only 1, 2 or 3 people less. Good video and analysis tho 👍
I feel like HardRains later chapters are understated. And they cause it to belong way higher than you put it. For starters, if even one of your randoms is bad at platfroming, they're taking lots of fall damage and extra time, punished heavily with back tracking or stomping through water, in top of being semi-seperated, and there are some places where you can not avoid having to slog through water. Not to mention the frequent storms that lower your range of visibility. On top if this, you also risk having new players or greedy delicate flowers who dont care, that burn through medkits and resources meant for the way back. So the map can also feel scarce for resources at times.
I completed all the og l4d2 campaigns on expert solo. Of course single player is a completely different experience. For me the easiest one was Hard Rain, I knew how to move properly through the map, funny enough, I lost two times outside of the final safe room on the second chapter. The finale was hard, but it was more of dodging the tank. Swamp fever is next, I literally cheesed it on the second and third chapters, just ran to the safe room. The finale took me a while and was more luck than anything. The parish, besides the cemetery and the bridge, the other three chapters are not that hard. Dead Center, well, scavenge in solo... You know how it is. Dark Carnival still has me traumatised. Every single chapter fucked me up in ways you can't imagine. I cannot even decide what's worse, the concert, the barns or the rollercoaster. Worst part is that the game didn't count the completion of the campaign (I think because I left the game in pause for too much time) and didn't get the achievement.
Hard Rain on Expert. One key element was that someone in the team had to have a defibrilator in order for us to beat the map. In the end, only one survivor got on the boat.
It should be noted that with the sacrifice that you can skip the crescendo event 4 players by jumping onto the side of the ship and just lifting player up from where they jumped.
From personal experience, having played L4D2 since 2010-2012 and getting back to it lately Cold Stream is definitely a difficult one because of how many crescendo events there are and the level design making it really frustrating. Dark Carnival has always been my favourite campaign in the l4d2 lineup and was the first one I ever played, it's definitely a hard one thanks to the roller coaster which is an easy spot to lose everything. However it had more of an intentional design whereas Cold Stream felt more... unintentionally difficult. I found Hard Rain to be quite easy and fast paced once you're more experienced and used to the resource management, especially as the environments are repeated but you traverse them in reverse. I can definitely see how it can be difficult on say Expert or Realism Expert. Edit: I forgot to mention Swamp Fever, definitely up there with difficulty mainly for the slow movement thanks to the water. It can also make tank fights awkward as lighting them on fire is nearly obsolete in most chapters due to the water extinguishing them, then there's the slow movement so they can easily catch up to you.
Chap 4 of Dark Carni in expert without a bile jar was about getting lucky with a boomer. When me and 2 of my friends got downed, I thought it was over until I got boomed on while incapicitated so all the commons went to me instead of my friend rushing to the safe house so he got there safely. Talk about being a human bile jar lol
As a veteran player of L4D2 for me after beating all of the campaigns and chapters in the difficulty of expert, i manage to beat all campaigns in expert difficulty, well as a veteran i am damn laughing now that i have beaten up all campaigns in expert mode not once but 10 times in just 1 hour each chapters well i find this video very accurate for beginners, but if you are a veteran you will laugh at this😂🤣 because you started from being a noob and now you are an old grinder or a veteran but still playing this game after 14 years of my life of playing this game..... I realized all on the hard tier is actually basic it's like normal tier 🤝
Not gonna lie it is genuinely weird that I say what I do at the beginning about the game being solved and I have easy runs on all the campaigns and I still get comments like this one. It's like people keep commenting without actually watching
@@NormStorm No no no, I'm actually impressed I'm not insulting or roasting you bro, calm down pls. I'm just a 31 year old who has Minecraft pfp for no good reason, and I am just amazed of how many years has been, this past few years now I just realized it's easy now even though I've stopped playing this game because I wanted to play other games instead of sticking to this one, I appreciated your hard work and dedication and your content is very good... I'm really meant to say bad stuff I'm just really amazed that there is still players out there and have a content about this game and play it on expert mode and hoped for rng, well goodluck and I hoped that you will have a 1 Million subs in the next several years buddy... Bye and enjoy your life man. Love from the Philippines ❤🇵🇭
@@NormStorm I did watched your full vid don't worry I understand it brother... Keep doing good and don't forget to rest too so that you don't get tired and don't abuse your body.
@@-KingRJ- ya you're right im sorry too i just get so many comments from people who click on these videos and they just talk about how insanely good they are and how easy the game is and therefore how dumb the videos are to the point where i question why they're even clicking to begin with, cause my target audience are newer players and people that just have a healthy love for the game. sometimes i cant differentiate between a hate comment and someone typing about the ease of the game out of their love for it, and i try to view comments from the perspective of a newer player. so sometimes i view it as someone who's new to the gym trying to bench press 135lbs and then they see comments from people who rep 315lbs going "people who cant do X are so weak and stupid" and i get defensive over them. in this case it was the part in your comment where you mention that you're laughing at it but i see what you're actually saying by that now cause yeah for me- these campaigns are so easy for me at this point. the ones i put in my upper tier make me work for it sometimes though if the teammates are newer but yeah. Love from canada :)
@@NormStorm well buddy, all I have to say is... You just earned your self a new subscriber❤. And yeah apology accepted bro, and don't worry I wasn't laughing at your content or anything, I was just laughing because I used to rage and quit dying 50 times playing L4D2 but after a lot of experience I'm now laughing because it was now easy... Hard work pays off man... Well I really appreciate that you get what my point is thank you
Idk what's the hardest campaign but after playing l4d2 since release mostly on PC and recently on Xbox with my friends, hard rains unique gimmick of a storm so loud you can't hear your friends mics is pretty cool and challenging. I never liked hard rain in the past but this recent playthrough with my friends made me a huge fan, I had so much fun and the loud weather sounds are such a cool effect. Underrated campaign for sure 👌
22:39 or u can save a bile and while waiting at the roof for the boat to arrive at the docks throw the bile at the tank to slow it down with the infected horde.
From my experience of playing one of the hardest modes in the game (Mutation Hard8 Expert No Restarts) imo i would put parish at the top 😭its been 3 years of trying and we still gotta beat, swamp fever, parish and hard rain. The ai director feels like an actual player with the insane plays it pulls on us despite being bots
I was so goated in my childhood I swear I remember being purely skilled at every game doesn't feel the same now it probably feels easier but man, young me's energy got me through alot of games I'd consider difficult now
im late to the party, but doing all of the expert l4d2 campaigns solo, and the expert realism Last Stand campaign was pure misery. especially thinking that i only had to beat last stand in expert, then after beating it then only realizing it was supposed to be in REALISM. safe to say i know my way around the game now 😭
I've played all vanilla campaigns of both L4D1 and L4D2 in the past month on expert. L4D1 i had to do it with AI for teammates since i couldn't find anyone on xbox 360. No mercy finale was easily the hardest chapter out of all that I've suffered. L4D2 i played mostly solo but had some randoms join my lobbies occasionally. It wasn't too bad. I'm redoing the Parish again with bots only and am stuck on chapter 4. Needless to say, i hate the AI teammates with a burning passion. Only redoing so i can get the Survive all campaigns achievement on expert. The only one i died on the finale was the parish. A random survived, so it didn't count and skipping to only doing the finale ALSO doesn't count. So here we are...pain.
Norm please, how do you find Crash Course easy? I'm surprised only few people in the comments have pointed how painfully hard is the finale? I mean, it might be a skill issue (I play w controller mostly single p.) but I usually can't hold in a spot with zombies reaching me on expert or a special infected sneaking from the windows/floor and usually something goes wrong when restarting the gen or with a tank. Do you clear all the zombies (and sci's) no matter where you position yourself? Me and a friend tried a duo on expert but we got common locked in all the places we tried, No Mercy was a breeze for us.. I really appreciate your vid because you highlighted Cold Stream 2nd chapter event with the respect it deserves. I asked on leddit asking why ppl don't talk about it and they told me "nobody cares about Cold Stream" XD but WE do! I think you should've mentioned there is a guaranteed bile +2 health kits/pills on the restart 4 gens part of Last Stand as well as other throwables +another kit later which makes that chapter easier, it's a yellow in my book.
Unless you're playing expert or versus none of the campaigns are hard they just differ in enjoyment levels as noone will be dead anyways. The problem with L4D difficulty scale is that advanced is easy and expert gets tedious. We got ourselves a custom mutation that puts the difficulty scale somewhere in between advanced and expert that isn't just scaling infected damage.
That Barn run is rage inducing. I thought I would make it. My whole team got killed and I was 5 steps away from thr safe room with green health. boom. Tank. Like wtf bro
Also just the mere fact someone has to hold onto a bile bomb means theres 1 less thorowable in the team for a whole 3 chapters since that guy is locked to having the bile. I do remember doing TLS on expert realism unnerfed with randoms.. it was hell... people entered and left for like 2 hours (except one other random that was there since the very start of the session with me) till eventually I got a team that managed to get by just fine. (Aka I and the aforementioned guy at least managed to survive lol)
I just realized I've never played The Sacrifice. No idea how. 200+ hours in the game and I somehow never played it. Probably confused it with The Passing.
The stand Dark carnival Hard rain Cold stream Least to hardest Cold takes hardest for the waterfall tunnel that endlessly spawns zombies to jet you out off the edge.
If we are considering vs, parish is probably the hardest campaign. You’re lucky to get through acts 2-finale because they are so long, super open but still have crazy choke points, and lots of points of no return.
the easiest way I found to do dark carnival was actually to pick up the sniper rifle for the ending, 30 shots before reload so double that of the hunting rifle and 1 bullet takes out multiple infected, I can clear out the first long corridor pretty fast the second you start turning the corner is hard but once you can manage to line yourself up in front of the safe room on the left side just keep shooting and pushing forward, the horde stops spawning when you get close to its spawn point so as long as the lead player makes it to the safe room its significantly easier. Everyone should have melee weapons as they’re and instant kill on all the commons that spawn.
My friend and I, rest his soul, were on Dark Carnival for the better part of an hour, trying to get Gnome Chompsky out of there, and most of our deaths came from the finale. It was absolute nonstop aggression from the Special Infected. The Hunter would distract from the Boomer. The Smoker distracts from the Charger and Spitter. Add two or three Tanks in there and you've got a recipe for maximum frustration.
To me its Dark carnivals crescendos 3 and 4, and Hard Rain just in general, playing realism really really makes that hurricane hit like a truck else youre 100% gonna teamkill everyone
Well as someone who ran the entirety of expert realism ALL Campaigns i can confiedently say its the last mission of the sacrifice i promise you everything leading up to that is lightwork in comparison, the concert the airstrip, heavy rain, doesnt matter its all a cakewalk compared to the fight starting with 3 tanks and continuing on thereforth, the really crazy part is, the tanks arent even the worst, its when youre running and absolutely clearing just for some random smoker or hunter grab you or youre friend and end the entire run, even the setup for that final mission takes like 10 minutes if youre fast with it, so yeah i feel justified saying its easily the hardest
Dark carnival. There i just saved you 36 minutes of your life.
Redditor cope
Why dont you warp at the safehouse in each game? Clearly the only important point is the end
Read this in Peter Griffin's voice lol
Maybe not the most difficult, but it is the one that goes the hardest.
Thanks, this mf can't editorialize worth a damn
My greatest achievement in this game is beating Cold Stream on expert realism with a group of dedicated strangers with no voice chat. Took forever
Highest tier gamer
Based
Congrats.
Until this day i haven't complete Gold Stream campaign on expert
I barely survived randos on normal Advanced cold stream. Ellis'd let you drive the car
Interesting how Dead Center's finalie goes from being one of the eaiser ones to arguably the hardest in versus context.
Yeah, it's fun how different a tierlist like that would look for versus. No Mercy is another example that is much much harder in versus, mostly because of all the death charge spots in the last 2 maps.
@@Irydion versus suffers immensely in most campaigns for the infected have barely any spots to spawn at. maps that have alleys with a lot of verticality are the best
Fr watching this feels so strange. I rarely play campaign. I'm like hell naw jigsaw you tweaking the whole time
@@512TheWolf512 It's not the lack of spawns. There's plenty of good places to spawn. However the game is old enough at this point that most people know where those spots are so they know to look there. That's the issue. There are good spots they're just predictable.
versus special infected benefits a lot from high places which dead center have a lot, campaign ai special infected cant use the benefits as good as real player
Dark Carnival has to be up there because me and my friends always, ALWAYS, go after the gnome. It's an unspoken rule lol
absolute chaddery
Same, everytime.
Have to respect your team grind
All of you are complete Thads
Getting the gnome is mandatory the same way en passant is forced. Sure, technically anyone can play without it, but only cowards and noobs actually do so lol
Cold Stream is definitely the most consistently mind numbing campaign. That staircase room with the water is BURNED into my brain. I usually play on advanced instead of expert, and on that difficulty you don't get a lot of people using as many "cheese strategies" so it REALLY can grind the run to a halt. Great video, great list
Can you give us tips on how to deal with the mob in that part? Me and my friends usually just rush to the safe room and leave anyone who gets incapped since it can get very difficult to save them especially with the amount of zombies that can interrupt anyone who tries to revive another teammate.
@@ytstickman1532usually for me, i jump between railings and staircases instead of walking down them all. also jumping on zombies kills them while also giving you a jump boost letting you kinda goomba stomp your way to the safe house if you jump enough.
overall keep bashing and jumping on their head. i haven’t had too much trouble since i figured it out.
I agree
Since the skip was fixed, i wont play it on vanilla expert
fr the 4th lvl sewer before the staircase is devious cos u cant save someone bcos the moving water makes you trip too
I forgot about that. Yea that one is awful
I'm glad there's still videos being made for this game
This game will never die, this is a GEN Z holy grail.
This is like what quake is boomers.
18:40 - It's also worth mentioning, that after the first tank, every tank wave spawns 2 tanks, which adds to the difficulty and often catches players off guard.
22:27 - Fun fact: Hard Rain is also the only campaign that doesn't spawn ANY ammo piles outside of saferooms, so if you're wasteful with your ammo, you will easily find yourself running out.
23:59 - I am flattered uwu
24:28 - Last Stand 1 is actually the 17th longest map in terms of raw distance traversed, at 0.63km long (If you include the most efficient event solo path it's 1.05km long). The longest maps for that metric are The Sacrifice's 2nd map and The Passing's 2nd map, which are both 0.84km long. Dead Center 2 gets an honorable mention for being the longest non-DLC map at 0.69km without the cola event, and 0.94km with it.
27:15 - One of the team members (Simplex) did actually upload the original release version of the campaign, as well as the original dev build version (where it was only 1 map) to the workshop.
28:11 - Dark Carnival 1 is also not guaranteed to spawn bile. There's a 24% chance that NONE spawn, which means you either have to restart, or deal with the event without a bile. Map 5 on the other hand is guaranteed to spawn 1 bile in the area before entering the stadium.
Holy moly
Honored to have you watching! I'm so happy to hear about the original on the workshop, God bless that. Thanks again for your hard work and all the fun niche facts you share on the subreddit
Also yeah now that you mention it I've never seen an ammo spawn in hard rain. Also love to read about the actual running numbers. I'm actually shocked to read that Dead Center 2 is longer than Parish 3. But I guess it's hard to mentally map these numbers out when you consider things like running up stairs and snaking around corridors
its actually nuts that you mention that hard rain doesn't have ammo piles between safe rooms because I've genuinely never noticed, which could mean two things, 1) I'm so good at ammo management and 2) I'm not so attached to any one primary that it bars me from just choosing another one
Edit: there's a 3rd thing, just remembered that primary spawns are basically their own ammo pile for that specific gun
This explains why I always run out of shotgun ammo in hard rain
@@Oswaldo_Godoy Yeah I was reacting the same way, then I realized I tend to stick to guns that happen to frequently be made available so I just refill lol. I do usually find myself needing to settle for something new at least once or twice per full Hard Rain campaign though -- yet somehow I NEVER noticed at ALL that there are no extra ammo piles! Wild how that's just escaped our notice until our illustrious overlord Jaiz pointed it out here lol
No Mercy. I was new to computers when I started tge game. Most challenging 1st hour of trying to open the door from the rooftop.
This is adorable and charming lol, thank you for sharing it. If anyone enters this thread intending to pick on you for it, they're a coward and should go find a hug lol
skill issue (don't take this seriously)
I also did that one when I first started pc gaming and spent 4 hours with randoms trying to beat and ultimately lost on the rooftop finale
For me it was the Hard Rain one (or whatever it's called) not because i couldn't see anything, but because i was very scared of witches back when i was a kid and neglected to play it
Same for me, i did my very first playthrough of Hard Rain (or as i like to call it, Witches Central) with 3 of my friends and my god, is it frustating. That one factory where there's a shit ton of witches inside made my heart skip a beat and the hard rain (pun intended) after you got the gas was making me anxious as hell.
Hard Rain was one of my favs when I was a kid cuz the witches were my favorite
I usually use sniper rifle as my main weapon. but for Hard Rain, I used Auto Shotgun for witches
Thanks for the colorblind accommodation, I could not actually tell the yellow and green numbers apart :)
what's the hair color of ur anime pfp
lmao me 2
The virgin "Saved you 36 minutes" VS. The Chad "tier list trivia facts" enjoyer
💯💯💯 Say it louder for the whiners in the back! Idk why people like that even click on videos if they care so little 😂
18:35 Rare Purple Francis sighting
Also cheeky The Shining Carpet at 7:10
The man behind the slaughter?
@@notsobadbones
I hate child murderers
- Franci, 2023
My brother got found!
The (L4D2 specifically) Death Toll has always been particularly difficult for me. Mainly because of the Endless horde run to the saferoom activated by the forklift, and the finale is really difficult for finding a good place to make your stand, with the house having so many entrances and the dock being a good place for chargers.
Then again… the last time I played Death Toll was over a year ago on the Iron Man mutation on advanced difficulty.
God you gave yourself the worst time with that haha
That's my favorite map! I also think it's the most difficult in og L4D.
Same i don’t think it was mentioned or maybe I missed it but I love that campaign and think it’s difficult as well
That forklift chapter killed my advanced campaign achievement. It's the only one I'm missing
Defending the house together by sitting on top of various appliances with friends is just such a funny yet awesome thing.
Even if it can easily go from "we got it under control" to "we're all dead", I just love it purely for how much it fits my childhood dream of an apocalypse.
Also playing with the mutation that only allows one player to leave makes it even more hilarious seeing everyone working together and immediately change to absolute aggressive the moment evac arrives.
Some chinese experimental maps had a final map with swinging columns, even with 4 players we died 468 times even on easy to complete it.
Chinese l4d2 servers are just pure insanity
@@Gusenichka925why?
@@Gusenichka925chinese servers are meant to be played with 10x health and infinite ammo
Now we need "Hardest Campaign to Solo" video or smth. I'd like to see which campaign gives people the most trouble to beat it in Solo.
hardest to solo would be last stand. (or sacrifice if you consider that it is technically impossible to solo due to the ending crescendo)
@@LinkoofHyrule You can finish The Sacrifice in solo, actually. Even without additional scripts.
@@sasha_4orniy Don't you die at the end though?
@@LinkoofHyrule Well, yes, you die, but campaign are about to finish anyway. Without chapter restart.
@@sasha_4orniy i think if u die u have lost lol
always that arguement on who is going to commit harakiri at the end of that campaign
during 4th grade, one of my friends suddenly told the group to not eat recess so we could play at the lan cafe after class, l4d2 is the first multiplayer game and the first survival horror ive played, i miss that feeling so much of going through the campaign, we kept going down the difficulty level because none of us had PC's at home and we were really bad at gaming
When you said you rated green yellow and red i knew i will not be able to tell what im supposed to look at but thankfully you did include blue a bit later on so i was able to understand what i was looking at. Thanks mate.
Id say the passing has the easiest finale since you have the L4D1 survivors giving extra firepower and supplies.
As long as you stick together & take the most remote gas cans first before things heat up you're very unlikely to fail.
I almost lost my mind doing that on expert realism solo with bots 😭😭
I guess the sewer section just before that can be a problem without boomer bile or a chainsaw.
Tell that to my friends
Every lobby I've been in, especially pubs, never accounts for the fact the difficulty ramps up when you complete the objective. Very few occasions did I see anybody else trying to grab the further ones first alongside me to prevent the slog that is pushing for them after your allies rushed the closer cans first.
My top 3 hardest based on Expert Difficulty:
Honorable mentions: The Passing - long chapters and generally brutal finale. Though I did play this on expert with only one buddy of mine and both of us have rudimentary L4D2 experience so, case to case basis applies a lot.
Cold Stream - some tight corners and very easy to get overwhelmed in the stream trench taking account the incredibly stressful finale too.
Easiest to hardest:
Hard Rain - honestly what makes this difficult is the incredibly high spawn rate of hordes, from the get go. You're gonna get worn out before you even get to the sugarmill and the sugar mill itself being incredibly long complete with one crescendo event with a chance of a tank in the sugarfield combined with witches is like playing Minesweeper and Space Invaders at the same time. Keep in mind that on expert you're down one tank punch and past tense with one Witch swipe so good luck making it through that if your team is on autopilot.
Swamp Fever - you have swamp that slows you down, foliage, and at least one run event in the third chapter where a lot of things can go wrong especially if a special infected ambushes your team. The hoard is relentless and unless you have pipe bombs or bile jars it can get pretty rough. But the most brutal is the finale as dealing with two tanks obliterates the stairs strategy and leaves you exposed to special infected. Hunters and smokers have put me and my team in chalk outlines just as the dual tanks spawn.
Dark Carnival - for all the reasons stated in this video and adding a more deceptive rescue placement in the finale itself. You have low amount of bile jars and you're gonna be thrown into one crescendo event after crescendo event. My most viable strategy for the Chapter 4 run is to equip a melee weapon while running to the saferoom and pray your teammates packed a bile bomb and a pipe bomb because Valve decided to use this map to remind players of their blueballing from Half Life's surface tension.
I haven't played Last Stand yet, but I might in a later session. Hopefully some players are brave enough for it.
Update on this;
I have played Last Stand on Expert and while it's not beating anything on the main top three. It is gonna be the hardest of the honorable mentions. Two very long levels with few kits in between and slow but constantly spawning horde in the scavenge portion with the finale.
Keep in mind that each run is filled with RNG so results may vary. I got one run one time when a gas can fell into the world itself and then a tank spawn during the generators in Chapter 1. People have criticized this map but honestly it shows its peak during stressful difficulties.
Personally I tend to frequent expert realism games as much as I can because I realized that is the best way to improve. Although I am still not good enough to do it on singleplayer with bots haha.
Good video.
I appreciated the colorblind switch for the chapter rating!
2:25 Okay, I haven't even seen the rest of the video yet. But thank you so much for having RG-Colorblindness in mind. That's awesome.
Actually tho I had no clue what anything was😂
with due respect, i think this tier list is for people who doesn't play in expert mode or expert realism
yeah in expert realism the last stand is the hardest because of the fact that if your teammates die, they die half of the run ESPECIALLY if you play single player
Definitely not an expert realism tier list, agree
As someone that plays mostly solo with bots, i would put dead air higher.
The second event on the airport is a nightmare with only bots.
This is an incredible video from someone with only 2k subs!
Keep making them!
this is the type of l4d2 content ive been wanting to see, great job!
ill add my input, during covid once it first hit, me and a group of friends did a 4 man run of all the l4d2 and then l4d campaigns that were out at the time, on extreme realism.
from just that experience, which was limited, the finale for dead center, the dark carnival finale and 4th(?) level, the sacrafice, and by far, hard rains second mission and its finale. were the missions we got stuck on. i would say, maybe of like a fully combined 80hours of playtime, maybe HALF was spent on hard rain. that mission broke us. it was fun but god damn I am convinced that it is not possible to make it to the crescendo event without losing two people at minimum.
so yeah heavy rain is easily the hardest imho.
Last Stand is difficult because of how well designed it is.
Cold Stream is difficult because of how poorly designed it is.
Cold Stream isn't that bad though. Is it the worst of the L4D2 campaigns? Absolutely. But is it terrible? Definitely not.
@@BrandonFlint-ro2nsevent on 2nd chapter where you run inside of a drain where stream can just flush you to the other side is pretty creative, especially on versus if someone gets grabbed by jockey or hunter
Last Stand is well designed sounds like the biggest joke ever. Generator event in 1 chapter is ass because of getting swarms of zombies while activating gens in dead ends, it should've been just like normal "hold your ground" event. Getting gas cans in the final through trees and from the shore is not well designed as well, and the addition of two tanks after second tank is out of place. Overall Last Stand is designed even worse than Cold Stream
@@tourbean790 Exactly, the Last Stand "campaign" immediately stood out as 4ss from the moment it was released.
It's not hard because it's well designed, but rather because it's a cheesy unlit corridor full of noclip trees to give zombies a cheap advantage, along with events that are blatantly harder than vanilla crescendos and finales. They've got the excuse for those since it only has 2 maps, but that's all the campaign offers, a pair of challenging fights.
There's no flair to it, it has the "poorly lit crawl through a random mish-mash of assets" feel that all the worst custom campaigns on the workshop have. Uninspired.
The most memorable thing about it is the lighthouse, which is just a repurposed survival map.
There's a dozen other custom campaigns which would've better served the game if made official. Last Stand's only advantage is the loose lore connection.
@@TheAlexRhodes Exactly my thoughts. Last Stand survival map in l4d1 never had in mind that there's gonna be a realism mod without character outline. That's another reason why this clustercluck of the campaign is bad. Also there's an metal tank theme that has absolutely zero purpose to exist in official campaign, it wouldn't even fit in l4d2 roaster of campaigns (Dark Carnaval would fit kinda ok but still it's awkward). I even made a mod that replace it with generic tank themes (just put "Metal tank theme is NO MORE" in workshop page). I would rather play Cold Stream and Crash Course
i loved the video! ❤️
i also agree with your number 1 honestly
i spent 2 and a half hours on cold stream by myself (with bots) in advance and i restarted 13 times, when i eventually got to that helicopter the feeling of finally winning and getting the achievement is so good, after dying nearly so many times when the helicopter was in my grasp.
Dark Carnival isn't one that i regularly struggle with, even on expert. Idk if it's just because i played it to death with my brother because it was his favorite, but outside of versus mode, i can do DC borderline blindfolded. Now, make no mistake. The rush event before the stadium is HARD. It requires either using the bile jar strat you mentioned, good pipe bomb placement, or a good amount of luck to navigate easily. However, I've found that good timing with a melee weapon and having one teammate designated to sniping special infected, an even middling team can get through it consistently. Personally, id give it as a toss up between Hard Rain and Cold Stream. Hard Rain has resource management on a higher level than any other campaign, is full to the brim with witches, and the visual disruption that starts half way through makes the return trip TRICKY. Even with good rng. And then Cold Stream has so many areas where the whole team can just get shut down and trapped all at once. And thats to say NOTHING of the stairway of nightmares.
On chapter 2 of the sacrifice, you could jump on the side of the boat instead of going to the hill and latch on to the boat's edge to effectively let yourself and others skip the whole crescendo event and let your run to the saferoom more easier... but to be honest I'm not really sure it applies to every server since I only have done this on one specific server.
And you need to know that The Last Stand was going to be one chapter only until I say "hey, we should add AT LEAST one saferoom" xD Imagine running from the beggining to the lighthouse just to die there and start all over again
Realism expert Crash Course for me and the boys. The waiting time for that Armoured vehicle to go down and then having to restart the generator. Damn.
Yo this is a fantastically thought out video. I was super engaged the whole time, despite being tired and ADHDaf. Love it, will definitely support any other content you make about L4D or any of my other interests
Great video! Kind of funny actually, I decided to pull up reddit while watching to see what other people thought of some of these chapters and managed to find a comment you made going over which chapters you thought were hardest. I was reading it and thought that this person had very similar opinions before realizing it was your account lol
Just here to say that I really, really appreciated the green -> blue fade on the overview difficulty image, so many people use Green/Yellow for these things and it makes it super hard to parse sometimes
Thank you so much for changing the level difficulties from green to blue ❤
Without watching, my first instinct for hard campaigns is probably Cold Stream or Dark Carnival due to the running crescendo events.
Edit: I watched it and yup! Great video!
nice video . can't say i agree on the placement of every single mission but i wanted to say a few things about the last stand campaign : the finale was actually nerfed twice (should be easy to find when / how by looking at the patch notes)
i think both times the intensity of the permanent horde during the scavenge part was reduced or at least it was absolutely reduced the first time : i got the realism expert achievements for that mission a few days after the release and the finale remained like that for a couple months if not more and,yes,it was absolutely brutal compared to how it is now
but you didn't mention a very important detail : there is a bile that always spawns in round 1 @ the generators event so one survivor simply has to save it for round 2 when there's a second guaranteed bile on the lighthouse . it's even possible to get a third one in round 2 but very rare
in any case,with 1 or 2 biles,even at full original difficulty,4 survivors should really have no problem beating that finale and that's why i really disliked those nerfs
besides,people can always play it on normal or advanced if expert is too much but more experienced players enjoyed the extra challenge so removing that option for them was a choice i truly didn't understand
and lastly,cold stream became a lot harder not too long ago when they removed the option to skip that event at the end of round 2
another change i don't really understand : i would leave all shortcuts / skips in there or fix them all . fixing one but leaving others make no sense imo
The exact spawn chances for biles in The Last Stand are:
0.27% chance that only 1 bile spawns; 97.86% chance that 2 will spawn, and 1.87% chance that 3 biles spawn in map 1.
85.13% chance that only 1 bile spawns; 14.7% chance that 2 will spawn; and a 0.17% chance that 3 will spawn in map 2.
So, other than the guaranteed biles, you're very likely to have an additional bile, which gives your a total of 60+ seconds where you don't have to deal with hordes, which should be more than enough time to collect all the gascans.
@@JAiZRUclips
the exploration of areas i never bother to check begins
in Expert Realism for me the hardest is the last stand because there is no reviving in rooms, only safe house, and because of the fact that it is 2 chapters only, if your teammate dies, they die for 50% of the run. Cold Stream is kinda alright in Expert Realism, the only spike in difficulty is cold stream, but the gimmick is just bring the chainsaw from the truck for the stairs part and pipe bomb for the tunnel part, if there is vile jar, tunnel part is a walk in the park
I didn't expect my color blindness to actually kick in during the video, but that blue color helped a lot, thanks!
never thought i'd see the day i actually agree with youtube l4d2 tierlists, congratulations bro you aren't just yapping around
The bile jar in chapter 1 isn't even a guaranteed spawn either. It's entirely possible you'll play through the whole campaign and not see a single one.
I always as a kid saw Ch 3-4 of Hard Rain as the hardest, I think just simply because the storms scared me to death and made me panic. Considering to reach that point I would have to go through Witch hell I would be on-edge. Mind you that was when I was a kid and I played on just advanced.
Dark Carnival is my favorite campaign, but in my experience, Crash Course has been hellish for me. I don't know what kind of luck I've had but I've only completed that campaign a few times on expert, while the rest I've finished many times when I'm with randoms. Randoms on crash course make me tear my hair out, they either get downed or get caught out of position. I think the length tilts people as you mentioned, but I love that campaign anyway.
Great video! I love the detail you go into explaining the campaigns to prove your points.
(Also Death Toll is the best campaign; your opinions are based)
Me and my friend cheesed barns on expert since not everyone is required to be around the trigger area after dropping from the roofs. I basically shot from the other side of the fence at the area shortly after the bumper cars, while my friend with the 2 bots ran to the safe room. Often, most of the commons will just ignore you, with a few getting in your way. Most will just go for your teammates. You just need to be aware of some SI trying to get you. You also need to get an SMG or a gun with really high ammo capacity and just use your secondary weapon before the point of no return when dropping from the roofs. That way you wont run out of ammo early. If all goes well youll be shredding the hordes that go for your team specially the ones coming from the front and help them when SI attack. Youll probably go down at some point and be a sacrifice. But if your team manages to get to the safe room, the infinite horde stops and you have a chance to live, or die in the safe room to preserve your weapon. Youd probably want your team to not help you on the way back and risk failing the level though.
That dead air rush to the gate before the finale was almost always hell on multiplayer
The last stand campaign before they fixed the special infected spawn rate was the most difficult expert realism campaign and borderline impossible to compete. There are literally special infected around every corner spawning every 2 seconds
Blood Harvest wins in psychological warfare, for me, it's without a doubt the creepiest campaign
My greatest achievement in L4D2 is the actual achievement Connecting Flights. At the time I didn't have the best computer/internet connection so I would sometimes drop/be kicked due to inactivity in multiplayer games. Despite this I found myself planning the game nights for a group of friends on a forum I was on. And even with friends it was hard to get more than five people to agree to a game and stick with it all night. So the fact I managed to play a Versus game on Dead Air from start to finish with a full team on both sides with nobody leaving/dropping is one of my top 10 awesome things I've done as a gamer. This being all the way back in 2013.
Last stand realism expert is a beast even the devil refuses to deal with
I will never ever ever forget trying to finish the barns on expert with just one other friend. That experience is burned into my brain.
ty for the red green colorblind-friendly blue :)
Cold Stream Realism Expert. Had to grind at it for hours. Whether it's with friends or strangers, it's not worth the stress at ALL.
Cold Stream has the super difficult run to the waterlogged safe room and the long difficult final run.
Thank you for the colorblind change lol. I thought not one level had been given a yellow rating lol
Me and my brother just bought this game last summer sale on steam and tried to do a rerun on all of the campaigns like we used to do way back 2009, and man the new cold stream campaign really kicked our ass.
nice to see this video have so many views for your channel.
You're really entertaining, i really hope your channel continues to grow, man.
The Parish has always been one of my favorites and it never felt that difficult depending on tank spawns. That was until I got probably the worst Tank RNG in one play session:
The first one was in the Alarmed Cars section that as soon as we went up the ladder to the cars, three of us were instantly downed and had to restart.
The second one was right before it in the tight houses that also caused us to restart.
We skipped past the Bridge tank but another tank spawned right after it and killed one of us and launched someone to the helicopter with only 1HP.
Yeah, maybe Parish is a bit rough.
I am proud to say this, a friend and I have beaten cold stream on expert difficulty and it only took 7 hours to complete.
honestly i’d say it’s the parish with the car maze under the bridge considering the cars go off randomly pretty much
Bro came back a year later
I was so suprised to hear you put crash course as the easiest finale but then I remembered that chapter 2 is only a real pain in the ass on realism with respawns. If you go slow, you risk more time spent fighting the hordes and specials and this might burn through your resources so you end up with none left for the finale (having to use some or all medkits at the finale even before starting it) and if you try to rush or go too fast, you risk having a teammate fall behind and get killed and are now fighting the finale with only 1, 2 or 3 people less. Good video and analysis tho 👍
As someone who is RG colorblind... that was a very nice thing to do cuz legit it all just looked yellow XD
I feel like HardRains later chapters are understated. And they cause it to belong way higher than you put it.
For starters, if even one of your randoms is bad at platfroming, they're taking lots of fall damage and extra time, punished heavily with back tracking or stomping through water, in top of being semi-seperated, and there are some places where you can not avoid having to slog through water.
Not to mention the frequent storms that lower your range of visibility.
On top if this, you also risk having new players or greedy delicate flowers who dont care, that burn through medkits and resources meant for the way back. So the map can also feel scarce for resources at times.
I completed all the og l4d2 campaigns on expert solo. Of course single player is a completely different experience.
For me the easiest one was Hard Rain, I knew how to move properly through the map, funny enough, I lost two times outside of the final safe room on the second chapter. The finale was hard, but it was more of dodging the tank.
Swamp fever is next, I literally cheesed it on the second and third chapters, just ran to the safe room. The finale took me a while and was more luck than anything.
The parish, besides the cemetery and the bridge, the other three chapters are not that hard.
Dead Center, well, scavenge in solo... You know how it is.
Dark Carnival still has me traumatised. Every single chapter fucked me up in ways you can't imagine. I cannot even decide what's worse, the concert, the barns or the rollercoaster.
Worst part is that the game didn't count the completion of the campaign (I think because I left the game in pause for too much time) and didn't get the achievement.
Hard Rain on Expert. One key element was that someone in the team had to have a defibrilator in order for us to beat the map. In the end, only one survivor got on the boat.
It should be noted that with the sacrifice that you can skip the crescendo event 4 players by jumping onto the side of the ship and just lifting player up from where they jumped.
Where's the fun in that?
From personal experience, having played L4D2 since 2010-2012 and getting back to it lately Cold Stream is definitely a difficult one because of how many crescendo events there are and the level design making it really frustrating. Dark Carnival has always been my favourite campaign in the l4d2 lineup and was the first one I ever played, it's definitely a hard one thanks to the roller coaster which is an easy spot to lose everything. However it had more of an intentional design whereas Cold Stream felt more... unintentionally difficult. I found Hard Rain to be quite easy and fast paced once you're more experienced and used to the resource management, especially as the environments are repeated but you traverse them in reverse. I can definitely see how it can be difficult on say Expert or Realism Expert.
Edit: I forgot to mention Swamp Fever, definitely up there with difficulty mainly for the slow movement thanks to the water. It can also make tank fights awkward as lighting them on fire is nearly obsolete in most chapters due to the water extinguishing them, then there's the slow movement so they can easily catch up to you.
Chap 4 of Dark Carni in expert without a bile jar was about getting lucky with a boomer. When me and 2 of my friends got downed, I thought it was over until I got boomed on while incapicitated so all the commons went to me instead of my friend rushing to the safe house so he got there safely. Talk about being a human bile jar lol
As a veteran player of L4D2 for me after beating all of the campaigns and chapters in the difficulty of expert, i manage to beat all campaigns in expert difficulty, well as a veteran i am damn laughing now that i have beaten up all campaigns in expert mode not once but 10 times in just 1 hour each chapters well i find this video very accurate for beginners, but if you are a veteran you will laugh at this😂🤣 because you started from being a noob and now you are an old grinder or a veteran but still playing this game after 14 years of my life of playing this game..... I realized all on the hard tier is actually basic it's like normal tier 🤝
Not gonna lie it is genuinely weird that I say what I do at the beginning about the game being solved and I have easy runs on all the campaigns and I still get comments like this one. It's like people keep commenting without actually watching
@@NormStorm No no no, I'm actually impressed I'm not insulting or roasting you bro, calm down pls. I'm just a 31 year old who has Minecraft pfp for no good reason, and I am just amazed of how many years has been, this past few years now I just realized it's easy now even though I've stopped playing this game because I wanted to play other games instead of sticking to this one, I appreciated your hard work and dedication and your content is very good... I'm really meant to say bad stuff I'm just really amazed that there is still players out there and have a content about this game and play it on expert mode and hoped for rng, well goodluck and I hoped that you will have a 1 Million subs in the next several years buddy... Bye and enjoy your life man.
Love from the Philippines ❤🇵🇭
@@NormStorm I did watched your full vid don't worry I understand it brother... Keep doing good and don't forget to rest too so that you don't get tired and don't abuse your body.
@@-KingRJ- ya you're right im sorry too i just get so many comments from people who click on these videos and they just talk about how insanely good they are and how easy the game is and therefore how dumb the videos are to the point where i question why they're even clicking to begin with, cause my target audience are newer players and people that just have a healthy love for the game. sometimes i cant differentiate between a hate comment and someone typing about the ease of the game out of their love for it, and i try to view comments from the perspective of a newer player. so sometimes i view it as someone who's new to the gym trying to bench press 135lbs and then they see comments from people who rep 315lbs going "people who cant do X are so weak and stupid" and i get defensive over them. in this case it was the part in your comment where you mention that you're laughing at it but i see what you're actually saying by that now cause yeah for me- these campaigns are so easy for me at this point. the ones i put in my upper tier make me work for it sometimes though if the teammates are newer but yeah. Love from canada :)
@@NormStorm well buddy, all I have to say is... You just earned your self a new subscriber❤. And yeah apology accepted bro, and don't worry I wasn't laughing at your content or anything, I was just laughing because I used to rage and quit dying 50 times playing L4D2 but after a lot of experience I'm now laughing because it was now easy... Hard work pays off man... Well I really appreciate that you get what my point is thank you
i love the inclusion of rg-colourblind friendly graph, i have deuteranopia so it's nice to see people putting stuff like that into videos
Idk what's the hardest campaign but after playing l4d2 since release mostly on PC and recently on Xbox with my friends, hard rains unique gimmick of a storm so loud you can't hear your friends mics is pretty cool and challenging.
I never liked hard rain in the past but this recent playthrough with my friends made me a huge fan, I had so much fun and the loud weather sounds are such a cool effect. Underrated campaign for sure 👌
22:39 or u can save a bile and while waiting at the roof for the boat to arrive at the docks throw the bile at the tank to slow it down with the infected horde.
From my experience of playing one of the hardest modes in the game (Mutation Hard8 Expert No Restarts) imo i would put parish at the top 😭its been 3 years of trying and we still gotta beat, swamp fever, parish and hard rain. The ai director feels like an actual player with the insane plays it pulls on us despite being bots
I've been playing for 15 years and I still get TPK'd in dark carnival, love this game so much
Glad you love Death Toll the most too. It's just vibes.
2:28 Thank man! As a color blind person, I had no Idea yellow was even there untill you change green to blue.
I was so goated in my childhood I swear I remember being purely skilled at every game doesn't feel the same now it probably feels easier but man, young me's energy got me through alot of games I'd consider difficult now
im late to the party, but doing all of the expert l4d2 campaigns solo, and the expert realism Last Stand campaign was pure misery. especially thinking that i only had to beat last stand in expert, then after beating it then only realizing it was supposed to be in REALISM. safe to say i know my way around the game now 😭
I've played all vanilla campaigns of both L4D1 and L4D2 in the past month on expert. L4D1 i had to do it with AI for teammates since i couldn't find anyone on xbox 360. No mercy finale was easily the hardest chapter out of all that I've suffered.
L4D2 i played mostly solo but had some randoms join my lobbies occasionally. It wasn't too bad. I'm redoing the Parish again with bots only and am stuck on chapter 4. Needless to say, i hate the AI teammates with a burning passion. Only redoing so i can get the Survive all campaigns achievement on expert. The only one i died on the finale was the parish. A random survived, so it didn't count and skipping to only doing the finale ALSO doesn't count. So here we are...pain.
Norm please, how do you find Crash Course easy? I'm surprised only few people in the comments have pointed how painfully hard is the finale? I mean, it might be a skill issue (I play w controller mostly single p.) but I usually can't hold in a spot with zombies reaching me on expert or a special infected sneaking from the windows/floor and usually something goes wrong when restarting the gen or with a tank. Do you clear all the zombies (and sci's) no matter where you position yourself? Me and a friend tried a duo on expert but we got common locked in all the places we tried, No Mercy was a breeze for us..
I really appreciate your vid because you highlighted Cold Stream 2nd chapter event with the respect it deserves. I asked on leddit asking why ppl don't talk about it and they told me "nobody cares about Cold Stream" XD but WE do!
I think you should've mentioned there is a guaranteed bile +2 health kits/pills on the restart 4 gens part of Last Stand as well as other throwables +another kit later which makes that chapter easier, it's a yellow in my book.
The fact he even included the respective colors for RG-colorblinded folks is just wholesome, (real) respect
Unless you're playing expert or versus none of the campaigns are hard they just differ in enjoyment levels as noone will be dead anyways. The problem with L4D difficulty scale is that advanced is easy and expert gets tedious. We got ourselves a custom mutation that puts the difficulty scale somewhere in between advanced and expert that isn't just scaling infected damage.
Funnily enough, from L4D2 the Dark Carnival was the only mission me and my friends managed to complete on Expert .
That Barn run is rage inducing. I thought I would make it. My whole team got killed and I was 5 steps away from thr safe room with green health. boom. Tank. Like wtf bro
Also just the mere fact someone has to hold onto a bile bomb means theres 1 less thorowable in the team for a whole 3 chapters since that guy is locked to having the bile.
I do remember doing TLS on expert realism unnerfed with randoms.. it was hell... people entered and left for like 2 hours (except one other random that was there since the very start of the session with me) till eventually I got a team that managed to get by just fine. (Aka I and the aforementioned guy at least managed to survive lol)
I wonder how this list changes in singleplayer (with three bots)
Dead Center chapter 3 is such a pain. I was stumped on it for so long. I beat every other campaign on expert realism before coming back to it.
Bile jars also works in last stand map panic event if it spawns
I just realized I've never played The Sacrifice. No idea how. 200+ hours in the game and I somehow never played it. Probably confused it with The Passing.
i think the last time i played it was like 9 years ago with my family
The stand
Dark carnival
Hard rain
Cold stream
Least to hardest
Cold takes hardest for the waterfall tunnel that endlessly spawns zombies to jet you out off the edge.
There's something very ominous about Hard Rain chapter 2 being *dark red* when nothing else is.
Death toll, that run with infinite horde is rough without bile bombs
If we are considering vs, parish is probably the hardest campaign. You’re lucky to get through acts 2-finale because they are so long, super open but still have crazy choke points, and lots of points of no return.
I wanna say Swamp Fever. The water movement penalty is killer.
Fr, but that’s also what makes it appealing for me.
the easiest way I found to do dark carnival was actually to pick up the sniper rifle for the ending, 30 shots before reload so double that of the hunting rifle and 1 bullet takes out multiple infected, I can clear out the first long corridor pretty fast the second you start turning the corner is hard but once you can manage to line yourself up in front of the safe room on the left side just keep shooting and pushing forward, the horde stops spawning when you get close to its spawn point so as long as the lead player makes it to the safe room its significantly easier. Everyone should have melee weapons as they’re and instant kill on all the commons that spawn.
My friend and I, rest his soul, were on Dark Carnival for the better part of an hour, trying to get Gnome Chompsky out of there, and most of our deaths came from the finale. It was absolute nonstop aggression from the Special Infected. The Hunter would distract from the Boomer. The Smoker distracts from the Charger and Spitter. Add two or three Tanks in there and you've got a recipe for maximum frustration.
To me its Dark carnivals crescendos 3 and 4, and Hard Rain just in general, playing realism really really makes that hurricane hit like a truck else youre 100% gonna teamkill everyone
Well as someone who ran the entirety of expert realism ALL Campaigns i can confiedently say its the last mission of the sacrifice i promise you everything leading up to that is lightwork in comparison, the concert the airstrip, heavy rain, doesnt matter its all a cakewalk compared to the fight starting with 3 tanks and continuing on thereforth, the really crazy part is, the tanks arent even the worst, its when youre running and absolutely clearing just for some random smoker or hunter grab you or youre friend and end the entire run, even the setup for that final mission takes like 10 minutes if youre fast with it, so yeah i feel justified saying its easily the hardest